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newerarticles/gettingt.TXT
It’s the new year, 2000, and we still have cars with wheels, disease, weather, acne, and Dick Clark. Not exactly what everyone expected.
We students are still hunching down into tiny desks, carrying around all amount of paper and books. Our backpack seams cry out in agony as they tote around 800 page behemoths that make "War and Peace" look like bedtime reading. Papers are still lost quite frequently among all our sheets of this and reports on that.
Kids still talk out of turn in class. Jerks keep on running amuck in the halls, causing mad amounts of stupid inconveniences for everyone. "Good" kids keep being annoyed by "bad" kids. Bad kids keep being annoyed by good kids!
Teachers continue to not tailor their teaching styles to the different batches of kids they get each year. Administrators keep on pushing ideas and laws onto kids who think they have better ones.
I'm sick of all the old stuff from the 1900s. Let's take the old, suck it into a big vacuum, throw that vacuum into a storage bin, and start replacing the junk of old with the shiny, red plastic of new.
What do I see coming? For starters, hopefully we can get jerks out of our halls in the next hundred years... hopefully in two years, as I'd like to witness that for myself. Even more so, I'd like to see all old methods of doing things stupidly to be disposed of. This includes toting around ten pound books, being instructed by teachers who really should be in another line of work, and losing papers to the monster living in my backpack. How to do this?
The book thing is easy. What fairly commonplace object can hold twenty-one thousand pages of text in the palm of your hand? If you said a DVD, you'd be wrong. It can hold one-hundred-seventy-thousand pages of text. No, the correct answer is a CD!
Take my Algebra II book... please! As I hold it, however, I can tell that if I compared the weight of the printed, hardcover version to a CD with the book on it, the CD would be less heavy. By, oh, at least five pounds. And, if I had three books of equal size in my backpack, I'd save myself fifteen pounds every day on my back. Does this not make sense?!
However, not everyone has a laptop computer. In fact, almost no one has a laptop, and to bring one to school and, say, open it up in the commons would be an invitation for it to get stolen, or at the very least, soaked upon with apple juice.
If electronics are really the unimaginable thing that I expect they'd be, here's another idea that could start saving our backs stress right now; softcover books. Doesn't it make sense? Do we really need hardcovers on these already-way-too-heavy things?!
Teachers are a commodity, and we should be thankful to have such good ones as we have at BHS. Now with that obligatory butt-kissing out of the way, I must also say that some teachers would not, oh... how can I say this kindly... if they were cows, they wouldn't pass the "Quality Checkd" test.
I'm not asking to get rid of any of them. I'm just encouraging all teachers that think they could improve their teaching methods to do so. As for the teachers who cannot think of a single thing they can do to improve: you're the ones who really need improvement. To assist in a little guidance, I offer up a little thought. Computers can do all sorts of amazing things. All by themselves they can teach kids every subject that's taught in high school. However, they can't adapt to students. That's where you teachers have the advantage; take that advantage, and throttle it.
As for losing papers in a backpack, again, a laptop would be the answer. Have a room full of laptops, have every kid send their file to the teacher's computer, and bing, she'll see who really did their work. All this, and again, no messy books or notebooks to carry around.
Are my ideas outlandish? Sure, somewhat. Will they be implemented soon? Doubtful. But could they really improve the education process for all of us in the years with a "2" in the front? Definitely!
Questions? Thoughts? Concerns? Dinner and a movie? Contact
us.
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Karl
Becker, the author of all these articles, uses New
Tricks for his writings.
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