Patience is Virtuous

I guess I'm more or less alright with saying that I'm back to that neutral state that I hit a while back. I'm sure I mentioned something like that yesterday, but reinforcing it doesn't particularly hurt. Not to say that I wouldn't like to jump forward into that ecstatic phase if things go the way that I want them to, but I have at least convinced myself to stop worrying about it. Now, a negative reply would create some issues that would take a while to get over - so it's not so much a matter of being over it as simply being able to be patient and see how things turn out. I've made friends with silence and sky-blue. A good place to be, for now, I suppose.

Finished that damnable AP Calc packet after spending most of the day working on it. What was frustrating about the whole thing was that it was essentially based on all of the concepts that we had learned in Pre-Calc, but taken to another level of difficulty that wasn't appropriate for a summer review assignment. There were one or two concepts that were completely new, but for the most part I felt like I knew what the problems were based on, I just wasn't entirely certain how to proceed from where I was. So that's the last of the homework pile except finishing that final paragraph for Joy Luck. Should be a nice, relaxed day tomorrow, though I believe I may end up getting screwed into volunteering at the hospital. Won't that be just a delightful way to spend the end of my summer.

I've been more or less addicted to Underclass Hero and The Bottle & Fresh Horses over the last few days - though I do like the latter more as it avoids the blatant politics of the former and at the same time has a rambling, Southwest flavor that I enjoy, oddly enough. Certainly nothing that will engender a liking of country, but this...flavor (a good word for what I am trying to quantify, I find) appeals to me, not as a genre but merely a layer on top of the general rock that adds a certain something to the music as a whole.

Bioshock...I don't really know what to say, other than I wish it weren't coming out the day after school starts. Jesus, my grades are going to be hobbled right off of the bat with that thing devouring my time. In all honesty, I doubt that will happen, I just will end up drooling over the box while not actually having any time to play. That is going to suck royally. It's bad enough people already got copies early, the fact that I might have to wait even longer to really get into it is agonizing. Depending on what happens next weekend, I may have even less time to play, but in that situation, it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make.

Played a good bit of Chrono Trigger tonight, and I still really enjoy it. It's also not turning out to be horrendously long, which I really appreciate. I might even be able to finish it tomorrow, depending on how much time I end up sinking into it.

Rented several movies today. Jackass Number Two, Hot Fuzz, and Crank. Watched Jackass and really enjoyed it, though I think I enjoyed the first one slightly more given its greater focus on painful stunts and less on guys with their pants off. I'll watch the other two tomorrow, and probably Hero, the Last Samurai, and possibly V for Vendetta. My movie binge for the end of the summer. I'm looking forward to it. Oh, perhaps House of Flying Daggers as well, though I'd have to track down the tape, wherever it got to. Wow, I really want to watch Hero now...

So, a truncated version of my planned rant for yesterday about school. The TIME article was about how schools fail to meet the needs of exceptionally intelligent students (I enjoyed the reassurance that there are plenty of people out there who are significantly smarter than me, now if only I could convince other people of that...). Essentially their conclusion was that schools ought to let students skip grades when they needed to, but that doesn't really address the root issue for many of these students. It's not that they already know what's being taught in their grade, it's simply a matter of learning it much faster. It's not that the system needs to allow them more movement, it's that the system is fundamentally flawed in its very pacing, but rectifying that is difficult. An honors track of any variety would have made the last two years significantly less painful, but that would have broken with Edgewood's desperate attempts to homogenize and socialize every incoming student. It's an understandable goal for a school in its position where students come from a large number of feeder schools and cliquishness is a problem even as things are now. Nonetheless, serving the educational needs of the students trumps trying to integrate all of them socially; the social issue is easier to ignore at a larger school where there would be enough accelerated students that they would form their own subsociety within the greater one of the school. Now the issue with the honors program is that Mommy and Daddy's Little Billy is just as bright as everyone else, and why can't he be in the special classes? He's just as smart as those other kids who have been reading Shakespeare as long as Billy's been able to dress himself. Well, Little Billy's a stupid shit, but Mommy and Daddy certainly aren't going to admit that if they even realize it in the first place. Apparently that was more or less the situation in Fort ten years ago and the end result was that the Honors track was lowered so that it was essentially a regular track while "regular" classes became remedial ones for the truly stupid kids. So the parents need to be kept in line, but something needs to be done to accelerate the pacing for the students who need it. Use standardized entrance tests for the honors track and weed out the students who don't keep their grades up high enough. At a smaller school like Edgewood, it would be more difficult to implement as the honors kids would already be somewhat set aside from the general population, and being in different classes would exacerbate that, but in a larger public high school where you have at least 2000 students in aggregate, there's no reason that something like that would not work - put all of the truly gifted students in an honors track, at least for the classes where they excelled. Doing so would create a fairly tight-knit group of intelligent students who would, granted, by somewhat ostracized from the rest of the school population, but in a school that large, there would be enough students in the honors track that it really wouldn't make much difference.

Well, that ended up being longer than intended. I was going to fire off a few emails about the iFlag group, but I think I'll save that and others for tomorrow during my movie binge. I'll certainly be calling on Monday if I haven't received anything by way of reply before that point.

BIOSHOCK!!! BIOSHOCK!!! BIOSHOCK!!! BIOSHOCK!!! BIOSHOCK!!!

- Veracity Out -
"Why would you put that in a lollipop?"