LA, CA (RINGGGGGG!) School's back in!

I am reminded here of Proust's longest sentence:

Cities of the Plain
(Sodom et Gomorrhe)
[Vol. 4 of Remembrance of Things Past--
(À la Recherche du temps perdu)]

"Their honour precarious, their liberty provisional, lasting only until the discovery of their crime; their position unstable, like that of the poet who one day was feasted at every table, applauded in every theatre in London, and on the next was driven from every lodging, unable to find a pillow upon which to lay his head, turning the mill like Samson and saying like him: "The two sexes shall die, each in a place apart!"; excluded even, save on the days of general disaster when the majority rally round the victim as the Jews rallied round Dreyfus, from the sympathy--at times from the society--of their fellows, in whom they inspire only disgust at seeing themselves as they are, portrayed in a mirror which, ceasing to flatter them, accentuates every blemish that they have refused to observe in themselves, and makes them understand that what they have been calling their love (a thing to which, playing upon the word, they have by association annexed all that poetry, painting, music, chivalry, asceticism have contrived to add to love) springs not from an ideal of beauty which they have chosen but from an incurable malady; like the Jews again (save some who will associate only with others of their race and have always on their lips ritual words and consecrated pleasantries), shunning one another, seeking out those who are most directly their opposite, who do not desire their company, pardoning their rebuffs, moved to ecstasy by their condescension; but also brought into the company of their own kind by the ostracism that strikes them, the opprobrium under which they have fallen, having finally been invested, by a persecution similar to that of Israel, with the physical and moral characteristics of a race, sometimes beautiful, often hideous, finding (in spite of all the mockery with which he who, more closely blended with, better assimilated to the opposing race, is relatively, in appearance, the least inverted, heaps upon him who has remained more so) a relief in frequenting the society of their kind, and even some corroboration of their own life, so much so that, while steadfastly denying that they are a race (the name of which is the vilest of insults), those who succeed in concealing the fact that they belong to it they readily unmask, with a view less to injuring them, though they have no scruple about that, than to excusing themselves; and, going in search (as a doctor seeks cases of appendicitis) of cases of inversion in history, taking pleasure in recalling that Socrates was one of themselves, as the Israelites claim that Jesus was one of them, without reflecting that there were no abnormals when homosexuality was the norm, no anti-Christians before Christ, that the disgrace alone makes the crime because it has allowed to survive only those who remained obdurate to every warning, to every example, to every punishment, by virtue of an innate disposition so peculiar that it is more repugnant to other men (even though it may be accompanied by exalted moral qualities) than certain other vices which exclude those qualities, such as theft, cruelty, breach of faith, vices better understood and so more readily excused by the generality of men; forming a freemasonry far more extensive, more powerful and less suspected than that of the Lodges, for it rests upon an identity of tastes, needs, habits, dangers, apprenticeship, knowledge, traffic, glossary, and one in which the members themselves, who intend not to know one another, recognise one another immediately by natural or conventional, involuntary or deliberate signs which indicate one of his congeners to the beggar in the street, in the great nobleman whose carriage door he is shutting, to the father in the suitor for his daughter's hand, to him who has sought healing, absolution, defence, in the doctor, the priest, the barrister to whom he has had recourse; all of them obliged to protect their own secre

 

Here here JB! You know school has taught me many things...I learned how to say all the states in alphabetical order:

Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinios Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachussets Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennesee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconson Wyoming.


I read many books, my favorite being Pride and Prejudice. Remember the first few wonderful lines?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered as the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

``My dear Mr. Bennet,'' said his lady to him one day, ``have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?''

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.

DH knows what I'm talking about. I cannot however translate to French...sorry.

 

Well in school, I learned to count, and can do so to at least 47 (give or take). I also know what a first person subjective and objective pronoun is and can spot one in a sentence.

 

So...our school system needs higher standards. I need more challenges!

 

My brain just purged this entire thread.

 

JB gets the Gold for long winded hasketting. Bowen & I can't hold a candle to that one.
Thanks JB, I feel much better about three esoteric lines that don't appeal to everyone's interest.

Gee, I had forgotten Proust's reputation for racism. Kind of Anti-Semitic, wasn't he?

 

OK, VK2, that was *humor*, not Hasketting.

 

I hereby retire the term Hasketting. Please do not use it anymore. It was ok, but now it's not.
We will now use the made-up word "cheesed". This thread has been cheesed.

 

Ah well, it had a good run

 

I concur...Cheesed it will be forevermore!

 

Schools cater to the common denominator, so you've got to seek out challenges if you want them.

 

I understand that the Magnet Schools operate on a higher standard.

 

Yes, but I'm IN a magnet school and I still don't feel challenged. I'm forced to take college classes to really get into subjects. Which isn't too bad, I suppose, but it'd be great if both high school AND college were interesting. The only saving quality about my high school is the people.

 

Well, college you're expected to get the knowledge. High school they teach to the tests too much, and they slow down, too often, for the slower students at the sake of the faster ones.

 

It was the exact opposite for me -- after high school, college was incredibly easy! High school was WAY harder, way too much homework, more than twice as much classtime, very stressful and I was depressed for my entire sophomore year JUST because of homework. 8.5 hours at school + 5-7 hours of homework = miserable.

Fortunately college is really not that difficult. I think only if you're pre-med or an engineering major would you find college difficult, because at 15-20 hours of total class per week, that's really easy, and your vacation time is absolutely ridiculous. I mean, in high school I got a 2.5 month summer, in college I got 3.5, all colleges get 3.5 month summers, in fact (32 or 33 weeks of school depending on whether you're in a semester or term college). In high school, x-mas break was just 2 weeks. In college, it was almost 4! So even if somehow you were working harder during college weeks, it's STILL way easier than high school because you have so much additional time off to compensate.

With 24 credits at college, I would say it was about 80% as tough as high school, but that's because I made it that tough by taking 9 more credits than you need to graduate in 4 years (i.e. 15 credits per term / semester you finish in 4 years, 24 per term or semester and you finish MUCH faster).

 

I did all that during college plus worked 30 hours a week as a technician/data analyst at an environmental lab (yeah, not even my major), plus gave birth to and raised a baby. Snort. Top that kids! And, I paid my own way. Oh, I forgot to mention all the awards, but that would be...crass.

 

I get the impression MrZAP is focused more on the difficulty of the material, not the courseload. But I could be off on that.

 

I think he just wants us to pity him. MZ, yo, you can READ and learn on your own, you know. Have some *imagination*! You don't have to sit there and wait for a teacher to hand you an assignment. Make your own challenges.

 

That's always how I was -- I learned a lot more outside of school than in. A lot of that was impatience with the poor education system, though, but I think it's too much to blame not knowing what you want on poor education because in this day and age there are so many cost-effective ways to accumulate information (libraries, the Internet, etc.) that you really have to take the initiative or you have nobody to blame but yourself.

I went to private school through high school, to very acclaimed schools, and was still quite annoyed with the poor lack of coordination and structure. I came into high school not knowing how to write very well, as far as grammar and sentence structure, but I loved writing and had done quite a bit of it in middle school. I was always a very good student, but I scored terribly on my entrance exam to high school. I think I was like 25th percentile in the English section, which was basically writing and grammar, and that's pretty sad when I consider what STUPID kids were in my class. Freshman year, our teacher told us we should already know how to write well so she refused to teach us anything, she just had us read and write without any guidance as to how to improve our writing skills (yeah lady, 14-year-olds are already expert writers, freakin' retard). There were several English teachers freshman year, so then fast forward to sophomore year. That year, our teacher said we should have already known how to write and the basics of grammar and sentence structure from our freshman years, but half of us didn't know that because we had a different teacher (the other one did teach grammar and all that). So that was when I finally decided, screw you morons, I'm going to teach myself. I bought The Chicago Manual of Style, Words into Type, The Elements of Style, all kinds of writing books, and I learned whatever I needed to know myself at a pace I could tolerate, and my writing improved a fair amount. Then by junior year, I finally got a great teacher, one of the best I ever had (mentioned in my first book), and he said, "The buck stops here." He spent the year teaching us how to write alongside studying American literature, which was a great year, because before that we studied African literature (who gives a crap? There is about as much good African literature as like 1 year of European history, huge waste of time; everything we read was total garbage) and a mix of other world literature freshman year (which was hit and miss). I picked up quite a bit in junior year, but still mostly from my own studies. By the end of that year I was a professional writer making $50 per article for a popular culture Website writing about movies, and I was making $25/mo for a few reviews of Hong Kong action movies with Suite101.com, back when they paid their editors. I was 17 and taught myself how to write well enough to get paid, and plus I finished my book by the time I was 18 and got a literary agent in New York, so by the time I graduated I went from being in the bottom 1/4 of the class at writing to the #1 writer easily.

In college, I was really annoyed that my philosophy professors -- while very good professors and a great department -- didn't seem to know anything about existentialism and nobody was an expert on Nietzsche. That subject interested me the most, so I spent the summer between years one year reading every book Nietzsche wrote, took me 3-4 hours a day of heavy reading, and I took 67 pages of single-spaced, typed notes, too. By the end of that summer I knew far more about Nietzsche than any professor at the school, and I used that knowledge to further my philosophical education and add to what I learned in college. The point being, if you take the initiative the world is out there and you can learn whatever you want with enough dedication. But it meant instead of sitting home watching TV all day I was doing pretty hardcore reading, though it was very enjoyable to me as in Nietzsche I found a mind like I had never seen before, and ideas that I had always thought and believed maybe I was alone in thinkin

 

Bowen! You're as high on yourself as Bon Jovi is, have you considered running for Governor (like he is/has)?

 

I just remember how in high school, I was pretty much at the option of do the busywork that I was assigned, or do something more productive. I did the latter on occasion... but my reading habits still haven't recovered from high school.
Nothing encourages one to not read like being in high school.

 

Elenetc. -- whatever that means, haha, that I'm definitely not. But you will see what you want to see. Stating facts isn't being high on yourself. If Michael Jordan said, "Yeah, I won six NBA titles," you're not going to say, "Jeez man, you're high on yourself." No. Those are just the facts. If he said, "I won 6 titles, I'm basically the greatest human being who has ever lived and should justly be worshipped as a god," THEN you say he's high on himself

I agree that high school kills your desire to do much reading. But personally, I've never enjoyed reading for pleasure. My parents were worried about that when I was younger, they had to pay me to read books, and then I'd do a pretty awesome job because since I was 6 I've always been very motivated by money, haha. But I simply think that reading fails as a leisure activity. It was wonderful a few hundred years ago, but now it's just one of the worst options you have. Surfing the Internet is far more entertaining, which can include reading but not in isolation (with AIM going, etc.), playing video games is much more fun, watching movies or TV shows are both better experiences, etc. I read only for information, and I still think it doesn't matter how much technology is invented, reading will always be the best means of transmitting much information. Non-fiction books are a staple of my life, whether it's poker books, philosophy books, lately of course numerous film books, etc. I just can't tolerate fiction much, I find it pretty intolerable, no matter how "good." There are some exceptions where I really appreciate the quality of the writing and storytelling, but I always find myself yearning for the book in movie form, because that's just my preferred medium of consumption.

I also will say I suck as a fiction writer. I'm not sure it's something I'll ever really get into. I once had aspirations like that, I knew I sucked, but I thought maybe I'll try to improve through writing short stories a lot, then after five or ten years I'll have written enough to be good enough to write a novel, perhaps, that way I could say I'm a fiction and non-fiction author. Now I realize I have no use for that, when I could spend that time writing a screenplay that I can direct. If I wrote a novel that was worth anything, then I'd have to adapt it to a screenplay myself, then turn it into a film, thus adding an unnecessary step into the process.

I love non-fiction writing because I'm very analytical and research-oriented, I've been known to spend 4 hours looking for a single statistic (actually on the last book I combed my research materials for about two full days for one quote I knew I needed, god, that was horrible, I was near to giving up but finally found it in somewhere I had already looked once, of course). Also to me non-fiction structure is very easy to put together, I know how to do it by this point, so it becomes really straight-forward. It's always a challenge crafting a book, of course, but I'm never worried that by the end of the process I'll have something I'm really proud of.

With fiction writing, I can't tolerate the flowery details expected of writers, because as a reader it kind of drives me crazy, too, so I can't write fiction. I could give it a go but I'd laugh at myself. "She walked into the room, which had the slightest scent of vanilla and charred oak, looked around as though she were surveying a vast lake, and blah blah crap crap crap." I hate that so badly. The metaphors just kill it for me. I'm too factually oriented to tolerate that kind of thing, it just makes me laugh even reading most fiction. What most people consider great metaphors I consider pretty cheesy.

I LOVE screenplay writing, however, because it's so formulaic and no-nonsense. You basically just write dialogue, which I think is the fun part of fiction writing, but you aren't required to give hardly any details of location beyond what is absolutely necessary. "A stark room" or "A house full of antiques," just enough to give the production design department an idea. You don't care what he

 

I should make clear, I wasn't talking about desire, per se.... but that it kills the habit of reading. Up until 8th grade, I read an insane amount, anything I could get my hands on. Fair bit of fiction and a ton of non-fiction. However, high school broke the reading habits I had because high school was a lot of pointless busiwork.
College is a lot of work, but its work with a point to it. I've been working on getting my reading habits back, but its still back in full force, and its a bit sporatic.

 

Oh, I read all the time. And no, ES, I don't want pity. I've recently been reading Book of Lost Tales by Tolkien, and I finished Disclosure by Michael Crichton recently. No, I probably read more than a lot of people here. And I study history constantly.

My problem is that I still feel unsatisfied. I have an amazing;y strong thirst for knowledge. I'm the kind of person that has a goal to learn EVERYTHING. And I feel that high school is holding me back. Now, I'm not going to do anything rash like quit, but I am going to try to heighten the standards.

 

Take the GED, and go to college right now.