I hated this guy's class. Apparently he's some kind of math education genius. I do remember liking geometry, so maybe it worked.
But I'd like to mention how much I particularly disliked one thing the writer mentions as a positive: that this teacher pushes students hard, then "lifts the mood with some lively intellectual jousting on nonmath topics, such as sports, that he knows interest them."
Yeah. I challenge anyone to come up with a way to get the 13-year-old me to hate a class more than breaking up the MATH with FOOTBALL.
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
Monday, August 04, 2008
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Ich glaube, daß diese Regel dumm ist.
Now I will rant about German. In English, things evolve. In English, eventually we'll just give up on people ever figuring out that "irregardless" is not a word and just let them use it. Stuff shifts, the language evolves, whatevah.
In other languages, they have Rules. Germany has recently done away with my favorite letter: ß. It's called the "es-tsett" and makes basically the same sound as "ss." Actually, it's still in a lot of words, but a few years ago The Authorities declared that the word "daß" - one of my favorite words, partly because it is super fun to write the ß and partly because it wreaks grammatical havoc on any sentence in which it appears - is now to be written "dass." This is lame and stupid.
Our teacher explained this the other day (after I had written "daß" several times in an essay) and I was like, well, ok, but if I *like* the ß, can I use it anyway? (I think this makes me the grammar equivalent of a crotchety old man - goldurn newfangled ways, can't make ME do it.) And he was like, "....not really." Actually, he answered with one of my new favorite German words: "Jein." It's what you get when you stick "ja" and "nein" together.
But, I mean, cmon. I only learned German 12 years ago. It's not like I'm trying to speak classical Greek in Athens.
Sigh.
In other languages, they have Rules. Germany has recently done away with my favorite letter: ß. It's called the "es-tsett" and makes basically the same sound as "ss." Actually, it's still in a lot of words, but a few years ago The Authorities declared that the word "daß" - one of my favorite words, partly because it is super fun to write the ß and partly because it wreaks grammatical havoc on any sentence in which it appears - is now to be written "dass." This is lame and stupid.
Our teacher explained this the other day (after I had written "daß" several times in an essay) and I was like, well, ok, but if I *like* the ß, can I use it anyway? (I think this makes me the grammar equivalent of a crotchety old man - goldurn newfangled ways, can't make ME do it.) And he was like, "....not really." Actually, he answered with one of my new favorite German words: "Jein." It's what you get when you stick "ja" and "nein" together.
But, I mean, cmon. I only learned German 12 years ago. It's not like I'm trying to speak classical Greek in Athens.
Sigh.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Deutsch ist viel Spaß
Tonight was my first German class. And you know what? It was great. I love language classes. The group consists of me, a Tunisian dude, a chick who has achieved extremely minor fame through the blog she writes for work (but enough fame for me to be dorkily excited to meet her), and a high school Latin teacher.
The blogger and I took German in high school and college, and the other two have never taken German before. So our levels are somewhat different. I found myself whipping out sentences with subordinate clauses, and blogger chick graduated recently enough that she still has a pretty good vocabulary. Meanwhile, Tunisian dude and Latin dude were struggling with word order. I'm totally impressed the two of them are there - they both seem to have taught themselves basic German.
When I left, I couldn't wait to go home and do my homework. Four whole days til another class! How will I make it? (I sound like the Monkey.)
The blogger and I took German in high school and college, and the other two have never taken German before. So our levels are somewhat different. I found myself whipping out sentences with subordinate clauses, and blogger chick graduated recently enough that she still has a pretty good vocabulary. Meanwhile, Tunisian dude and Latin dude were struggling with word order. I'm totally impressed the two of them are there - they both seem to have taught themselves basic German.
When I left, I couldn't wait to go home and do my homework. Four whole days til another class! How will I make it? (I sound like the Monkey.)
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
ich spreche Deutsch, ja!
Ok, I'm doing it. The German adventure has started. I gave the school a large amount of money this evening, and tomorrow night I'm starting one of the intensive courses.
They had really low registration for the January intensive courses, and they'll only hold a class if there's four people, so tonight they rounded everyone up to see who could be grouped together. I had to take a written placement test and the guy was dealing with other students while I worked on it, and by the time I was done there were only three people still sitting in the waiting area. He told me what level I'd placed into and I said, "So, the class is happening?" and he said, "It is if you register!" Turns out the other three people were waiting to see if there would be a fourth. Oop. Good thing I signed up.
So, thanks for the advice and analysis, dear readers! I think I could do a lot of good work on my German without the class, but I think it'll be fun, and anyway, social lives are for the weak. I'll resurface in February...but then I'll probably be staying home every night to watch German movies from Netflix. (Guests welcome.)
They had really low registration for the January intensive courses, and they'll only hold a class if there's four people, so tonight they rounded everyone up to see who could be grouped together. I had to take a written placement test and the guy was dealing with other students while I worked on it, and by the time I was done there were only three people still sitting in the waiting area. He told me what level I'd placed into and I said, "So, the class is happening?" and he said, "It is if you register!" Turns out the other three people were waiting to see if there would be a fourth. Oop. Good thing I signed up.
So, thanks for the advice and analysis, dear readers! I think I could do a lot of good work on my German without the class, but I think it'll be fun, and anyway, social lives are for the weak. I'll resurface in February...but then I'll probably be staying home every night to watch German movies from Netflix. (Guests welcome.)
Saturday, September 08, 2007
book quest
I've finished two more books in my quest to read my way through my shelves. (Woo!)
On Spice's recommendation, I finally got around to reading Blink. It's about split-second decisions, like when an expert looks at a sculpture and instantly knows it's fake, or when an orchestra's audition panel knows in two seconds that this is the french horn player for them. I had it because Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer who wrote the book, was supposed to speak at this conference I went to a couple of years ago, but he couldn't make it. So instead they sent several boxes of Blink. The book confirmed what I think about the guy - he's a fantastic writer. Beautiful, beautiful way with words. But I'm not always totally sure he has his ideas straight. (It's also possible that I'm too dumb to get his ideas.)
I actually once interviewed Malcolm Gladwell for a class. We had to pick an article and talk to the writer about how they'd done it - the reporting, the writing, what the editing was like. So I had a long conversation with him (about one of the articles that led to Blink, as it happens) as I sat outside a restaurant in the Bay Area, getting progressively later for an OAM trivia competition, and he walked down the street in New York and informed me about journalism in general and his article on facial lie detecting in particular.
Interesting - I just reread my transcript of the phone call and the things he said about writing and being edited have turned out to be very accurate.
I said there were two books, but this is plenty long enough for one blog post. More on the other book later.
On Spice's recommendation, I finally got around to reading Blink. It's about split-second decisions, like when an expert looks at a sculpture and instantly knows it's fake, or when an orchestra's audition panel knows in two seconds that this is the french horn player for them. I had it because Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer who wrote the book, was supposed to speak at this conference I went to a couple of years ago, but he couldn't make it. So instead they sent several boxes of Blink. The book confirmed what I think about the guy - he's a fantastic writer. Beautiful, beautiful way with words. But I'm not always totally sure he has his ideas straight. (It's also possible that I'm too dumb to get his ideas.)
I actually once interviewed Malcolm Gladwell for a class. We had to pick an article and talk to the writer about how they'd done it - the reporting, the writing, what the editing was like. So I had a long conversation with him (about one of the articles that led to Blink, as it happens) as I sat outside a restaurant in the Bay Area, getting progressively later for an OAM trivia competition, and he walked down the street in New York and informed me about journalism in general and his article on facial lie detecting in particular.
Interesting - I just reread my transcript of the phone call and the things he said about writing and being edited have turned out to be very accurate.
I said there were two books, but this is plenty long enough for one blog post. More on the other book later.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
itty bitty milestone
Today the Department of Education's bank elves took their last withdrawal from my bank account. I am now debt-free.
Ok, so, this is not as momentous as it sounds - my parents paid for undergrad at OAM (thank you parents, who are not blog readers, but for the record, I really appreciate it), the master's at MFGAM was fully funded (how to get a fully funded master's: start a PhD, then quit), and I got in-state tuition and some grant money for MSGAM. But I did have to take out one loan along the way - and now it's gone! Woo!
Also, I think the government now owes me $200, thanks to some confusion about the scheduled payments. Hm. I hope they pay that back.
Ok, so, this is not as momentous as it sounds - my parents paid for undergrad at OAM (thank you parents, who are not blog readers, but for the record, I really appreciate it), the master's at MFGAM was fully funded (how to get a fully funded master's: start a PhD, then quit), and I got in-state tuition and some grant money for MSGAM. But I did have to take out one loan along the way - and now it's gone! Woo!
Also, I think the government now owes me $200, thanks to some confusion about the scheduled payments. Hm. I hope they pay that back.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
