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brocktonianrogue
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Name: Katie-Kate-Katherine
Country: United States
State: Massachusetts
Metro: Boston
Birthday: 10/14/1979
Interests: reading, drumming, trumpeting, traveling, my awesome German Shepherd, and crusading for the sub-middle classes
Expertise: medievalism, ghettoness, being simultaneously idealistic and disillusioned, tomato juice, random songs/artists, and being nocturnal
Occupation: Education/training
Industry: Education/Research
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
5/7/2002
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| I love it when I find an awesome item somewhere online, and then check Overstock.com, which has the same thing for $50 less. Score!! Besides that, I'm still profoundly sad. I should channel my sorrow into poetry. | | |
| I'm not sure whether I should feel devastated - yet, at all - but I do. I feel like it's September of 1922, and what I knew was the Greek presence in Asia Minor. Such history, such swift dissolution. . .
It's been a dark couple days.
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| I generally agree with this piece from The New Criterion, which asserts that "good" schools are unable to transform weak students into strong ones. But I have to qualify this comment a bit:
"Readers who attended normally bad K-12 schools
and then went to selective colleges are likely to understand why: Your
classmates who had gone to Phillips Exeter had taken much better
courses than your school offered, and you may have envied their good
luck, but you had read a lot on your own, you weren’t that far behind,
and you caught up quickly."
This is certainly true in the humanities: as long as a bright kid has read avidly throughout childhood, he can compete neck-and-neck with any similarly-abled prep school kid at collegiate level, regardless of whatever extra-canonical fluff was taught in his high school English, social studies or foreign language classes. He has a good command of syntax, understands narrative structure, and can grasp various figurative devices. The sophisticated tools of university-level literary analysis are the lemon icing on his independently-developed bundt cake. But math and science are a different matter: how can a kid who has attended a weaker public school compete on equal footing with the prep/private/good public school kid who's been taught high-level math by superlative and creative teachers, or has conducted rigorous laboratory projects in modern, well-equipped facilities? And the super-proactive elite whose parents got their hands on the science textbooks their child would be using in their intro college courses and put their kid through private lessons over the summer? I'd like to see some figures of graduates of weak public schools who've gone on to major in the hard sciences or engineering. And start some math and science camps for poor kids (if they don't already exist, and if they do, help to better publicize them in their target market). And tell the writers of The New Criterion that, while I love the humanities, there are other disciplines, too. ;)
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| For a while now, I've felt horribly uninformed about the 2008 presidential candidates. Seeking to rectify this problem, I was happy to find a Washington Post quiz called "Choose Your Candidate" (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/candidatequiz/). I could choose from either a Democrat or Republican quiz (I took each in turn), and answered 25 questions on such topics as the economy, the war in Iraq, education, gun control, abortion and global warming. Here are my results (more points indicate a stronger concordance): Democrats: John Edwards 26 points Hillary Clinton 21 points Barack Obama 37 points Republicans: John McCain 21 points Ron Paul 6 points Mike Hucakabee 10 points Mitt Romney 29 points Fred Thompson 11 points Rudy Giuliani 3 points So apparently I see eye to eye most with Obama and Romney. Education is my most important issue, though, and on the Democratic side I agreed with Edwards's and Clinton's answers on education but not Obama's. On the Republican side I agreed with all of Romney's comments on education, including that it is "the civil rights issue of our time." I won't stop here, but use this as a jumping-off point for future research. I am intrigued! | | |
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