Rantage on various topics, none of them fannish

[katallison]

Our first rant is brought to you by the Dept. of Getting Old Sucks: you know, friends, while I love and adore my new 19" LCD monitor, setting it to its native 1280x1024 resolution leads me to realize that I really need to get cracking with the purchase of the special computer glasses. See, if you have bifocals, the time-honored assumption is that you just need distance and close-up focus, and that distance is for when you're looking straight ahead (at street signs, faces of people down the hall, etc.) while close-up is for while you're looking down (at papers on a desk, a book in your lap). Which has long dictated the placement of the different focusing regions in the lens.

However, text on a computer monitor is straight ahead, in the "distance" region of one's glasses, and hence is out of focus. The only option is to angle one's head back and try to read the screen through the bottom of one's lenses, with predictable unfortunate effects on one's neck and shoulder muscles. Thus, unless one resorts to trifocals (which are right out, it's bad enough I have to deal with the bifocals), one also needs an extra pair of single-focus glasses set for maximum acuity at about arm's length.

Interestingly, opthalmological thinking in this area seems to have progressed quickly. When I asked my previous doctor for such a prescription, a couple of years ago, she acted like this was a bizarre and outre request, and that if she gave them to me, in contravention of the Opthalmologist Code of Ethics, I'd probably wear them while driving and veer into a tree and kill myself. Whereas the person I saw last week said, "Well, of course you need those. Here, let me write it up for you."

So, I've got the prescription; I just need to go in and consummate the purchase (there goes another $150, sigh). And in the meantime, Firefox, with its control+scrollwheel method of bumping up text size, is my friend.

So -- while wandering around the web this morning, deploying the control+scrollwheel and squinting, I came across a really fascinating article by Macieg Ceglowski (cool guy and good writer; his piece on getting attacked by thugs in Warsaw is hilarious) -- a thorough and thoughtful evisceration of the NASA manned Space Shuttle mission, its historical/political roots, current illogic, and ultimate futility, from someone who's basically a supporter of scientific exploration of space. Though I'm not very knowledgeable on the topic, and would be interested to see a well-documented rebuttal of the points Ceglowski makes, still and all I find this article reassuring, in a weird paradoxical way. Because the whole NASA space mission has long left me perplexed and conflicted; I'm all in favor of science, I dig research and exploration, boldly going where no man has yadda, but at the same time I have this gnawing sense that NASA soaks up an unbelievable amount of money without much that I can see in the way of payoff. (I'm not talking monetary payoff, but, you know, expanding frontiers of knowledge, improving human life, etc. etc.)

Pondering this article led me to thinking about an e-mail that came across my work computer the other day from some university higher-up about making sure that students who plan to take the CLEP test to be exempted from the freshman writing requirement actually take said test before they, y'know, apply for graduation. And included in this e-mail, as almost a throwaway line, was the sentence, "Be aware that not all seniors who take the test pass it."

I read that, and boggled; re-read it, and boggled anew. I mean, think about it -- we have students who've made it through four years at a self-proclaimed Major Research University, who present themselves for graduation, and who are unable to pass the basic test intended to establish competency in freshman-level writing. And let's not even talk about the freshmen who show up at my door, graduates of Minnesota's highly-ranked public school system, without even the most basic grasp of written communication or quantitative reasonining. This is not really news, of course, not to anyone who works in education or in fact who works at all with allegedly educated college graduates and takes a gander at their prose stylings. But it should be news; it should be a fucking banner headline. I know it, you know, the American people should know it.

And really, I'm not carping here about niceties like subject-verb agreement, or the proper use of the comma. I'm talking about people who have allegedly undergone some form of education and yet who have no idea how to structure a line of thought and express it in words. One thing I know for sure as a writer, down to the bone marrow, is that writing = thinking, that the process of collecting your various woolly concepts and organizing them into prose is the process by which you learn to examine them, see if they hold together, discern the gaps and boggy spots and the larger connections.

Learning to do this is not easy; teaching students to do it is the farthest possible thing from easy. I'm not standing here and saying I know how to fix the educational system, but I do know it's not going to come cheap. And while I am, as noted above, all in favor of scientific research, from basic to cutting-edge, and the funding thereof, I also am made very nervous by the prospect of massive public dollars being funnelled into shiny high-tech space adventures that sit like a very tottery superstructure atop an ill-educated and credulous citizenry.

People who don't know how to read critically or write coherently don't know how to think, and are helpless in the face of politicians and corporations who can deploy the glossy rhetoric, with predictable unfortunate results we see all around us. And yeah, I know, preaching to the choir, and yeah, this is one of the oldest and tiredest rants in the Cornucopia of Rantage. But, still.

And I really do need to get those damn glasses right quick, because ow. Headache now.

Comments

[boniblithe.livejournal.com]

I have this gnawing sense that NASA soaks up an unbelievable amount of money without much that I can see in the way of payoff. (I'm not talking monetary payoff, but, you know, expanding frontiers of knowledge, improving human life, etc. etc.)

The cynic in me says that the space program is a glorified Defense experiment and the science mumbo jumbo they spout is only to distract us from the fact that one day they'd like to blow shit up from spaceships instead of from airplanes.

[jacquez.livejournal.com]

Re: space. I should hook you up with one of my father's rants on NASA sometime. (He's on the board of directors of the Space Studies Institute in Princeton.)

Re: the inability of people to write. When I was an undergrad, my university let you get out of the freshman writing requirement ONLY if you had a 5 on the AP exam. Otherwise, you were automatically in the class. People complained about how draconian this was, but it made sense to me. 'Course, what was my major? English. Heh.

[chickwriter.livejournal.com]

Okay, the glasses thing - oh yeah.

I wear progressive lens bifocals and in the last couple of weeks have realized that they are just not working for computer viewing.

Sigh.

Time to make an appointment. :(

[the-shoshanna.livejournal.com]

no idea how to structure a line of thought and express it in words

My stepson tries to argue that video games involve/count as reading because you have to read instructions and signs and stuff. I counter-argue that "recognizing words" is not the same thing as "reading."

A few days ago we had sauteed chard with dinner. Yesterday he was nibbling some Trader Joe's root-vegetable chips in the car (I was driving), and remarked,

"Apparently, when they make these chips, when they deep-fry them, they drain the oil on chard."

"Huh?" I said. "I doubt that."

"Well, that's what it says, right here! I mean, it says 'Manufactured on chard,' and I don't think they chop up the vegetables on chard, so I assume they drain them on it."

"Okay, now I'm curious. Geoff, would you take the bag and figure out what he's looking at?"

The bag actually said, "Manufactured on shared equipment with wheat, milk, and soy." With a line break after "shared."

Yikes.

(And, gentle temple massage for your headache.)

[kadymae.livejournal.com]

ROFL. (I'll 'splain why in a moment.)

Is stepson from the deep south where "ch" and "sh" can both be pronounced like the sh in Sharon and "ed" can get slurred into "ard". (eg "I'm really tarred" = I'm really tired?)

As for the ROFL, when I was young, my little brother had *terrible* reading skills and his teacher suggested that every time we were in the car, he read road signs.

So, we're taking a roadtrip up the pacific coast and he keeps saying "Fiddely Tittley"

Fidelity Title.

And then there's my husband who had an atrocious elementary education devoid of the concept of phonics. If there's a word that is not in his lexicon of memorized words, he just skips it or butchers it incredibly in trying to guess how it's prounounced.

In the Marvel U there's a character called Black Panther whose real life alter ego is T'Challa, King of Wakanda.

Ralph had been reading Black Panther comics for over 20 years when this took place during a discussion of an ongoing storyline:

Dave: I thought it was pretty funny how T'challa dispatched those rebels.

Ralph: No, Black Panther took them out.

Dave: That's what I said, T'Challa did it.

Ralph: Who's T'Challa?

Dave: Uh, T'Challa, King of Wakanda, AKA The Black Panther.

Ralph: OHHHH, that's how you say that word.

Pause

Dave: Well, did you think it was prounounced "Steve" or something?!

[the-shoshanna.livejournal.com]

Is stepson from the deep south where "ch" and "sh" can both be pronounced like the sh in Sharon

Nope, he's from Montreal. But I've always pronounced "chard" with a /sh/ rather than a /ch/ (and have just found out I'm wrong), so he'd been hearing both /shard/ and /tchard/ over the previous couple of days.

But still. Yikes.

Well, did you think it was prounounced "Steve" or something?!

Hee!

Suggestion re glasses

[tazlet.livejournal.com]

Last year's recycled frames+new lenses=$37

[leadensky.livejournal.com]

re: NASA - Being that I'm from Nasa's second hometown (Huston is the first) I can only heartily agree about the bueracrachy and the waste and the corruption and all of that. However, I'm not convinced it's possible to have a long-running government program *without* all of that.

(I'm open to counter examples. But I don't think there are many.)

And it's very true, I think, that private companies would do a better job. Except they have not, to this point, and again, "private companies do it better" is as true for other programs as the "government programs corrupt."

And so I'll continue to support NASA, because I'd rather waste the money on space exploration than on other things.

re: education - would you say that it's more true that a person can not *think* without the ability to write, or that they can not *communicate their thoughts* to others, without the organizational skills taught by writing?

As a student, I myself find that my understanding of materials - and, esp, my understanding of what areas I *don't* grasp - is brought into focus by writing about the subject matter.

re: glasses - now would not be the time to note that my mother has bifocals *and* computer glasses, would it? *g* I, on the other hand, am so hopelessly near-sighted that I do no fine detail work without glasses. Or any work, for that matter.

Here's hoping the day improves.

- hg

[giglet.livejournal.com]

re: education - would you say that it's more true that a person can not *think* without the ability to write, or that they can not *communicate their thoughts* to others, without the organizational skills taught by writing?

This is a major concern for me as well, as the mom of a kid who has severe problems with writing. (Severe enough that he's in special education because, although he's bright as a whip and has reading skills of a kid 6 years older, he can't write well enough to pass standardized tests.)

I'm certain that my kid, at least, can think without writing -- since he shows clear ability to implement things he's learned -- but I wonder how much he loses from not necessarily being capable of organizing his thoughts.

There are plenty of ways of organizing thoughts without writing (after all, there must have been plenty of smart people in pre-literate societies to create things like cloth and beer and social structures that allowed civilization -- and to create writing itself). None of these methods (so far as I know) are taught in traditional Western schools. Maybe a little bit of nonlinear thinking in art classes, but that's about it.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

There's always a pay-off with research, even if it's not flashy. I just hate that we've been stalled for 25 years. The shuttle was never an end to itself.

I currently have progressives, and while I can tell the difference between top and bottom, the middle range is fine for the computer.

Then again, with some difficulty, I can use the computer without glasses at all, and I often read that way. I got the progressives when I couldn't thread a needle unless I took my glasses off and closed my right eye, so I barely need them. I suspect that will change and that computer glasses are in my future.

When it comes to writing - at Rutgers in the early 80s, no one could test out of Expository Writing. If you got above a certain level (I think it was 600 on the SATs), you were placed in 191 instead of 101, but you took it.

Even if you were going to the Engineering school. :)

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

I had the exact same thought about bifocals, which is why my glasses (the ones I wear on the odd occasion I don't have my Mary Sue violet contacts in) are *not* bifocals or progressives, despite being encouraged to get them by my eye doctor. I mean, reading...yes. But my reading is straight ahead (mostly).

And s for the writing test, yes...our school, for the past five years or so, has required all students to pass a two-part writing proficiency exam (part 'a' being a formal essay), to be taken when the student has between 45 and 60 credits. Some students - most notably transfer students - fall through the information crack and take the test later, and some students (especially second-language students) are allowed to defer the test for a time, but there are *three* chances to pass (actually four, given the almost pro forma appeal structure), and there are *still* graduating seniors who can't write well enough to pass this kind of test.

Seeing as how this test is a graduation requirement, it's quite possible for a student to have been blithely passed from course to course for four (or five) years and never actually be awarded with a degree.

You want educational tragedy?

[kormantic.livejournal.com]

Try "tutoring" a roomful of football freshman at a school desperate to build a team that won't be laughed at. Most of the papers I looked at in that class made me want to cry. But I'll tell you this: Daunte Culpepper is a level-headed sweetheart and not just 6'4" of hot.

[eliade.livejournal.com]

Oh my god. I read that "Attacked by Thugs" piece and laughed myself sick, until I was in *pain*. *works on breathing again* Thank you. *g*

[zoerayne]

I'm not even going to get started on the educational system in this country. I'm not. There's a reason why my daughter (now 17) has been homeschooled for the vast majority of her school career to date.

[pocketmouse]

Frankly, the main reason we continue to pour so much money into the space program with so little results readily available to the general public is that we'll look like total losers if we just stop. We all know that the shuttle is defunct, but we can't make something better without seriously re-prioritizing NASA, and getting a major funding extension. The Cold War gave us the push to develop past separation modules, but to put up a new type of manned vehicle would mean stopping use of the current one, and the military has too much use for the shuttle. Not major, but they get the fun, really delicate satellites and the like. And there is a lot of new technology coming out of the shuttle program, it's just most of it isn't useful to the general public.
Although I was so glad he had all his facts right! Most articles these days are full of errors and misconceptions (blah blah don't feel like using the Hubble any more blah). Although I gotta tell you the supersekrit reason for all those chats with elementary school kids: you get first dibs if you're somehow related to the astronauts, so there's a bunch right there (a lot of the astronauts tend to come from big families, and they're proud of it), and the other thing of it is just for the guys up there, especially on the ISS. I mean, you're up there for at least 6 months, with only one other person for company, and most of the communication you get is through email, or CAPCOM, and they are not the most exciting of people. It's isolated. So they do things like send care packages with the supply modules, or let the astronauts use the teleconferences to talk to their families on their birthday.
I love NASA. It just sucks because they're a competitive market program that's not got anyone to compete with.

[resonant8.livejournal.com]

I feel for you. I'll probably have to have bifocals next year, but I escaped them, narrowly, this year. So I have a sort of complementary problem: My new glasses are small, on the assumption that you don't need sharp peripheral vision, correct? Except that when I sing in choir, my music is now down below the bottoms of the frames. So either I hold the music in front of my face, or I pull the glasses down to the end of my nose like Lily Tomlin in the phone company sketch.

[amand-r.livejournal.com]

I lost all of my sanity the other day regarding improper homonym usage the other day, and it occurred to me that it's not the disregard of proper spelling and grammar that bother me so much as the things that are improperly spelled/structurally written are actually piss poor when one takes the time to suss them out (and as that is the first time I've ever used suss, I hope I did it correctly). In the end, I have this feeling that this is all tied up with the observation that not only do those who cannot write properly do it because they never learned properly, but also that they never care enough to fix the problem once they mature and see that they in fact canno't write properly. I'll tell you right now that I would never have CLEPed anything writing wise when I was in high school. I was atrocious. I'm not William Safire or anything, but dear god, I learned how to write servicably.

In the end, what I meant to say is that in tandem to your statement, I'm tired of people who excuse their poor writing and/or spelling by saying that the medium isn't that important (a script, an office email, etc), because when you stop caring about it in one place, it tends to go in other places. Or, what I really suspect is that they just don't care about the substance of what they are trying to say enough to even bother making it presentable. In this case, I take full initiative to not care about reading my boss's notificaton memos.

This is as coherent as I have been able to articulate my growing insanity in the past weeks. Really, I'll soon appear in the papers as "that woman who assaulted the script industry with a rusty cheese grater and a copy of Warringer's English Grammar and Composition whilst screaming 'spellcheck! spellcheck you lazy ass bastards!'" Hum.