Since i've been thinking a lot recently about becoming a highschool teacher, i just read it that way.
Anyway, yeah, make sure you teach them to be a bit more critical readers than me.
And apply for a room transfer. A computer classroom is a gimmick. Gimmicks have their place in highschool - it's your job to hold their attention even if they'd rather be 100 miles away, but in college anyone who doesn't feel like learning can just leave. The computers will only distract the students. They can post to a blog using library computers or their own computers during time outside of class. I promise you that your class will go better if you get a better room. Ideally one with a table like I talked about above.
Oh and you weren't very clear in your question: is this an English class as in books and composition, or teaching the English language to those who don't know it? There are a variety of useful computer applications for learning language. Literature on the other hand is for dead trees and human discussion. Your students will be reading their email and not listening if you put computers in front of them.
In that context, they're going to be using a lot of AIM slang, announce on the first day that it's an English class, and you expect English spelling and English grammar.
In general I don't like computer classrooms, especially not for English. They get in the way of actual discussion. The best environment for a literature class is a big table where everyone looks everyone else in the face. Don't just ask your students to memorize the plot, ask them to think critically about the books. Why is this an important thing to read? What does it say about society? Literature is more than a fancy way of telling stories, don't let them discuss books on the level that they'd discuss an action movie, they're definitely capable of deeper analysis than "it was cool when..."
Also, for high school English, don't underestimate short stories. You should definitely be assigning a lot of novels as well, but frequently young students are much better at thinking about short works critically. On the first day, have them read Hemingway's "A Clean Well Lighted Place" to get the ball rolling. You can read it in 10 minutes and the story obviously exists for a reason other than to tell about some event that happened to some characters.
Also, I'd suggest The Bell Jar, Lord of the Flies, Huck Finn, and Catcher in the Rye as great books for ninth graders.
If you're going to do any Shakespeare, Othello is probably the most accessible of the 4 tragedies.
As far as the computers, I wouldn't use them for anything beyond in-class typewriters. Certainly don't make them do powerpoint presentations or webpages. What on earth does that have to do with English. Some sort of continuing reading response diary is a good idea, but make sure out-loud discussion and debate outweighs typing.
Oh and they should be writing an essay a week, at least. It's a shame how poor the writing of most high schoolers is.
Anyway, good luck.
I don't own any $1000+ equipment, but I can definitely hear a difference between vinyl and CD.
It is especially clear on recordings that feature a small number of accoustic instruments and human voice. There's no reason to listen to techno on vinyl, but Bob Dylan sounds a lot better.
And yes it isn't an issue of fidelity or anything like that. "Warmpth" might be unquantifiable, but you know it when you hear it.
Also there's something intellectually pleasing about an entirely analogue recording and playback process. Vocal cord vibrates air vibrates microphone diaphram makes electric wave form makes magnetic waveform makes waveform in vinyl vibrates needle makes electric waveform vibrates speaker vibrates air vibrates eardrum. The process is broken by a digital encoding process. It's nice if you're silly and sentimental and after 120 years still view recorded sound as somewhat miraculous.
not really irony, irony would be if they tried to sue slashdot for using a small quote from the article.
the article doesn't argue against copyright, but against the iron-clad inforcement of copyright by DRM.
Shared libraries aren't really (much of) a problem, it's their presentation to the user that causes problems. If linux is going to be an OS for the non-developer and non-administrator, then it has to stop treating people like IT professionals. Regardless of what goes on behind the scene, applications should be presented to the user as they are in the Macintosh environment: a single file, easily installed, moved, and deleted. OS X has done this within the unix framework and Linux file managers need to follow suite.
The little blurb at the side tells us that Mr. Gates' net worth is a bit over $50 billion. That's a lot of money, in fact, I've read estimates of the cost of constructing a small moon colony that run below that.
So think about this: if you had the chance to liquidate most of your assets, and then finance a moon colony how could you say no? Oh I'm sure there are more humanitarian things he could do with that money, but he isn't really doing that either. But come on, Bill, a *moon colony* you could do it!
Well one, you aren't taking into consideration the considerable cost in time of burning 5000 CDs, lets assume 20 minutes per (realistic even with fast burners, given setup and inevitable problems) and that's (mental math here) about 1200 hours, or about 50 DAYS of man-hours burning CDs.
But you don't want burned CDs. It looks unprofessional and it's of far less quality. Color album art printing is also very expensive. You want this thing to be stocked in display racks, not the $1 bin, so appearance matters. You can't have inkjet printing and a blue-back CDR.
CDrs are pretty much only good for demos.
Now I personally know a lot of bands in my home town (Athens, GA) area that trade on CDrs and printing stolen from Kinkos, but they aren't expecting to "make it" this way. They either regard the band as an expensive and time-consuming hobby or as a stepping stone toward a contract. This style of self-publishing won't net your band any cash, which is what we're talking about here.
It has always been somewhat true that success in the music industry was based on image, not quality of music. Since the dawn of MTV and the half-million dollar music video this has become more true. Since the deregulation of radio in 1996, and the return of payola this has far more true. In short, almost any band can become popular with major label support, and almost no band can become popular without it. (Notice that the quality of the "alt" rock on the radio saw a sharp decline starting somewhere around 1996/1997, thank you Bill Clinton and Congress)
The members of the RIAA have virtually identical business practices so if you don't like the deal offered by say Capitol, you can't go to Sony and expect much better. And you can't hold out on Capitol, because they don't really need you.
Combine this with the fact that the music industry has been marketing toward a younger and younger audience (remember when the tastes of 20-somethings determined popularity? How many people over 20 can name more than 2 rock acts that had a #1 hit in the past year?). A young audience doesn't have a lot of history of listening to music. You can repackage an old formula (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Green Day) and sell it to 15 year olds; they'll never know the difference.
Indie acts can take a far larger cut of record sales (though indie labels can frequently be desperate enough for cash to be just as underhanded as the majors, and there's always the danger that your label will go bankrupt), and indie acts take a FAR larger cut of touring and merchandise. So someone signed to Merge or Matador (2 fairly well known indie labels) selling 50,000 albums a year would probably make as much as someone on Sony selling 500,000. How many indie acts sell 50,000 albums per year? Not many.
So why not self-release? Well it takes a _huge_ amount of starting capitol. Say you want to print 5000 albums, about a minimum if you want to be stocked in stores just in your home state. At that quantity, CDs cost about $3 per, so that's $15,000. Not a small amount of money for your average musician. Of course, with no label, you get no promotions and no automatic opening gigs with more promanent acts, so selling those 5000 CDs to pay back mom & dad that $15,000 is quite a trick.
Can it be done? Yes. Is it worth it? Probably not. These days I can't imagine why anyone would sign to a major label unless they really wanted to see themselves on MTV. From a financial and creative standpoint, it makes very little sense.
Popgun War, Halo + Sprocket, Acme Novelty, 8 Ball, Promethia, Bone, The Invisibles (i'm just thinking of things off the top of my head, my roommate is the comic book guy in my life)
There's a LOT more to American comics than just superheros. I think the real problem with the industry is that the only place to buy comics are comicbook stores. Typically scary (especially to parents) overly nerdy places run by bearded fat men with inferiority complexes. The Simpson's Comic Book Guy is hardly a parody. Comics are great these days, the business sucks.
What's even sadder is the state of American Newspaper comics. It's hard to imagine something as creative and artistic as Calvin and Hobbes, and even less a Krazy Kat, Little Nemo, Pogo, or Peanuts even getting syndication these days.
I hope that comics as a medium have some life in them in the 21st century.
I've found that harddrive manufacturers typically distribute low-level format utilities. At least Maxtor does, and it's gotten me out of a serious bind.
Just because VR is 3d doesn't mean it will require more memory than a 2d film. A gig or two is a *lot* of coordinates and textures with which to make up a VR environment. Even in the most high-detail modern games, level information only takes up a few megs. To get to the terrabyte sized files you are expecting, the amount of detail *programmed into* these worlds is going to have to increase by a factor of 1 million. This is unlikely since, while computers can improve efficiency, virtual worlds continue to be sculpted largely "by hand" by human artists.
Southern Methodist University has a very appealing female/male university, and a *lot* of young actresses (very good theater school.)
This sounds like the best possible place to go after most CS degrees.
I don't think asking the question "is this technology, which we are paying X thousands of dollars for, actually hurting the learning environment more than it is helping?"
Reading the posts here makes me remember why I was so eager to switch majors from engineering to liberal arts. Every post I've read ASSUMES that all university classes are large, 100+ enrollment, lectures. I haven't had one of those in two semesters.
Most people end up working in a field that has nothing to do with their college degree. If your major is providing you with nothing more than sleepable straight-from-the-book lectures, then switch. The tech industry sucks for jobs right now anyway.
Also, and I know I'm risking offending a lot of slashdot here, and maybe this is different in other schools. But I found Compsci classes to be filled with complete and utter arrogant social paranoids. I've never met so many people who treated simple discussions of class material as some sort of knowledge contest. I'm not saying you won't find assholes in literature or philosophy, but you'll find a lot more well-adjusted people.
Yeah, tell a minimum wage earner that his job no longer supports his commute.
I'd support a sane increase on gas taxes in order to fund a functional mass transit system.
Why do we oppose government mass transit, while at the same time support the government giving billions of dollars a year to prop up the airline industry.
Sometimes I really wonder about free-market economists when time after time the private companies maintaining our essential infrastructure can't seem to keep themselves in existance without huge government bailouts.
Oregon parents will be taxed based on how much their children use the public education system.
Children receiving more education will incur greater taxes on their parents. Parents will be taxed $1000 for each A, $500 for each B, $250 for each C, and $500 for each summer school or remedial course. Each extracurricular activity will incur a further $500.
My favorite little rough statistic for tax burden debates:
In the 1950s, corporations (not rich people employed by corporations) paid over half the overall tax burden in the United States.
Now, they pay less than 15%.
Corporate Welfare has shifted the burden to you.
I can penpoint the age of my first memory well. My mother was pregnant with my brother and sister, she was in bed under a big blue quilt. She read me the book "I can count to 100" and something about swamp animals in a treehouse.
My brother and sister were born about a month before my third birthday, so this was during my late 2s.
Everything after that is pretty clear, up till about age 9 or 10. I have hundreds of vividly clear images from my early childhood. Then around middle-school life started to suck so I blocked out about three years.
And for everyone out there in their mid-teens: it gets better don't worry. wash your face and lose some weight though. yes, they all notice. and christ, don't let your parents pick out your clothing. yes, at your age stupid superficial things like this are key to happiness.
Slashdot Mirror
Did Monty Python get a similar suite?
i'm so unfamiliar with this i assumed the first two letters stood for "Read the F**king"
scary stuff
yes, but the "big four" are the ones you're generally assumed to know as a well-read person
i've also found they have the most depth.
Shakespear has a lot of lesser work.
Ceasar for instance, is only interesting for about two acts. It's a pretty good play, but it ain't Hamlet.
Since i've been thinking a lot recently about becoming a highschool teacher, i just read it that way.
Anyway, yeah, make sure you teach them to be a bit more critical readers than me.
And apply for a room transfer. A computer classroom is a gimmick. Gimmicks have their place in highschool - it's your job to hold their attention even if they'd rather be 100 miles away, but in college anyone who doesn't feel like learning can just leave. The computers will only distract the students. They can post to a blog using library computers or their own computers during time outside of class. I promise you that your class will go better if you get a better room. Ideally one with a table like I talked about above.
Oh and you weren't very clear in your question: is this an English class as in books and composition, or teaching the English language to those who don't know it? There are a variety of useful computer applications for learning language. Literature on the other hand is for dead trees and human discussion. Your students will be reading their email and not listening if you put computers in front of them.
In that context, they're going to be using a lot of AIM slang, announce on the first day that it's an English class, and you expect English spelling and English grammar. In general I don't like computer classrooms, especially not for English. They get in the way of actual discussion. The best environment for a literature class is a big table where everyone looks everyone else in the face. Don't just ask your students to memorize the plot, ask them to think critically about the books. Why is this an important thing to read? What does it say about society? Literature is more than a fancy way of telling stories, don't let them discuss books on the level that they'd discuss an action movie, they're definitely capable of deeper analysis than "it was cool when..." Also, for high school English, don't underestimate short stories. You should definitely be assigning a lot of novels as well, but frequently young students are much better at thinking about short works critically. On the first day, have them read Hemingway's "A Clean Well Lighted Place" to get the ball rolling. You can read it in 10 minutes and the story obviously exists for a reason other than to tell about some event that happened to some characters. Also, I'd suggest The Bell Jar, Lord of the Flies, Huck Finn, and Catcher in the Rye as great books for ninth graders. If you're going to do any Shakespeare, Othello is probably the most accessible of the 4 tragedies. As far as the computers, I wouldn't use them for anything beyond in-class typewriters. Certainly don't make them do powerpoint presentations or webpages. What on earth does that have to do with English. Some sort of continuing reading response diary is a good idea, but make sure out-loud discussion and debate outweighs typing. Oh and they should be writing an essay a week, at least. It's a shame how poor the writing of most high schoolers is. Anyway, good luck.
I don't own any $1000+ equipment, but I can definitely hear a difference between vinyl and CD.
It is especially clear on recordings that feature a small number of accoustic instruments and human voice. There's no reason to listen to techno on vinyl, but Bob Dylan sounds a lot better.
And yes it isn't an issue of fidelity or anything like that. "Warmpth" might be unquantifiable, but you know it when you hear it.
Also there's something intellectually pleasing about an entirely analogue recording and playback process. Vocal cord vibrates air vibrates microphone diaphram makes electric wave form makes magnetic waveform makes waveform in vinyl vibrates needle makes electric waveform vibrates speaker vibrates air vibrates eardrum. The process is broken by a digital encoding process. It's nice if you're silly and sentimental and after 120 years still view recorded sound as somewhat miraculous.
not really irony, irony would be if they tried to sue slashdot for using a small quote from the article. the article doesn't argue against copyright, but against the iron-clad inforcement of copyright by DRM.
Shared libraries aren't really (much of) a problem, it's their presentation to the user that causes problems. If linux is going to be an OS for the non-developer and non-administrator, then it has to stop treating people like IT professionals. Regardless of what goes on behind the scene, applications should be presented to the user as they are in the Macintosh environment: a single file, easily installed, moved, and deleted. OS X has done this within the unix framework and Linux file managers need to follow suite.
The little blurb at the side tells us that Mr. Gates' net worth is a bit over $50 billion. That's a lot of money, in fact, I've read estimates of the cost of constructing a small moon colony that run below that.
So think about this: if you had the chance to liquidate most of your assets, and then finance a moon colony how could you say no? Oh I'm sure there are more humanitarian things he could do with that money, but he isn't really doing that either. But come on, Bill, a *moon colony* you could do it!
Well one, you aren't taking into consideration the considerable cost in time of burning 5000 CDs, lets assume 20 minutes per (realistic even with fast burners, given setup and inevitable problems) and that's (mental math here) about 1200 hours, or about 50 DAYS of man-hours burning CDs. But you don't want burned CDs. It looks unprofessional and it's of far less quality. Color album art printing is also very expensive. You want this thing to be stocked in display racks, not the $1 bin, so appearance matters. You can't have inkjet printing and a blue-back CDR. CDrs are pretty much only good for demos. Now I personally know a lot of bands in my home town (Athens, GA) area that trade on CDrs and printing stolen from Kinkos, but they aren't expecting to "make it" this way. They either regard the band as an expensive and time-consuming hobby or as a stepping stone toward a contract. This style of self-publishing won't net your band any cash, which is what we're talking about here.
It has always been somewhat true that success in the music industry was based on image, not quality of music. Since the dawn of MTV and the half-million dollar music video this has become more true. Since the deregulation of radio in 1996, and the return of payola this has far more true. In short, almost any band can become popular with major label support, and almost no band can become popular without it. (Notice that the quality of the "alt" rock on the radio saw a sharp decline starting somewhere around 1996/1997, thank you Bill Clinton and Congress)
The members of the RIAA have virtually identical business practices so if you don't like the deal offered by say Capitol, you can't go to Sony and expect much better. And you can't hold out on Capitol, because they don't really need you.
Combine this with the fact that the music industry has been marketing toward a younger and younger audience (remember when the tastes of 20-somethings determined popularity? How many people over 20 can name more than 2 rock acts that had a #1 hit in the past year?). A young audience doesn't have a lot of history of listening to music. You can repackage an old formula (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Green Day) and sell it to 15 year olds; they'll never know the difference.
Indie acts can take a far larger cut of record sales (though indie labels can frequently be desperate enough for cash to be just as underhanded as the majors, and there's always the danger that your label will go bankrupt), and indie acts take a FAR larger cut of touring and merchandise. So someone signed to Merge or Matador (2 fairly well known indie labels) selling 50,000 albums a year would probably make as much as someone on Sony selling 500,000. How many indie acts sell 50,000 albums per year? Not many.
So why not self-release? Well it takes a _huge_ amount of starting capitol. Say you want to print 5000 albums, about a minimum if you want to be stocked in stores just in your home state. At that quantity, CDs cost about $3 per, so that's $15,000. Not a small amount of money for your average musician. Of course, with no label, you get no promotions and no automatic opening gigs with more promanent acts, so selling those 5000 CDs to pay back mom & dad that $15,000 is quite a trick.
Can it be done? Yes. Is it worth it? Probably not. These days I can't imagine why anyone would sign to a major label unless they really wanted to see themselves on MTV. From a financial and creative standpoint, it makes very little sense.
Popgun War, Halo + Sprocket, Acme Novelty, 8 Ball, Promethia, Bone, The Invisibles (i'm just thinking of things off the top of my head, my roommate is the comic book guy in my life)
There's a LOT more to American comics than just superheros. I think the real problem with the industry is that the only place to buy comics are comicbook stores. Typically scary (especially to parents) overly nerdy places run by bearded fat men with inferiority complexes. The Simpson's Comic Book Guy is hardly a parody. Comics are great these days, the business sucks.
What's even sadder is the state of American Newspaper comics. It's hard to imagine something as creative and artistic as Calvin and Hobbes, and even less a Krazy Kat, Little Nemo, Pogo, or Peanuts even getting syndication these days.
I hope that comics as a medium have some life in them in the 21st century.
"There's a heppy land fur fur away..."
I've found that harddrive manufacturers typically distribute low-level format utilities. At least Maxtor does, and it's gotten me out of a serious bind.
Now... wait a minute.
Just because VR is 3d doesn't mean it will require more memory than a 2d film. A gig or two is a *lot* of coordinates and textures with which to make up a VR environment. Even in the most high-detail modern games, level information only takes up a few megs. To get to the terrabyte sized files you are expecting, the amount of detail *programmed into* these worlds is going to have to increase by a factor of 1 million. This is unlikely since, while computers can improve efficiency, virtual worlds continue to be sculpted largely "by hand" by human artists.
Southern Methodist University has a very appealing female/male university, and a *lot* of young actresses (very good theater school.) This sounds like the best possible place to go after most CS degrees.
Seems you missed the point of a "joke."
I was parodying the idea of per-use taxation taken to an extreme.
I don't think asking the question "is this technology, which we are paying X thousands of dollars for, actually hurting the learning environment more than it is helping?"
Reading the posts here makes me remember why I was so eager to switch majors from engineering to liberal arts. Every post I've read ASSUMES that all university classes are large, 100+ enrollment, lectures. I haven't had one of those in two semesters.
Most people end up working in a field that has nothing to do with their college degree. If your major is providing you with nothing more than sleepable straight-from-the-book lectures, then switch. The tech industry sucks for jobs right now anyway.
Also, and I know I'm risking offending a lot of slashdot here, and maybe this is different in other schools. But I found Compsci classes to be filled with complete and utter arrogant social paranoids. I've never met so many people who treated simple discussions of class material as some sort of knowledge contest. I'm not saying you won't find assholes in literature or philosophy, but you'll find a lot more well-adjusted people.
That man is all teeth...
Sensitive viewers should be aware that all haircuts in these photos date between 1989 and 1992.
Yeah, tell a minimum wage earner that his job no longer supports his commute.
I'd support a sane increase on gas taxes in order to fund a functional mass transit system.
Why do we oppose government mass transit, while at the same time support the government giving billions of dollars a year to prop up the airline industry.
Sometimes I really wonder about free-market economists when time after time the private companies maintaining our essential infrastructure can't seem to keep themselves in existance without huge government bailouts.
This Just In:
Oregon parents will be taxed based on how much their children use the public education system.
Children receiving more education will incur greater taxes on their parents. Parents will be taxed $1000 for each A, $500 for each B, $250 for each C, and $500 for each summer school or remedial course. Each extracurricular activity will incur a further $500.
My favorite little rough statistic for tax burden debates: In the 1950s, corporations (not rich people employed by corporations) paid over half the overall tax burden in the United States. Now, they pay less than 15%. Corporate Welfare has shifted the burden to you.
I know it's new years, so people are apt to make lists and such. But why all the "worst games" lists? I know I've seen 3 or 4 in the past week.
I can penpoint the age of my first memory well. My mother was pregnant with my brother and sister, she was in bed under a big blue quilt. She read me the book "I can count to 100" and something about swamp animals in a treehouse.
My brother and sister were born about a month before my third birthday, so this was during my late 2s.
Everything after that is pretty clear, up till about age 9 or 10. I have hundreds of vividly clear images from my early childhood. Then around middle-school life started to suck so I blocked out about three years.
And for everyone out there in their mid-teens: it gets better don't worry. wash your face and lose some weight though. yes, they all notice. and christ, don't let your parents pick out your clothing. yes, at your age stupid superficial things like this are key to happiness.
Especially not after Cable tried to kill Dr. Xavier.