Most Valuable High School Subject
W MI scares me. All those "Vans" and "Huis"es. I feel like I am in Village of the Damned. I once had an interview with Meijer Stores at their Grand Rapids HQ. If you've seen my picture, I am hardly blond hair blue eyed. I didn't get the job ... don't think I would have fit in...Quote: EvenBobMy HS was 3 years old when I started 9th grade. It was
in suburbia and was 100% white, not even any Hispanics.
210 in my graduating class, all blond haired blue eyed
white kids. W MI has the largest settlement of people from
the Netherlands in the world.
Quote: konceptumIf you do an excessive amount of typing, as I do, switch to "Das Keyboard", that's the brand name. They are pricey, around $130, but since I type around 120 wpm, I find it necessary. Light touch on the keys, proper feedback. I can't stand the new fangled keyboards that come with computers.
I swear, I have a dell that's EXACTLY IDENTICAL to that one...it took me a while to find this one too..very soft-touch keys.
Quote: teddysW MI scares me. All those "Vans" and "Huis"es. I feel like I am in Village of the Damned. I once had an interview with Meijer Stores at their Grand Rapids HQ.
Dutch people are very hard working and thrifty.
There were lots of arguments among friends
when I was young as to who the cheapest SOB.
Some of the most beautiful women in the US
live here, though. Blue eyed blonds everywhere
you turn.
Quote: YoDiceRoll11Tiebreak between History and Constitutional Law.
Constitutional Law in High School?
I had Latin in Jr. High. I wish I had learned more.
Quote: EvenBobNobody ever talked about computers, except on Star Trek. We saw a movie in class in 1965 that was about what to expect in 1990. Flying cars, 500mph trains, jets that went Mach 3.
Probably the most fundamental mistake of visionaries would be that transportation would improve at exponential rates. In many ways it has stalled, a victim of economics.
Some of the darker science fiction stories, like The Feeling of Power (1958) where people have become so used to computers, they can no longer do any mathematics, are proving to be more prophetic.
" I doubt my kids have ever seen a typewriter. Then again, my father probably thinks I'm spoiled from never having had to suffer the slide rule. "
You are really old if you played solitaire with a real deck of cards LOL
Paco, I took 2 years of Latin, one year of Spanish. Do not remember any Spanish, but the Xaverian Brothers burned Amo Amas,Amat
along with Gallia Est Omnis Divisa in Partes Tres into my brain over 50 years ago.
If only I wasn't so bloody horrible at math, I mighta made something of myself. You know, instead of being a mindless monitor starer and all ;)
Quote: buzzpaffPaco, I took 2 years of Latin, one year of Spanish. Do not remember any Spanish, but the Xaverian Brothers burned Amo Amas,Amat along with Gallia Est Omnis Divisa in Partes Tres into my brain over 50 years ago.
Death of Ceasar followed by Death of Brutus from Rome.
Used to ride the # 8 street car to high school and it went past Edgar Allen Poe's grave.
Quote the raven, nevermore: comes to mind but more likely from a Vincent Price movie than literature. SIGH
Quote: buzzpaffHate to admit it but the only Shakespeare I can quote is " Et tu, Brute? "
I actually doubt that very much. I think you probably know dozens of Shakespeare quotes, you just don't recognize them all.
- Let's kill all the lawyers
- He hath eaten me out of house and home
- Lord, what fools these mortals be
- In my heart of hearts
- A thousand times good night
- Nothing can come of nothing
- Get thee to a nunnery
- Method in the madness
- Sweets to the sweet
- The play's the thing
- To be, or not to be
- What a piece of work is a man
- I must be cruel to be kind
- There are more things in heaven and earth
- When shall we three meet again
- Screw your courage to the sticking place
- The crack of doom
- Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
- In my mind's eye
- O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
- One that loved not wisely but too well
- Pomp and circumstance
- The green-eyed monster
- Bated breath
- Brevity is the soul of wit
- For goodness' sake
- Parting is such sweet sorrow
- To sleep, perchance to dream
- Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
- What light through yonder window breaks?
- What's in a name? That which we call a rose
- Something wicked this way comes
- Foregone conclusion
- Full circle
- Good riddance
- Heart on my sleeve
- Hob nob
- In my heart of hearts
- Laid on with a trowel
- Neither rhyme nor reason
- One fell swoop
- What the dickens
- Short shrift
- The be-all and the end-all
- The milk of human kindness
- The primrose path
- Too much of a good thing
- We have seen better days
- Wild-goose chase
to the Wiz's show. Both my computers are
currently without sound. A young girl of about
20 sat down beside me at the next station.
She had her 20 digit card number memorized
and her fingers flew so fast on the keyboard
my jaw dripped. She proceeded to kill the thing,
typing so fast her fingers were a blur. She checked
her FB page, her email, then played a stupid
computer game for the 45min she had left on the
hour they give you. What an incredible waste
of time. She has the world at her fingertips,
literally, and she plays a nonsense game, her foot
going a mile a minute in bored agitation.
Quote: DJTeddyBearActually, you can get drivers that will make your keyboard act like it has a Dvorak layout, or other layout.
Then it's a simple matter of swapping the key-caps, except it's kinda hard to swap keycaps on a laptop....
Dvorak rocks. I switched my freshman year of college during a term when I knew I wouldn't have to do much typing.
I use Programmer Dvorak on all of my computers now. I don't physically swap the keycaps though, because it's not practical on some keyboards (notably laptops) and I touch-type so I rarely look at the keys anyway. It also serves as a hilarious security mechanism. If I leave my computer unlocked and someone wants to hijack it for a hilarious facebook post or something, they can't type :)
This reminds me of my students when I taught. When they went to computer class, they had less than five minutes before the teacher arrived and class started, but they could still access the computers. You never saw faster typing in your life. It was shocking. I think they played whole games of StarCraft in that five minutes.Quote: EvenBobI went to the library yesterday to listen
to the Wiz's show.
Quote: DJTeddyBearWhen I first arrived at high school in 1974, my best friend, who was one year ahead of me, dragged me into the math center and sat me down in front of a teletype terminal. It was attached to a computer in the next town, and had a variety of programs built in. It was clunky, and ran slowly. But it was intriguiging. It looked like this, except it had it's own stand.
He showed me the Star Trek program.
I was soon cutting some of my classes to play the Star Trek program, until I finally got bored with it and decided to see what other programs the system had.
Among other things, it had a series of programs designed to teach programming, in BASIC.
As a result, nearly everything I know about computers, has been self-taught. My current job title is "Computer System Specialist" for an electrical supply warehouse, managing a unix system.
That teletype was one of my earliest experiences with a keyboard. When I took the typing class later that year, I felt that I was faster on the teletype than on a typewriter. On the other hand, even today, I'm not a true touch typist. I tend to use only 6 fingers, but I'm fairly fast, and accurate.
It was the following year that I took the introduction to computers and BASIC programming courses. I, of course, already knew all that was being taught.
I did well in my other math classes, but I generally like math. Not that it's done any good. As can be seen in some threads, I sometimes totally screw up the formulas to figure out some of the questions presented, and at BlackJack, I sometimes freeze like a "deer in the headlights" while trying to evaluate my hand. ("Evaluate" means to add the value of several cards. Sigh.)
With the exception of the Science Fiction literature class, I hated, absolutely HATED, my English literature and grammar classes, and did poorly in them. On the other hand, I feel that today I have a fairly strong grasp of vocabulary, am a reasonably good speller and use good grammar. (On the other hand, I had to edit this post, because I originally stated I use good grammer.)
I did poorly in history, except for the one semester where the teacher announced on the first day that: 1) He does open-notes tests, and 2) everything on the test would have previously been on the blackboard. I guess I'm the only one that believed him or took good notes, because that was the only year I did well in history. On the other hand, it skewed my parent's belief about my history aptitude.
In Electricity shop, I managed to burn out part of my bench causing a gnarly cloud of smoke. The room had it's own breaker panel, and this event caused the breaker for my bench, as well as the main breaker for the room, to trip.
I did well in graphic arts (architecture). I think it has helped me in my sideline career doing design work and DeskTop Publishing on my Mac.
Bottom line, my most valuable high school moment was when my buddy showed me that terminal. But the most valuable subject? It would probably take a gun to my head to come up with an answer. My knee-jerk response would be the English classes, because, despite bad grades, it seems that I actually learned something in those classes.
Quote: buzzpaffHate to admit it but the only Shakespeare I can quote is " Et tu, Brute? "
2 year old reciting Shakespeare
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
He is distracted by his sister so he misses two lines.
Quote: buzzpaffHate to admit it but the only Shakespeare I can quote is " Et tu, Brute? "
I was having a conversation with a teacher friend of mine, and I mentioned how, for some reason, throughout my elementary and high school education, I was only exposed to one Shakespeare play, and that was Taming of the Shrew. This seems like a huge deal, since most high school kids are exposed to Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, MacBeth, and Midsummer Night's Dream. While I recognize the names of Shakespearean plays and various quotes from them, that is mainly due to having heard the quotes through popular media. Yes, most of my knowledge of Shakespearean plays comes directly from episodes of The Simpsons.
I still have no idea why none of these plays were ever studied during my education. I went to public schools, and not necessarily large ones. My high school class had ~500 students (although only ~400 graduated). Elementary School was done on military bases, while Middle School and High School were public schools. There's no seeming reason why I would never have had an English class that required us to read more Shakespearean plays than just Taming of the Shrew.
Quote: konceptumI was only exposed to one Shakespeare play
I really thought that Romeo and Juliet was standard in the curriculum for 9th grade. It has been turned into two of the most popular Shakespearean movies of all time, while the writing of the play was also the centerpiece of the movie Shakespeare in Love.
If someone said that they read only one play in school, I would always guess R&J.
The problem with all R&J movies is that the character of Mercutio gets short shrift, or is turned into a caricature
Quote: teddysI think the Histories are some of the better plays. Richard III is great, and the other Henrys are pretty good, too.
As movies the histories don't do as well in USA as in the UK. I have never seen the individual Henry VI plays done, there is always some sort of merger of all three plays. Henry IV and Henry V are done fairly often.
