I read the first chapter of The Catcher in the Rye yesterday, and it reminded me of who I was.  At the time that story resonated with me like a Stradivarius violin.  It’s fair to say that during that time frame there was very little difference in the fictional mind of Holden Caulfield and my actaul mind.  I wrote a paper as though I was Holden at one point.  In the paper I fullfilled the minimun requirements of quotes and structure but I wrote it so that it defeated its self.  I discredited my the quotes I had pulled, and all around enjoyed my time working of that paper(though it was a week over due).  Afterwards, I recieved the paper back from my teacher>  She assured me that the grade of D was not reflectant upon the paper’s quality but the fact that it was a week late, then she asked why I wrote it that way.-  I said, “I thought it would be funny.”

At the end of the semester I was getting a C in the class.  I expected to recieve a C in the class because it was a middle C and not boardering C+ somehow I recieved a B for the class.  I don’t know how well I did on the final but I don’t think I did that well.  I think she bumped my grade up.  Here is the interesting thing, she was probably one of the most incompassionate, and tired teachers I ever had.  Yet, she did something for me that no other teacher had done before or since.  She gave me the grade she knew I deserved.

Hey it’s Friday, my day for new entries.  I’ve been developing a couple different story lines and structures, but I am unable to really hack away at the prose parts of the storys because I haven’t yet figured out the art of character design.  My characters end up being too flat, predictable, or many other things none of which I would want to publish.  So I may have a couple weeks worth of entries catagorized as “commentary” until I can build up a bank of material that is, at the very least, developed fully.  I also may publish some of my highschool and college assignments.  Most of those works would not fall under the fully developed catagory but many of them I enjoy reading because of their absurdity.

Which reminds me of my last year of highschool, I was taking Spanish 1, a froshmen course, and I wrote a paper about panama(I chose Panama because I have done several projects about Panama in the past).  The assignment was to write a page describing the culture or something.  I could not have cared less about this paper as I wrote it, writing with comedic abandon I made a made up a fifteen letter word, Panamanamanians.  When I got the paper back after grading I was astonished to see that I recieved a perfect grade 50/50.  When I enquired about how I possibly could have gotten a perfect score she told me that no one else had broken there one page into seperate paragraphs.  Ironically, I failed that class.  I failed with a 87% in the class because a minimun course requirement stated that you must have a homework grade of 80% or higher to pass.  My homework grade was 70%, which by every grading scale I ever seen is passing.

Here we go.  I’m inspired.  Let’s talk about why my school failed me.

First lets talk about our Education System.

Education: (root word)Educate: (synonym) Teach: To impart knowlegde.

System: A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole.

With a name like Education System you’d think that the main purpose of it would be to educate people, and also to verify education.  Yet I would say that the system I went through would more aptly be called the Effort System.  That is because the schools focused very heavily on homework which when you use the scientific definition of “work” you would actually call homework effort.  Homework is one means to the educational end.  Work scientifically is define as effortXdistance=work.

I’m going to leave the above paragraph un-molested because it gave me an apiphany.  I’m going to change my arguement.

The schools overarching system is the Work System.  They emphasize a minimum work load.  You must complete X amount of homework or else you did not work to become educated.  The Education System is not interested in education alone it is interested in making everyone work.  Why do you need to measure work in order to give some one a diploma?  Is our Education System afread of giving diplomas away to people that are educated but not interested in working hard?

An interesting dynamic to all of this is that you can choose to cheat on your homework by copying someone elses.  There is basically no way to stop that from happening because of the nature of homework leaving the class room.  Which clearly makes homework an unreliable source of data if you wanted to confirm that some one is putting in effort.  I’m sure I’m not the first to think of this, which is scary.  That means that as a student you are pressented with a couple of decissions about how to pass.  The first is do you homework every night at home or in some other class(this would be a waste of time because the homework will be gone over completely in class therefore passing the test is no problem), second cheat and join a couple of friends and alternate who does the homework.   That way that person could do only a third the work neccessary.  That is the easiest way to get an A, cheat.  Also, if you cheat or even do the homework you could fail, often times, more than half the tests and still pass the class.  So, the people that end up getting the “Educated” stamp of approval are often unethical under-educated cheaters.

In my case, because I was honest I didn’t do all of my homework because it was superfluous and I easily passed tests with out it and I never cheated, I was failed.  I’m an ethical over-educated GED graduate with spit in my eye.

Note:  If you are an educator; educate and verify education.  That’s it.

It’s hard to publish something on every Tuesday and Friday.  Especially, when you aren’t writing on Thursday and, even, Wednesday.

I blew past my deadline for my very first regular post.  My poor planning and subsequent underutilization of time are to blame.

I’ve been working on many things lately.  Most of which concern “work”: the changing of availabilities, and learning the habits of a new job.  I’m working towards solving a financial catastrophe that I’ve gotten myself into, as well.  The overall theme of previous activities relate to each-other and consume my mind.  As an escape, I’ve taken time to read educational books, classic fiction, and I’ve binged, from time to time, on Call of Duty 4.  These escapes have helped me articulate where I’ve been failing myself.

Habits are exacerbating.  Making good ones out of bad ones takes time.  I’ve made a habit of making good habits, and now I learning that I also must limit myself to a certain number of habits.  I’m overextended intellectually.  So, I’ve made poor decisions because of the overwhelming nature of abstraction.  I’ve got to focus my mind onto a few, most important, tasks and hack away.

It’s quite a process; make sense out of non-sense.

Changing takes repitition and structure; and time.

I will publish new material every Tuesday and Friday.  Just thought you should know.