Lazy Freshmans

Okay, so am I the only one that saw this one coming from like, a MILE away? I mean really, this should have been apparent since the invention of GOOGLE that kids were going to get lazy.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The story here is that University proffs. are complaining that their first year students are too lazy, immature, reliant on wikipedia, the works. Essentially, they blame the students who blame the high school teachers and the high school teachers blame the elementary school teachers who blame the parents who are really at a loss as to why little Johnny (who had $20, 000 invested in him so he could go to U of T ) is now failing every class he's taking.

The real problem here isn't where to place the blame. As aforementioned, its a vicious cycle that gets nowhere and leaves the accused angry, scared, and at a complete loss. Personally, I think that its the combined effort of lazy parents, elementary and high school teachers that leads in turn to the kids themselves being lazy.

Think about it: our parents generation was the one that was told to go outside and play all day by themselves. Back then, kids would go out at 9 AM, run around the neighbourhood with their friends  until 5PM (aka supper time). If they got hurt ..... then they got hurt, and a lesson was learned from it. Whats that, son? You fell out of a tree and sprained your wrist? Well I guess you now know not to climb that high, stupid. Now lets go take you to the doctors, dummy.

There wasn't such a fear of rapists, molesters, etc. Because our parents were raised with this mentality of 'everything will be okay, let them go off on their own' from such an early age, they vowed that they would never, ever let that happen to their kids. So when they themselves actually did have kids of their own, they raised them entirely differently from how their parents raised them:

Kids were kept inside at all times so that their parents could monitor them 24/7, cell phones were bought for them at the ludicrous age of 7 so that they could always be in contact, hell, even little GPS chips were put into their fingers so that, heaven forbid they leave their parents sight for a second, they can use satellite technology to track them down.

See what I'm getting at here? We as a generation were babied! Our parents gave us what they never had: un-conditional love and support, all day every day. Now I'm not saying that our grandparents never loved our parents, I'm just saying that they always wanted more love, and are now over compensating for it by throwing it at us.

By the time we get to school, our parents are sweating buckets with worry about us. Leaving their kids all alone with a bunch of other kids in a huge building with strange and different teachers? Just the thought of it makes parents want to faint. Parents also like to think that their spawn is quite possibly the best thing to ever grace this earth. Stuff White People Like mentioned this, but really, it holds true to most parents. They are under the misguided impression that their kid is the smartest damn kid in that school, and that if you as a teacher don't fully recognize that fact, you're dead.

SO when the unthinkable happens, and Tommy gets a D- on a math test, his parents hit the roof, they go nuts, they hulk out, they loose their sh**, to say the least. They storm the school, report card in handing, demanding to know why their little angel is failing geometry (or whatever the hell it is that you take in math during the 3rd grade). The teachers are corned. They can't very well argue with the parents in fear of loosing their jobs, so in the end, Tommy either gets individual attention, or the curriculum is dumbed down in order to accommodate a bunch of kids who are stupid and can get away with it. 

So what does this have to do with the fact that first year University kids are lazy? Well it doesn't take a genius to connect the dots: between our parents babying us all our lives, and the fact that essentially, elementary school teachers and high school teachers do the same, and to add that to the fact that we have technology at our finger tips that makes research excruciatingly simple, it all sums up to the fact that by the time we're 18, we are completely unprepared for life on our own!

It's not really any ones fault, its just happenstance, and it's the way things are. I for one think that we as students have to accept the fact that yes, we are lazy. It's not something that anyone likes to admit about themselves, but it's true. Our best course of action is to suck it up, get the board of education to stop babying kids, and prove the professors wrong by showing them that this wave of first years isn't going to be a bunch of sloth-like, wiki-addicted students. Well... it's that, or we all google 'good freshman students' and see what search results come up. And after that, how about asking good old Mom and Dad for a raise in your allowance, eh?

Pirate Supplies and Essays....

I grew up with education all around me as a kid, because BOTH my dad and my step-mum who I lived with all throughout elementary school were teachers, which meant that I always heard about your run of the mill teacher gripes: report cards, snotty nose kids, heckling parents and yes, the many, MANY flaws that are in the education system.

One of these flaws, of course, is that classes are way too big, and not enough kids are getting one on one help. Now I'm going to play devils advocate and say that although this isn't exactly the greatest situation, you have to understand the stress that the teachers themselves are under, too. If they had it their way, I'm sure that most teachers would make sure that classes were very small and that every student got individual attention. But sadly this world isn't designed entirely by a board of public school teachers, and the classes keep growing, the parents get more irate, and the kids keep falling by the wayside.

BUT there is hope!

Thanks for the wonderful people at McSweeney's (who I already knew were glorious, wonderful people to begin with thanks to McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes) there is the Pirate Supply store / Homework Help Center also known as 826 Valencia in San Francisco.

Pirate Supply Shop on the outside, tutoring center on the inside, and a McSweeney's publishing office somewhere in between,  826 Valencia is a unique and fantastic idea that offers help to kids for free in an attempt to make sure that each child in some way, shape, or form gets individual attention and gets help with problems that are exclusive to them.

Personally, I think that this is a great idea. Kids feel intrigued by the store, and then wind up getting help with their homework in a way that doesn't make them feel dumb, different, or anything like that. It wasn't 'The Center for Kids Who Need More Help' as David Egger so eloquently put it. It was simply 826 Valencia. 

BUT would this clever idea work in a place like Ingersoll? In a word, no.

I could go on all day about why this wouldn't work, but I can pretty much sum it down to a few main arguments. First of all, Ingersoll is much too small of a town. Most of the kids that go to school here are either from rural, farming families, or your average, middle class working families. That means that kids my age (aka the 'high school' crowd) are either working on their parents farm right after school, or they're working at a part time job. Many people wouldn't have time to go to a help center even if they wanted to. Which leads me to my next point:

Sure, everyone wants to get better grades. But going into a help center to do your homework creates a stigma whether you like it or not. Sure its not fair, but its true. If people found out that someone went to a 'help center' that person would automatically be labelled as dumb or remedial, and would be shunned a little, if not looked at differently (at the very least). Because Ingersoll is so small, everyone knows practically everything about everyone. If even one person knew of a kid that went to our very own 826 Valencia, word would get around and soon enough, out of peer pressure, that kid would stop going. It would take a kid who was cool enough to be different, and could get away with it, and who doesn't care what other people think to start a wave of people to go. And those kids are few and far between.

Also, who would run this make believe 826 Valencia? The one in San Francisco is mainly volunteer run, and I don't know if Ingersoll is exactly over flowing with volunteers who would be willing to haul themselves down town to help out a bunch of kids with their homework. I'm not saying that those people aren't out there, but I am saying that there's not enough of them to make it work. 

Lastly,  look at what happened to the Fusion Youth Center. It started off as a good idea: a place where kids in the area could hang out with their friends away from peer pressure, drugs, etc. It had a lot of funding backing it up, and showed a lot of promise. Sadly though, it turned into a spot known for its druggies and back crowd. Perhaps this is what would happen to our hypothetical Valencia too?

All in all, its a great idea, and I really, really do wish that every town could have its own 826 Valencia. I can't say for sure whether or not I myself would go if we had one here in town. I can certainly say that if a McSweeny's publishing company was in the back, I would be there all day, everyday trying to scrounge a job for myself, but other than that I don't know. Sure, we'd all like to think that we would all be flooding in to our own Valencia the second it opened, but really, we're all affected by the stigma that goes along with the phrase 'homework help' so no one can be sure. Hopefully though, there would be enough of us to make it work, or at the very least, keep the pirate/superhero/time travelling store in business, even if it was only for a few months. 

American Teen

First of all let me say: seriously?! One of our assignments is to (technically) do a movie review of American Teen?! HONESTLY!! YES! Interdisciplinary is now officially the best class ever. Period.

*Ahem* on to the task at hand: American Teen.

I've been following this movie for awhile. I'm big on the Sundance Film Festival, and the second it premiered there I did a ton of research about the film and waited (impatiently) for it to come out on DVD. Up until this point though, I hadn't seen the whole film.

Boasting that it's this generations Breakfast Club, the movie set the bar high for itself, and over all I think that it basically achieved what it was trying to do: show regular everyday teenagers, one from each major stereotype, in an effort to show every kid out there that everybody has problems, and that life is basically tough all around. 

I really, really liked the movie, but out of all the kids, I have to say that the one that I sympathized the most with was Hannah (who saw that one coming?).  Sadly, right from the very start when she was boasting about how much she loved her boyfriend of 2 years, I knew that *it* was about to hit the fan. And I was right. 

From the start, Hannah is dumped in probably the worst way possible, and I know that every single girl in the room (hopefully most of the guys, too) all had their hearts deflate a little when they heard that after sleeping together for the first time, Hannah and guywhodeservestogethitbyabus were no more. After missing school (and I mean A LOT) of school, she almost fails her last year of high school, then falls for the 'heart throb' Mitch, only to have him 'text message break up'. Let me tell you something, fellow gifteds:

YOU NEVER TEXT MESSAGE BREAK UP!!

(skip to 2:40 for the meat of the video..warning: not appropriate for school).

Anyways, along with all of this she has a dream of going to San Francisco so she can really live in a world different from the conformist, red, Christian one that she grew up in. She also wants to make movies, which yeah, did really strike a chord with me, so I related to her the most. 

I was really happy to see that she did end up in San Fran, and was even more pleased to learn that after 8 months she went back to the East Coast and was studying film. I'd also like to mention that I 'became a fan' of her on facebook. Oh yeah, I'm soooo bordering on stalker-ish right now.

All in all, a great movie with a likable (and hate-able aka MEGAN)  characters that weren't just characters: they were real which gave the movie a lot of depth that you wouldn't get from a movie that followed the exact same script, plot line, etc but used actors. Although art mimics reality, only reality can capture the ultimate spirit of reality. 

Overall, a thumbs up / 4 out of 5 stars.

PS I would also like to state that this is one of my shortest blogs ever. A rather tremendous occasion for me, I must say. 

Twittering fantastic Tweets to all my Twits!!!

Twitter, how doth I love thou? Let me count the ways...

Okay so I'm not actually going to recite poetry to Twitter to show my devotion, because as much as I love tweeting, that would be bordering on insanity, and I already walk that fine line of 'devoted fan' and 'insane asylum patient' everyday. What else is new?

But yes, it is true. I am a bit of a twitter fan girl. I tweet to my fellow twits everyday, and I don't even feel remotely stupid saying it. I'm sure that I should, but I just can't. I've officially jumped on the twitter band wagon (hell, by this point in time, I'm DRIVING the twitter band wagon), and I love it. I must admit that I'm a bit miffed that more of my friends don't use twitter yet, and yes, I do get mocked within my circle of friends, but I can brush it off. Why? Because I know that in a few years time, they'll all be tweeting too. I mean hey, everyone scoffed at the idea of facebook and myspace at some time, right? And now look where we are. 

And before you start mocking me too, yes, I do realize how stupid twitter is and how stupid it sounds. Randomly posting your pointless activities through out the day in 140 words or less? I was skeptical at first, but once you get started, its addicting. Even I couldn't have predicted that at some point in my life, I would be telling random people:

Where the hell  are my oat clusters in my Cheerios Oat Clusters CRUNCH! cereal. God damn it, why does this always happen to ME?! 

Yes, it is a bit self absorbed of me to believe that anyone out there would honestly care that I was saddened over the lack of granola in my cereal, but I did receive a few tweets back that made me laugh, such as this one from my 'bestie' and fellow tweeter, Michelle:

@Chlo_Chlo_Chloe i ate them when you were asleep. wake up earlier next time. Sorry, princess

A fantastic Twit!! (and yes, I realize that I'm saying 'twit'. It's half of the appeal, the irony of it all). But anyways, on to the task at hand.

Personally, I can understand that some may think that it's a fear of death that keeps me tweeting. I'm sure that if Freud was around today, he'd have a few things to say about all the Internet activity, but seeing as how he's not,  it looks like I'm going to have to sort through all the Internet phsycology myself.

Why do I tweet? The same reason why you have a facebook account: it's fun. It's addicting. It's pointless and you realize it, and yet you can't stop. You like to know what other people are up to. You like to glorify your life by shouting out random information about your day into the dark void known as the Internet. Many are quick to criticise Twitter, but it's really not all that different from updating your status on facebook, which many of us do everyday. I mean really, if you think about it, who cares?! No one, that's who. No one except for you. But as humans, we're all full of ourselves and like to think that someone out there, be they stalker or not, are concerned with our breakfast cereal and would like to be updated every hour or so on our daily activities. 

Personally, I don't think that I have a fear of death and thus I tweet. I think I tweet because weather I like to admit it or not, I am just like every other self obsessed teenager out there. I enjoy being apart of something, I like letting everyone else know what I'm doing. I hate to say it, and it pains me as I type to admit it, but it's true. It's just another fun, random, addicting Internet trend that will be dead in 5 years, but in the meantime it's fun, and I'm the first (as far as I can tell) to stake this new found ground as my own. To conclude, I give you this, my own twitter account. I know that you don't care what I'm up to, and to be frank, I don't care either. But in the meantime, we're young and tweeting, so why the hell not? Follow me, Tweet me, Twitter me, etc (as the kids say). 

Rock Stars and Science

Okay, so I'm nong to lie here. 

I definitely fell asleep during the Ted Talks Large Hadron Collider video. I know, shun me, burn me at the stake, do whatever you like. I deserve it (kind of). And the really sad part is, is that I don't mean that I got bored and zoned out, I mean I literally fell asleep. Full out, head on my computer desk, lights still on,  mom walking in at about 1 in the morning asking 'what the heck happened to you?' The answer? Physics, Mom. Physics happened to me.

But give me a little credit! I stuck it out until Brian Cox (aka the rock star physicist) started talking about quarks and then I got a Star Trek flashback and I was done. I mean really, asking someone like me to understand particle physics is like asking an ant to re-create the Mona Lisa. That is to say, that IF it happens (and that is a VERY big 'if'), it's going to take that ant a very long time. It's like CJ says: 'I'm CJ, and I play X-box.' Well, when it comes to complicated science-type stuff like this 'I'm Chloe, and I get all of my science related knowledge from a little show called The Big Bang Theory.' 'Nuff said. But seriously, if you're a geek in any sense (comic book geek, science geek, etc etc) you are going to find this show hilarious. I usually cry I laugh so hard. These guys reference everything from Lord of the Rings to Superman to Physics and scientific theories to Battlestar Galactica and back again. The only reason why I know what I know about science is because of a few way to smart people I hang out with...and a television show. How sad.

ANYWAYS I knew about the LHC long before watching the TED video, because f the aforementioned  nerds I hang out with who went bonkers the day they first tested it. Thanks to them, and for the portion of the video that I was conscious for, this is the bare bones knowledge that I now have:

The LHC is the worlds largest science experiment. It is a particle accelerator who's goal is to smash together two particles traveling at very fast speeds together, in an attempt to re-create the exact moment of the Big Bang. Right now, we're really close to the exact time, about 10 billionths of a second after the Big Bang. Which is pretty damn impressive.

So that's all I know when it comes to particle physics. Its not much, I know, but it's all I've got so far. And hey, it helps me sleep at night knowing that behind this small, cynical blogger is someone who can at least pretend that they know what they're talking about if ever asked about 'all this LHC business'. Go team Chloe. Oh, and since I mentioned Star Trek earlier.......

Live Long and Prosper, my friends. 

'Earth Hour' or '60 Minutes of Pretending to Care'

So at this point in time Earth Hour has come and gone. For the most part, I really don't have a problem with 'going green' and doing what you can to help the environment: I actually think that it's a great idea to get out there and actually do a little good for the world, and if you're one of the few people that actually manage to stay 'green' all year long instead of just on certain days, then I fully congratulate and look up to you, because in all seriousness you're a better person than I am (try as I might to do my part, I'm still addicted to Tim Hortons, who's cups are slowly but surely clogging up our landfills).

But ANYWAYS on with Earth Hour: the problem that I had with it this year is that for whatever reason, someone over at EH thought that it would be a good idea to go with a gimmick as a weak attempt to try and get more people interested and involved. This year, the catch to Earth Hour was that if you turned your lights off, that would count as a 'vote' towards saving the earth, but if you left your lights on, that would be a vote for 'global warming'. At the end of Earth Hour, the results would then be taken to the Global Climate Change Conference in December 2009, and shown to all the worlds leaders to try and spark some sort of global green initiative.

Now, because of 'liberal media' and Al Gore, we all know that global warming is not a good thing. Whether or not we agree that it exists is still up for debate, but for the most part the majority of the population knows that it isn't something we want. Playing on this general knowledge, the EH folks thought that their whole 'voting' gimmick would work wonders and get billions of people around the world to turn off their lights.

NOTE: NEVER go with a gimmick. Ever.

Now, the results (as far as I can tell) are not online. I've looked on various websites and there are no concrete numbers showing whether or not Earth Hour actually did any good, and if mother earth 'won' against Global Warming. You have to wonder if this lack of information means that Global Warming really did win...

Whether or not this lame attempt at making Eco-friendliness commercial is exactly what I hate about the ever-popular green movement: Like I mentioned early, I hold high respects for those certain individuals who really, honestly care about the earth, and do everything in their power to make it a cleaner and better place. What I don't like however, is the fact that this has become a trend, and a part of pop-culture.

When did it suddenly become 'hip' and 'young' and 'trendy' to pick up trash and actually care about our planet? Have you noticed how it's considered cool to drive a hybrid car and use cloth shopping bags instead of plastic ones? Have you taken a look at the sale of 'organically made' clothing or 'fair trade' outfits? Or what about the fact that people are using phrases like 'Carbon Footprint' but don't have the slightest idea what they actually mean?! I don't like that caring about the earth has become commercial, and just another trend that in a few months, years, etc is going to fall by the wayside and die just like the other trends of past decades. Saving the planet is supposed to be something that's sold in magazines and on tv: it's a responsibility that every person on earth should have to bear. Sometimes it's not fun, and it's definitely not easy, but if we're going to actually save the earth, we have to stop jumping on the electrically fueled, 100% bio-degradable bandwagon and start seriously caring about this, and not think of it as just another way to be cool.