Whoa, its been a looong time since I posted a journal hasn't it? The last one was for that song-thing I made a long time ago.

Excuse my poor writing right now, I'm typing this all up in the 10 minutes I have between classes so... yeah I'll deal with sloppy for now.

Well! I've been keeping busy. Kinda died on DA for a while. I've been shipped off to college for a quarter and a bit and... I already have a rant on that, but that can wait.
Being college bound I haven't been able to get around and take pictures (I has no car and the college is placed on the outer fringes of strip-mall-highway land) however, I can readily attest that I've been bored in some classes and therefore have been slowly accumulating doodles. Scanner access is another question however.

That said, college has its ups and downs. My dorm floor is awesome. I love it. I'm located in a special interest housing for computer science majors, and there are robots and projects abound. We have a soda machine hooked up to the internal network, and added a touch s ibutton creen so that you can either drop a soda using a special doohickey or by SSH-ing into via a computer terminal from your room, and I'm starting to help out working on a robot we've designed to retrieve said sodas and deliver them to individual rooms when you remotely drop one. We also are working on producing our own homebrew version of the Microsoft Surface, only open source and for either windows or linux, and motorized shopping carts that can go up to 25mph.

That being said... there are also downs attributed to college. Namely, my classes. I think this little rant will say it all.
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College.
I cant stand this type of teaching.
This is nothing. This is not an education, this is not $30,000 at work. This is a hack who decided to write a textbook near verbatim up on a board while reading out loud and decided to earn money for it. This is intolerable.
Or maybe its just that I've missed something about being in college. Somehow I had allowed myself to believe, to earnestly believe that college would be the fabled holy land of education. That once I had struggled out of the bureaucratic cesspool of the grade school system I would arrive somewhere that rather than preform bare minimum to meet government standards, would take it upon itself as an institute of higher learning to cherish and establish a more effective style and system of teaching.
Was I wrong?
Does such a place exist?
This is NOT an effective education, these "professors" doing nothing more than repeating tired, standardized lectures to a crowd of students copying down every word into notes. Is this what education is believed to be? Having hundreds of students re-publishing a text book hundreds of times with all motivation and effort being focused in response to the threat of an oncoming test? It scares me fundamentally that it seems to be.
It seems that what we consider to be knowledge are mere definitions and statements, rather than the concepts of reality. Professors preach "This is what happens. Memorize it." But neglect to say why, to explain the inner mechanics, the full dimensions of the very concepts they're attempting to convey. Although I know the reason why... Most of these professors, with the rare exception, don't even know the breadth of what they're attempting to teach. When pushed to respond to a question like "why is that true?" or "how does that work?" become flustered and agitatedly re-read over the lecture notes they just said once again in a louder voice as if that would fix the problem. All they are, are parrots preaching word for word what they read in the text book given to them by the school, without understanding the scope of what they're saying.
They put no effort into teaching, and expect the student to write down every word, to memorize every definition or oddly worded description and sentence with no engagement or practice. Have my fellow students really settled for this? Are we actually considering this enough of an education to justify the cost of coming here? Enough of an education to uphold the ideal that college would be the promised land of knowledge? They make no attempt to create interesting assignments, innovative teaching styles, don't address the class, and choose to either direct all their speech at the whiteboard or at that empty spot in the room no one chooses to sit in. There will always be a vacant seat in the room, and the teacher will always talk to it. Oh, and they completely rely on tests to do anything worthwhile in a room.
The only reason a student, any student, would ever pay any real attention to this boring non-engaging class style is the test-threat. That ever present threat to your progress in a school system that we've been kicked around by since the first grade. It's built into our systems now, maybe thats why no one thinks it odd that its still a key element in education. The truth is, it SHOULDN'T be. Outside of grade school (and I still will debate whether even grade school should be on the grading system) neither grades (a, b, c) nor subsequently tests/quizzes should be relevant. They only have two purposes in a school setting: 1.) to motivate students via threat, and 2.) to judge a student's progress through school and their "intelligence". First of, and yes, I realize this is more my own opinion than fact, but, if you aren't motivated or interested in learning for its own sake, or becoming more proficient in a certain field, you shouldn't even BE in college to begin with. Though I'm sure thats not a widely accepted opinion judging from the amount of whiney "My class is soooo hard, we actually have to do something! Leik ohmahGawd!" students there are. However, another good point to address is that there are many systems out there that do a fine job, if not a better one than the grading system to motivate students to get off their lazy asses and do something interesting, like the Don Rags system. Secondly, as for tracking the "intelligence" of a student and their progress in their classes... To be honest, it can't even do that well. There's far too much discretion given to teachers for that to be a solid number, and the very idea that grades could track your intelligence is a non sequitur since all grades can represent is the amount of material you turned in and performance on the tests, which in and of themselves are broken.
What is a test? Is it a performance evaluation? Is it an attempt to see how much you've been learning in class? Well, if it is, how does it follow that you could possibly attribute it to a lecture/note class? If the supposed idea is that it would track how well you have understood the concept and that you could apply it to a multitude of situations, then how could you possibly apply that to a class which in its essence only covers "how it is" statements, and definitions? How could you possibly expect to track a student's competence and ability in a style that was never taught to them? Answer, you can't. In practice, all that happens is that your supposed progress monitor turns into a memorization-regurgitation nightmare as students archive every word the teacher has ever spoken , and attempt to cram it all into short-term memorization to make it past the test and protect their precious grade. Once again I ask, is this education? Thousands of students with a surplus in notes that they weren't able to learn fully to begin with sticking factoid information that they may not even fully understand into their mind temporarily as a short term solution to just get by. Is this what we consider an education? A short term, incomplete education. And this is what we live our lives in. A system set up to teach us a short-term solution. I don't know about you, but this is hard for me to cope with.