Education

So an article came to my attention recently.

Teacher fired

So let me get this straight, a teacher has been fired, for teaching kids about how the real world works.

In what reality does that make sense?

It would have been a bit better if the person behind the firing wasn't the school's principal. The man who wrote a letter to the Edmonton School Board saying that Mr. Dorval had shown “obvious neglect of duty as a professional teacher, his repeated insubordination and his continued refusal to obey lawful orders.”

I'll give your brain a moment to process the irony in that statement.

All done? Good.

So apparently, letting students not complete work and give them "behavioural codes" when they didn't fix that problem is okay while giving them a flat out ZERO for the missed assignment and potentially alienating their feelings is a no-no.

Let me be very clear. People fail. That is how nature works. Someone is always going to be left behind, alienated and outright fail. Deal with it. Does a heard of Zebras running from some Lions stop and wait for the slowest to catch up so that everyone is on equal pace?

HELL NO.

They all run as fast as they can. The slowest get eaten. By not giving students zeros we're letting the system eat everyone up. Sure kids who do good work still excel, but why should they? They're going to pass the class whether they do the work or not. Most kids hate schoolwork. This gives them a free excuse to not do anything.

I skipped on some homework when I was in high school. What happened? I had a C average. I didn't put much effort into my grade 12 Spanish homework. What happened? I FAILED (only by a percentage point, mind you and I still got my diploma, but that was five years ago).

The principal of Ross Shepard high school has even gone so far to say: “I am here to tell you that you did nothing wrong,” Ron Bradley says. “Everything you did with regards to student achievement and high school completion was the right thing.”

He also was quoted as saying that the news media’s take on the policy is “narrow” and oversimplified.
“In my opinion, the culture of the media deteriorated to the quality of pulp fiction and talk radio,”


Dude, get your head out of your ass. You are encouraging kids to be lazy, unproductive slackers. With this kind of policy in effect, the crop of kids who graduate in a few years is going to be so warped that they won't have any idea how the real world actually works!


Now why is this happening? My theory is pretty simple, money.

Public schools are funded by governments. To the best of my knowledge, (this might not actually be the case, I will do some further checking, so don't quote me on this) the higher the grade averages, the more money they get. Zeros look pretty bad and the more of them that happen, the lower the average is so the less money they get. The no Zero policy means that the grade average stays high, since "behavioural codes" don't imfluence the grade average. But that's just my theory.

I just got an official reply from Alberta Ministry of Education and as far as money coming from them, the above is not the case. Each school board sends money as it chooses.

Teachers have spent the last couple decades teaching kids to "feel good about themselves" and "imagine how the world can be". The problem with that is that it doesn't really do anything useful for the students and all it does is breed lazy hippies.

Now if you've read the rest of this blog, you'll know that I am fairly left wing in both politics and beliefs. I always tell people to dream big and if you believe hard enough, you'll have a hard time letting yourself fail. That said, I hate this. It's encouraging kids to not do anything. After all, if they think that no matter what, they can't fail, then get out into the real world and fail constantly, won't that destroy their self esteem and self worth faster than getting an F on a homework assignment? What does that lead to? I'd rather not think about it. Failure builds experience. After all, Thomas Edison did find 2000 ways NOT to make a lightbulb. If we don't fail, then we never have the chance to stand back up, dust ourselves off and look at a problem from a different angle.

That's just my theory.

Why 2012 is the end of the world after all.

To start, no, this is not about the "Supposed" Mayan prophecy. Based on everything I have seen and learned so far in 2011, it's my belief that 2012 will be the end of the world as we know it and the beginning of a whole new world.

2011 has already seen widespread revolutions in the Middle East - Egypt, Tunisa, Libya - and now it is beginning to happen in Syria. It is also beginning to happen in the United States and somewhat moderately in Canada.

The Middle East Revolutions, "Arab Spring", was about bringing freedom and democracy to the lands ruled over by tyrants with an iron fist. Now people are taking to the streets in American cities just like the Egyptian people did in Tahir Square. There is also unrest in China, Iran and North Korea (but neither government will acknowledge that). Coupled with the extreme amount of uncertainty and chaos in Europe with their financial crisis, it is only a matter of time.

I watched the Egyptian Revolution from day one. I have been watching the Occupy Wall Street movement since before it even started.

Now, I will admit that people in North America don't have it as bad as people in other nations, I will admit that freely.

After everything that has happened this year and as we enter the final quarter of 2011, it is my opinion that 2012 will be the year that the world falls. There is unrest everywhere. New York is a powderkeg. All it will take is an event the violence we all saw in England will pale in comparison. And one by one government around the world will fall. People have seen that if enough of them congregate together with a real belief in a progressive ideal, it will have an impact.


At the same time, Egypt is still in turmoil, Libya is barely holding together and the death toll of Syrian civilians is nearing 3,000. So I wouldn't call them complete successes just yet, but it is a start on the right path.

In North America the voting public are, en masse, rejecting right wing conservative politics in favour of either left or centerist politics, something that the right wing extremists are not happy about.

At this point, a global upheaval is invetable. There are only a few questions left to be answered:
1) Where will it start?
2) How will it start?

and, most importantly,

3) How will it end?



Only time will tell, but as I stand here, united with my progressive brothers and sisters around the world, one thing is for certain, this decade will be one that will change the world, and humanity, forever.

NASA's New Rocket

If you haven't heard already, NASA announced today that they have a new vehicle in design, the DSES or Deep Space Exploration System (Though I think DSV - Deep Space Vehicle - sounds way better) that will ferry astronauts to the Moon and then to Mars. They say it is supposed to be able to carry around 130 metric tons. My theory is that that is based on current technology. Who knows where we'll be in six years, that number may just go up.


NASA DSES

The rocket won't be ready until 2017 unfortunately, so we still have a ways to go. But not only is returning to the moon looking more feesable, but seeing a colony there in my lifetime is looking very possible.


I still say that NASA should not only work on this system, but an unmanned delivery vehicle. Sacrificing crew compartments for cargo space would be an easier way to make large deliveries to any future bases.

All in all, I'm glad to hear this annoucement. It's a step in the right direction. It could also foster international competition among the space agencies which could lead to better delivery systems.

political systems

I've been hearing a lot lately about all this political shit. Frankly, it's got me annoyed. People go on and on and on, saying they're all for free speech and freedom of goverment and democracy and flowers and puppies and all that. Then turn around and bitch and complain when what they want to happen, doesn't happen. Frankly, the main reason the world is falling apart is because democracy reins. That's right, I said it, democracy is killing the world. Now, no political system is perfect. It can't be. If there is one that is perfect, it hasn't been invented yet and never will. That said, I've been reading through bits of history, political stuff mostly and after all that, I've come to see the truth behind it all. There was one man in history who made the system work. One man who made the goverment work, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Following the October Revolution of 1917, for those of you who actually give a shit, he brought communism to Russia, based off the works of Karl Marx and Marxism.

"Every man is born equal" that is one of the founding priciples and it is damn right.

Now, I am aware that during the Cold War, Communism was labeled as "evil" and "of Satan" and "immoral". Pfeh, I say. PFEH. Now, Josef Stalin warped Lenin's orginal idea to something of his own creation, I know. A totalarian state. But the founding ideals of Communism is something to behold. Something we should adopt. The problem with that is then it would take away the current voice that every Joe and Jane Nobody holds. Frankly, that might do the world some good. People need to have a voice in the way that their goverment is run, yes indeed, but not at the expense of the system itself. See, Communism may not work, but Socialism is the foundation of quite possibly the best political system that humans have come up with. Plain and simple. We should go back to Lenin's ideals and adopt that into our system.

Capitalism is all about money, and thinking about oneself. It's short sighted, greedy and fucking useless. Leninism is about the people. And quite fucking frankly, that's what the world needs right now. Of course, Early Communism also had another trait that I admire, Anti-religious establishment. While I am of the belief that people should be able to believe and worship what they want, read my lips people, the Church should have absolutely no influence on the affairs of the State. Religious figureheads should never, in any instance, be granted the same rights and freedoms as politicians. Now, I could go and say that all politicians should be Athiests or Agnostics, but I won't, that infringes too much on personal freedoms. However, that said, Religious propoganda should be forbidden and things relating to religion should be restricted, by law and force, to designated religious facilities. Simple. As. That.

There we go, I've solved the problems for the world, Adopt Leninism and form a world goverment, while at the same time, forbidding the practice of religion in anywhere other than places of worship. Not hard. Not overly simple, but not unachievable. Of course, the people with the money don't like that. So it won't happen. You know what I say to that?

FUCK. THAT.

It's time for a good ol' fashioned Coup d'etat. RISE UP PEOPLE OF THE WORLD. OVERTHROW YOUR GOVERMENTS. LOVE THE PEOPLE YOU ARE WITH. REJECT CORPORATIONS AND PROFIT. BELIEVE IN YOURSELF AND THOSE AROUND YOU AND IT IS POSSIBLE.

If movies have taught anyone anything at all, it's that ONE PERSON CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE. So it's time. RISE UP. The goverments fear attacks from outside, so they would never see one coming from inside. RISE UP AND AWAKEN THE EYES OF SOCIETY!

Humans and the space race

Okay, so people (mostly me) have been talking a lot lately about the future of space exploration and Terran society. With the world fracturing as it is, people are looking to the stars for plain survival. NASA has said that they want a trip back and have a base established by 2019 with a manned mars mission by the same date. Franky, I say that's not good enough. We could've been on mars by now. We could've been that far along. We had the tech and the drive to be on Mars by 1985. Instead, the US goverment decided that it would be best to pursue the Orbital Shuttle program *cough* idiots *cough*. Speaking of which, that program is due to be retired by the end of this year with, whadda ya know, no American replacement ready or even under construction. With the Russians due to take over resupply missions to the ISS. Now, I won't bash the importance of the International Space Station. It's a damn good project. But that said, it shouldn't be a PRIMARY concern. It should have been a thing that got built while we were planning for the trip to Mars. (I'll be giving my ideas for the Mars missions in a later post) And now, the Obama administration is poised to CUT the budget for the NASA Constellation project, which was to develop vehicles to take us to Luna and Mars. Frankly, the ONLY good thing the Bush administration did was to pour shitloads of cash into NASA's budget. And now Obama is saying "Well, we need the monies for the millitary, so NASA, you ain't getting anything" which annoys me, but more so, it confirms the thought that the first country to put a Terran on Mars will be either Russia or China (most likely China). I'm glad. Let someone else other than the US of A get there first. Might show the Americans that they are NOT in fact the greatest Country on Terra firma.

Now, I realize that we can't time travel (yet!) and complaining only goes so far. All I'm saying is that we need to look back to the stars and realize that we need to get back out there. We NEED to go out and colonize Luna and Mars, probably in that order. It will be a step forward for our society, and considering that over the past decade, we've taken about a dozen steps backwards, we NEED this. We NEED to get back into space. Not spend the money on a new missile that can smell it's target. Though that would be kinda cool.

This will probably be how it happens for the manned missions to Mars. China first. Russia second. ESA third. USA dead last. Obama, don't fuck this up for North America.

People need to get it in their minds that we are ALL of the same species. People need to start realizing that unless we start working together and working to better our species, we simply don't deserve to exist. If all we are going to do is point fingers and say "My god is better than your god even though both are exactly the same god, but we worship differently" and hate each other, exploit each other for meaningless profit and just look for new ways to kill each other, then I say, don't wait. LAUNCH THE NUKES!

So, simply. Get the act together. Learn to listen and understand. Learn that we are all the same, despite the small differences. And realize that space is the goal we should all work together. Learn that we must extend our reach to the stars.

MARS OR BUST!