We all have a right to an education. In this country, that's expressed through government funded (which means taxed) public education.
I attended private school for my elementary years. I fell out of touch with a lot of the friends I made there, but through the wonders of modern technology ('the internet is really, really great...'), I recently reconnected to a friend from my early life.
This evening, we had a bit of a conversation about education. After complaining mutually about the terror that is senior year, we compared schools. She had stuck with the private school system, transferring to another private secondary school, while I had moved to public school in the fifth grade.
She mentioned an economics paper (and this is approaching where I intend to go with this post) in which she had to write about the fact that everyone has to pay for public school, presumably from the angle of the fact that it's 'not fair', especially to private school attendees.
I disagree heartily.
Public school is a right and a privilege that we enjoy in this country. The reason the system was created was to benefit those who could not afford if for themselves. The operation of the system, though no where near perfect, at least begins to allow for an equal access to equal schools, regardless of family income, because what everyone pays allows everyone to attend.
By opting to attend, and subsequently pay for, private school, you opt to default the right that you've been given to government funded schooling.
People choose private tutalege for any number of reasons, ranging from religious or personal beliefs, or a desire for a particular emphasis in educations. The ones who are really attempting to cheat the system, I think, are the ones who select a private school because they want a better education than the one offered in their public school district. By paying the extra to send a child to a private school that only the wealthier can afford, the family is cheating the less monetarily enabled families of the district out of a good education, in the long run, because families that send their children to private school typically vote to lower public school budgets, because it does not affect them directly. This lowers the quality of the schools, making more families send their children to private school, and perpetuating the cycle.
This cycle cheats some people of their rights: their rights to a full and equal education, regardless of race, gender, religion, nationality or national origin, ethnic background, or socioeconomic class.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Guitar
My little brother's learning to play, and he's getting good, if I do say so myself. He just got an electric for his birthday. He's practicing right now. I'd post a picture but I'm too lazy to scout out my camera.
'Carry On Wayward Son' is vaguely recognizable, albeit a little slow, and he's sort of singing softly in the background. He's no great shakes at singing, but he can carry a tune. I can't wait for him to be a big person, and yet he's adorable and huggable and nice just as he is. I'm afraid of the intermediate years, when he won't be nice to me anymore, like my other brother. But I'll be in college by then, so he'll only see me sometimes.
Of all the people in my house, I think he's one of the best. He's just a genuinely good, insightful person, despite the fact that he's only eleven.
And he's a good musician to boot.
'Carry On Wayward Son' is vaguely recognizable, albeit a little slow, and he's sort of singing softly in the background. He's no great shakes at singing, but he can carry a tune. I can't wait for him to be a big person, and yet he's adorable and huggable and nice just as he is. I'm afraid of the intermediate years, when he won't be nice to me anymore, like my other brother. But I'll be in college by then, so he'll only see me sometimes.
Of all the people in my house, I think he's one of the best. He's just a genuinely good, insightful person, despite the fact that he's only eleven.
And he's a good musician to boot.
Words
Language fascinates me.
Have you ever stopped to think about the fact that we're able to communicate?
I mean, clearly, most of what we do has language as a vital part. All of this -- the internet, blogging, computers -- requires language. We need to communicate with one another. We need to communicate with machines. We need to communicate with our selves. How could anything have developed at all without communication?
I stare at all of the books lining my shelves, and I'm astounded. I can't imagine life without them. All of these languages, too; I have books in three or four languages on my shelves. The Tower of Babel was always one of the most intriguing stories to me. Can you imagine being able to communicate fully and universally? I certainly can't. I can't even fully communicate with many people who ostensibly speak English -- many of my peers don't even know what 'ostensibly' means.
Shades of meaning are what really define communication for me, though. Connotation is the best part of writing. In my search for a title to one of my posts from yesterday, I translated the word 'time' to Latin on an online translation service. It gave me a number of results (vicis, tempus temporis, tractus, hora, aetas), so I decided to translate them back to English to figure out exactly what they meant. They all were yielded to me in a search for 'time', but they all had very different meanings. 'Tractus', the word I decided on, means 'a dragging, drawing, pulling, territory, tract, space, time, lapse, extension, length, course, progress, movement'. If you read the other post, that's absolutely perfect. Exactly what I meant by 'time'. However, one of the other words I translated, also technically meaning time, was 'aetas'. Aetas means 'an age, stage, period of life, time, era'. Each of these might mean time, but they're so, so different. Precision of language, to me, is the most important part of communicating.
Hebrew has these phrases that are just so perfect for some things. It's a language well entrenched in religion, of course, so it has sayings from that. There's a proverb that goes something like this: "Everyone should keep two pieces of paper on them, one in each pocket. As things happen, one should pull out one or the other. One should say 'Anochi afar va'efer' and the other should say 'Bash'vili nevareh ha'olam'; 'I am but dust and ashes' and 'For my sake the whole world was created'." 'Dust' and 'ashes' are the same word, letter by letter, in Hebrew. And our language is filled with words like that, and phrases that do not bare with literal translation to any other language.
I once heard that the Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. I've since heard that it's fewer than that, but still much more than the one we have. Because their culture requires them to have all of the words, for the sake of precision of language and good communication, they have them. The same is true of artists. In English, there are hundreds of different words for colors, but most people only know a few of the more basic ones. An artist would be able to identify, and subsequently remember, different colors because of the different names that a slightly different color can have.
And don't even get me started on tone.
Have you ever stopped to think about the fact that we're able to communicate?
I mean, clearly, most of what we do has language as a vital part. All of this -- the internet, blogging, computers -- requires language. We need to communicate with one another. We need to communicate with machines. We need to communicate with our selves. How could anything have developed at all without communication?
I stare at all of the books lining my shelves, and I'm astounded. I can't imagine life without them. All of these languages, too; I have books in three or four languages on my shelves. The Tower of Babel was always one of the most intriguing stories to me. Can you imagine being able to communicate fully and universally? I certainly can't. I can't even fully communicate with many people who ostensibly speak English -- many of my peers don't even know what 'ostensibly' means.
Shades of meaning are what really define communication for me, though. Connotation is the best part of writing. In my search for a title to one of my posts from yesterday, I translated the word 'time' to Latin on an online translation service. It gave me a number of results (vicis, tempus temporis, tractus, hora, aetas), so I decided to translate them back to English to figure out exactly what they meant. They all were yielded to me in a search for 'time', but they all had very different meanings. 'Tractus', the word I decided on, means 'a dragging, drawing, pulling, territory, tract, space, time, lapse, extension, length, course, progress, movement'. If you read the other post, that's absolutely perfect. Exactly what I meant by 'time'. However, one of the other words I translated, also technically meaning time, was 'aetas'. Aetas means 'an age, stage, period of life, time, era'. Each of these might mean time, but they're so, so different. Precision of language, to me, is the most important part of communicating.
Hebrew has these phrases that are just so perfect for some things. It's a language well entrenched in religion, of course, so it has sayings from that. There's a proverb that goes something like this: "Everyone should keep two pieces of paper on them, one in each pocket. As things happen, one should pull out one or the other. One should say 'Anochi afar va'efer' and the other should say 'Bash'vili nevareh ha'olam'; 'I am but dust and ashes' and 'For my sake the whole world was created'." 'Dust' and 'ashes' are the same word, letter by letter, in Hebrew. And our language is filled with words like that, and phrases that do not bare with literal translation to any other language.
I once heard that the Eskimos have hundreds of words for snow. I've since heard that it's fewer than that, but still much more than the one we have. Because their culture requires them to have all of the words, for the sake of precision of language and good communication, they have them. The same is true of artists. In English, there are hundreds of different words for colors, but most people only know a few of the more basic ones. An artist would be able to identify, and subsequently remember, different colors because of the different names that a slightly different color can have.
And don't even get me started on tone.
Friday, November 9, 2007
Tractus
I love astronomy.
It's just so amazing, looking at the stars and realizing that they're not just friendly little points of light that seem to be just out of reach. They're really countless lightyears away. Most of them burn brighter, bigger, and hotter than our own sun, which seems so powerful and huge.
Most people don't really realize that light has to travel to get from place to place, same as the rest of us. Of course, the reason why we don't think about it is because light that we produce or see on our planet has to travel so little that it seems instantaneous to us. The sun rises eight minutes before we see it. That, though, is not a particularly long amount of time, considering how fast light travels (299,792,458 meters per second, in case you were wondering). What's really fascinating is that because some galaxies are so far away from our own, we're actually seeing into the past.
Woah. Hold on. What? Let me repeat this for emphasis, because it's really too cool to say just once.
We're seeing into the past.
Some galaxies are so far away that it takes light billions of years to travel to our corneas. We can see almost to when we think the formation of the universe happened.
Makes you question how hard-and-fast all those science 'laws' you were taught are, huh?
It's just so amazing, looking at the stars and realizing that they're not just friendly little points of light that seem to be just out of reach. They're really countless lightyears away. Most of them burn brighter, bigger, and hotter than our own sun, which seems so powerful and huge.
Most people don't really realize that light has to travel to get from place to place, same as the rest of us. Of course, the reason why we don't think about it is because light that we produce or see on our planet has to travel so little that it seems instantaneous to us. The sun rises eight minutes before we see it. That, though, is not a particularly long amount of time, considering how fast light travels (299,792,458 meters per second, in case you were wondering). What's really fascinating is that because some galaxies are so far away from our own, we're actually seeing into the past.
Woah. Hold on. What? Let me repeat this for emphasis, because it's really too cool to say just once.
We're seeing into the past.
Some galaxies are so far away that it takes light billions of years to travel to our corneas. We can see almost to when we think the formation of the universe happened.
Makes you question how hard-and-fast all those science 'laws' you were taught are, huh?
The downside to the whoosh
I spent this afternoon with both my father and my mother, in the same room. They, jointly, told me that I need to shape up. They're going to treat me punatively, for the first time in a while.
Oh, backtrack: my economics teacher called home on Monday. I had a 35. That was, as you might expect, a bit of an issue. I dodged the bullet of super late papers and got the stuff in, and now that I'm out of the fire, they talked to me about it.
Long and short of it: they're going to be checking my homework every now and then. And, (and this is the worst of it,) they're not letting me do stagecrew for this coming quarter. I hope the company will let me help out on the nights of, and that they'll let me go to the cast parties.
Oh, backtrack: my economics teacher called home on Monday. I had a 35. That was, as you might expect, a bit of an issue. I dodged the bullet of super late papers and got the stuff in, and now that I'm out of the fire, they talked to me about it.
Long and short of it: they're going to be checking my homework every now and then. And, (and this is the worst of it,) they're not letting me do stagecrew for this coming quarter. I hope the company will let me help out on the nights of, and that they'll let me go to the cast parties.
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