01-27-2012, 07:56 PM
It’s called operant conditioning, and we’re all subjected to it. What do you do when your dog does a trick you’re teaching it? You reward it right? And if it pisses on your couch? You punish it right? What you’re doing is shaping the dog’s behavior by controlling the consequences of his behavior. If he is punished, he will stop doing whatever he did that made you punish him.
Homework sucks. People hate it; some would rather have a pinecone shoved up their ass. Then again, there are those people – we all know them – who liked to have pinecones up their pooper. When do you get homework? Right after you learn something. You are being punished for learning and are being trained to hate it. Do you like waking up early? Probably not. When do you usually wake up early? For school. You are associating being tired (which I doubt you like) with going to school. You don’t like being tired and you won’t like school.
It’s really a basic but totally logical concept. But let’s assume this was non-existent, we weren’t being conditioned against learning. What is our true benefit of going to school? Most assignments, most topics, most classes will be useless to you once you graduate in grammar and high school. That would be fine if we actually developed skills we’ll need in the real world during our time in class, but we don’t. The system tries, but fails terribly.
Who has ever been assigned to a group project in school? The goal here is to teach you how to work together and accomplish a common goal. Great concept, right? Well, all I have ever learned from these activities is to never trust anybody to get crap done for or even with you. If you want it done right, you do it yourself. Everybody must have experienced this one way or another.
This week I was assigned a research paper in my US History class. Sweet, basically an easy A with minimal effort. I’d expect a 5-8 page research paper on a topic in History. Nope. This year the teachers decided to work together with the Literature department. We get to write a fiction research paper! We pick a topic from the 1750-1900 time period and add our own character in there. How freakin awesome is this? Not freakin awesome at all, that is the answer. Okay maybe if we got to do this on our own it’d maybe give these lazy and terribly unintelligent students in my class motivation to do something productive, but no. The teachers will be holding our hands and will be making us do it their way to a tee. What the fudge is that? We’re in high school, it is not that hard to write a 5-8 page fictional essay when we are given 2 months to do it. Notecards, outlines, rough draft, and the new “plot and character development plan.” Yeah we cannot even decide on our own method for plot/character development.
The point is, school caters to the underachievers and nobody wins. It’s an honest bullshit system that does not seem to be working one bit. Teach people common sense and how to create new ideas and maybe we’ll see some more success in the world. As of now, we just sitting at a stand still.
Why Lie?
Homework sucks. People hate it; some would rather have a pinecone shoved up their ass. Then again, there are those people – we all know them – who liked to have pinecones up their pooper. When do you get homework? Right after you learn something. You are being punished for learning and are being trained to hate it. Do you like waking up early? Probably not. When do you usually wake up early? For school. You are associating being tired (which I doubt you like) with going to school. You don’t like being tired and you won’t like school.
It’s really a basic but totally logical concept. But let’s assume this was non-existent, we weren’t being conditioned against learning. What is our true benefit of going to school? Most assignments, most topics, most classes will be useless to you once you graduate in grammar and high school. That would be fine if we actually developed skills we’ll need in the real world during our time in class, but we don’t. The system tries, but fails terribly.
Who has ever been assigned to a group project in school? The goal here is to teach you how to work together and accomplish a common goal. Great concept, right? Well, all I have ever learned from these activities is to never trust anybody to get crap done for or even with you. If you want it done right, you do it yourself. Everybody must have experienced this one way or another.
This week I was assigned a research paper in my US History class. Sweet, basically an easy A with minimal effort. I’d expect a 5-8 page research paper on a topic in History. Nope. This year the teachers decided to work together with the Literature department. We get to write a fiction research paper! We pick a topic from the 1750-1900 time period and add our own character in there. How freakin awesome is this? Not freakin awesome at all, that is the answer. Okay maybe if we got to do this on our own it’d maybe give these lazy and terribly unintelligent students in my class motivation to do something productive, but no. The teachers will be holding our hands and will be making us do it their way to a tee. What the fudge is that? We’re in high school, it is not that hard to write a 5-8 page fictional essay when we are given 2 months to do it. Notecards, outlines, rough draft, and the new “plot and character development plan.” Yeah we cannot even decide on our own method for plot/character development.
The point is, school caters to the underachievers and nobody wins. It’s an honest bullshit system that does not seem to be working one bit. Teach people common sense and how to create new ideas and maybe we’ll see some more success in the world. As of now, we just sitting at a stand still.
Why Lie?
He was onto something with being able to broadcast electricity to others. But as soon as his partner found out, you never heard of anything further that became of his invention through time.