don’t panic

I read this on CNN.com today, and it brought up an issue that I remember from when I was in High School, that being “homework” over summer vacation.

I can remember being pretty bummed about it as a teen, purely from a selfish standpoint. It was MY vacation… If you’re going to give me “work” to do, which is going to take away from my time, then don’t call it “vacation” or “break” or whatever, and don’t expect me to come back to school feeling all “refreshed” and ready to pound the books again.

And I pretty much have the same feelings about it now, only it’s from the perspective of a parent. The CNN article talked about how more and more teachers were using summer vacation as a means to get “school reform on the cheap.” The political gobstoppers can say they’re “getting more rigorous with our academic standards” and it doesn’t even cost them anything in salaries to do so.

But what it comes down to is, why do we have vacation at all? Surely there must be a reason we have given three months of downtime to our kids, and if you say it’s for the teachers, I will scream in your face. Even if it WAS for the teachers, the same question applies. WHY DO IT AT ALL?

Could it be that we want our children to go out and be just kids for a while, not “students”? Could it be that we want them to remember the whole point to all this learning, which is so that they can better themselves and enjoy more of life? If that’s NOT the reason behind vacation, then perhaps the pundits in education need to get their priorities straightened out.

Life is not about succeeding in school, or acing the SAT, or getting into a great college, or even being financially well-off. Life is about being happy. It’s about having meaning and purpose and drive, and enjoying oneself. If we forget those things, then what’s the point? Why indenture ourselves into a decade and a half of scholastic hell if we are never going to actually use what we learn for any enjoyable purpose?

Does that mean all learning stops when school is out? Of course not. But don’t make it a requirement that my child read a half dozen books from some list, and do twelve chapters of semi-random math problems, just because it sounds like a good idea. There are other ways to learn things. Just because it’s not memorizing dates from a history book, doesn’t mean that my child isn’t learning something invaluable for their life.

Want to learn about history? Go there. Take a trip to D.C. and visit the White House. You’ll learn more about practical history in a simple one-hour tour than you will sitting in a classroom for an entire year. Have you ever been inside the Library of Congress? How about a Senate session? Have you ever seen a particle accelerator? Do you know why they are significant? How about something as simple as the post office? Have you got any idea how it all works; how your letter goes from your mailbox to that pen pal in China? Ever take apart a carburetor? Do you even know what it does? Ever been to a dairy? How about a waste processing plant? We flush the toilet many times a day, but I doubt most people have any idea what actually happens to our waste when we press the little lever other than it “disappears down the hole”.

There’s so much we can do with our kids on “vacation” other than giving them mindless work to do, even if it’s with the best of intentions. Forcing a child to “learn” something when they would rather be out playing soccer or building a tree-house, is a waste of their time and yours. It won’t stick. But give even a mediocre child a chance to do something they have always dreamed of, and it will be with them for the rest of their lives. What do you remember with more detail, the pages and pages of math problems you did in the eighth grade because your teacher felt that if you did enough of those problems, eventually it would sink in, or the one time you went on a field trip to the local bottling company and got to see how they put Coke into cans? And which was more practical? I say it’s debatable. When was the last time you needed the quadratic equation? (Can you even remember what it is?) But you can still see the images in your head of all that complex automated machinery blasting out row upon endless row of aluminum cans, and even though you don’t understand how it all works, you have some kind of scope as to what it takes to actually produce something as simple as a soda. You are informed and armed with practical knowledge that you very well may use someday when you are put in charge of building a factory to produce running shoes, or books, or the half billion different plastic toys that will be out this christmas.

I’m stuck in a bit of ethical spaghetti. I was coming home from Costco today and I got stuck behind someone going really really slowly through an area that’s already seriously bogged down with an over-abundance of traffic lights. When I finally had a chance to pass them, I saw that the car was being driven by someone so old that she could hardly see over the steering wheel.

“Okay,” I thought to myself. “You’re really being prejudiced here. So what if she’s old? Shouldn’t old people be allowed to drive too?”

But then I got to thinking about it, and to a certain extent, the answer is absolutely not.

How can I justify this horrible position? Simple. Suppose the person behind the wheel wasn’t old, but rather a spry young twenty, but with the reaction time of a senior in their nineties. Would THEY be allowed to drive? Hell no! They’d never pass the driving test.

And yet, it’s “discrimination” if I say the same thing about a senior.

Our system is set up to allow inadequate, even dangerous drivers to continue driving so long as they can pass a simple written exam. I’ve heard (but not verified) that they have to take another driving test (in California) after a certain age, but that they only have to be retested every FIVE YEARS. Yikes!

And the solution to this problem is to take age out of the equation. Make EVERYONE take a simple reaction time test. If you pass, you can drive. If you fail, you take the bus. Having a bad day? Tough. A “bad day” on the road could cost you or someone else their life. It might even catch a few druggies.

I picked up an actual newspaper today while I was at my folks and I noticed an article regarding solar power. The gist of the story was that Lawmakers have been stalling a bill that would add a surcharge to our electricity to subsidize home builders so that they would include photovoltaic systems in new homes. The “solar” community was disappointed in this action and is hoping that Arnie will help them along and fulfill an election commitment to renewable energy systems.

Okay, at first it sounds good, but then I got to thinking about it a bit more. I’ve always been a huge supporter of solar power. Forget costs, anything that gets us away from our dependancies on fossil fuel is moving in the right direction. But subsidizing the California Building Industry to get it? That smells funny.

Why should I add a surcharge to MY bill so that the home builders, the same guys who are recklessly constructing mammoth homes that only about 10% or less of San Diegians can actually afford, can offset the costs of installing solar power? I don’t think so. Let the home buyer pay for it, not me. Or better yet, let the home builders pay for it. Those 5000 square foot homes they keep building are half the reason I can’t afford to get out of an apartment.

Of course, there is still another rule that prevents those people who do generate excess energy from solar power from getting any credit for GIVING it back to the grid. Sounds like SDG&E makes out pretty nice on that one. They get to charge more on our bills, encourage solar power in the home market, and yet doesn’t have to pay for the excess free energy that they might get. Smells pretty foul to me. Oh yeah, this is the same company that wanted to leave us consumers holding the bill a few years ago for the energy “shortages” that resulted from mismanagement and price-fixing.

We have an unlimited free energy source literally raining down on us in abundance and all we can do is fight over who has to pay for catching it. That sucks.

Go green!

I saw this article on CNN today about how Jerry Falwell won a case in court over the control of a domain name that was “like” his name.

Content of the sites aside, this struck me on several levels.

First, there’s the matter of the name of the domain itself, “fallwell.com”. I have to think here that the good reverend might be overstepping himself a bit. I mean, for all anyone knows, that domain might be for a parachute company, or even a drilling company owned by the “fall” brothers. The judge who ruled on the case states that the name, “was likely to be confusing to Web surfers.”

What web surfers? You mean the stupid buffoons that can’t spell the name of the guy they’ve been watching on TV for twenty years? Those web surfers?

And you have to wonder if this same ruling will apply to the fifty different porn sites that come up when you misspell Yahoo, Amazon, or Microsoft. That might confuse users a bit as well.

And then there’s the whole idea of this guy’s own self importance. Hey, it’s not GOD’s ministries, it’s “Jerry Falwell Ministries”. Gotta protect that market share.

Falwell says, “This person for whatever reason is hostile to the message of the gospel I preach and was therefore trying to do damage to the message I deliver.”

What, like God is worried that somebody’s website is going to prevent His message from being spread? This is the same God that send a couple of angels to turn Sodom and Gomorrah into a greasy black hole in the ground? Is He really going to be stopped cold by a mere web server? I don’t think so, but Mr. Falwell obviously does.

Annie Jacobsen is a perfect example of why Americans are such perfect targets for terrorists. Hell, the terrorist don’t even need to DO anything… Not when they have idiots like this lady doing it all for them.

I’m certainly not one to bemoan the necessities of improved national security, but screaming to the internet in this manner isn’t the way to do it. And I can’t lay the blame on just her. The media has gobbled this up for the sensational “story” that it is. Hell, even this response is giving her more attention than she deserves, but I’m not writing about her article, or it’s lack of validity. I’m writing about an arrogant, bigoted idiot, who is eating up her 15 minutes of fame for all she can get. Well, hopefully, this will be her ONLY 15 minutes, and we won’t have to waste any more time avoiding her headlines.

I guess I’m angry because instead of taking this where it belonged, to the authorities, and then letting them do their jobs, or not if they thought it was garbage, she has gone and found a bigger media audience to “make them listen” and “do something.” What she fails to understand is that she’s a single person within a massive and unbelievably complicated system. Either that system works, or it doesn’t, but simply being louder just so that the system will pay attention to what she thinks is important, is exactly why we don’t let just the president make all the laws and decisions for our country. If everyone just screamed louder when the authorities didn’t coddle them like they wanted, then the whole system would fall apart faster than you can say, “understaffed and overworked.” Never mind the legal fiascos that would ensue.

But the media just keeps on giving her what she wants, which is a bigger mouth, because, after all, more attention means bigger revenues.

And the worst part is, even if it turns out that she’s right (which she’s not), it’s almost a certainty that she has permanently crippled the very system she has voiced so loudly as being in need of improvement. Sure, it’s a weak, leaky, poor excuse for what’s really needed, but how do you think those gun-shy bureaucrats are going to react to the next paranoid freak who thinks they saw “abnormal behavior” on a flight? They’re going to whisk them away to a closed room, take a statement, and then make them sign a legal no-fault agreement as well as a non-disclosure simply because they fear the financial repercussions of bad media.

But Annie Jacobsen couldn’t see past the end of her bigoted nose if her life (and mine) depended on it. And they might.