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katallisonOur 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.
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.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-08-07 03:30 pm (UTC)