Riddle Me This Class

Well, guess who's back? Yes, it's me, your favorite genius, and I finally have time to sit down and do this again. So what's new? I passed my oral exam, it was brutal to say the least, basically the longest hour and a half of my life, but now it's over and I wont ever have to take another test for as long as I live; and that, gentle reader, is the best feeling in the world. After the oral I basically had the weekend and I was off to TN for thanksgiving with the family, which was oh so wonderful as usual. Then it was back to the grindstone on Monday, so yeah I've been busy. But I'm back, and I have some fun problems and rants stewing in the ole brain box to share with you, though they'll have to wait for another time. I'm basically just here to let you know I'm not dead, or crushed under the stress of grad school, or any other scenario you might have been concerned about. I'm alive and well and will soon be back with a vengeance.

What I will do though is have myself a mini little rant. Want some evidence as to why the education major is a complete waste of ... well everything? My wonderful, beautiful, suave super spy of a girlfriend recently switched into education (much to my silent chagrin, but looks like it wont be a long diversion) and one of her assignments was to watch a bunch of pointless videos and make comments on them. Ok, so tedious and pointless, but one can see why teachers might want to assign such a thing, but one might also expect it to be as easy as turning in the comments right? Wrong, actually, you had to submit them online (another bullshit hype-o-rama schools are all wet for that I hate) but that's not all. No, they wanted you to download the videos, then upload them back onto their servers with the comments. I know, what the hell? Why do they want their videos back? Oh well, it might be dumb, but whatever, it just makes the process more tedious. EXCEPT, when trying to upload the videos, the education department's servers wont accept the file extensions these videos are in. So class, here's your assignment: download these videos and give them back to us with your comments, except you can't do that because our online machine wont accept them. If you can attempt this without losing your sanity, then congratulations you're a perfect candidate to teach America's future generations.

And no I'm not making this up, I'm as serious as a heart attack. So, to say the least, it's been a stressful day/week, but it's all fixed now (hopefully, this has supposedly been finished a few times already). But I do have a message for education departments, and pretty much any department educating students: Your Bullshit Technology Doesn't Help You In The Classroom! Period, technology wont make up for shit teaching, and all it does is provide a crutch for you. I haven't talked to a single [good] student who likes online components. This is mainly because they're rife with bullshit like this, and it always ends up being more of a headache for the students and the teachers. Seriously, let's just drop it, there hasn't been a technological advance that has really progressed the art of teaching since blackboards and chalk. Call me a luddite if you must, but this obsession with technology has caused us to take our eyes off the goal, and this is just a small bit of proof. You know I'm right.