The education system needs to be redone.

I posted this on YouTube just now for the “Ask President Obama” thing they have going over the next few days. FOUR DAYS LEFT!

When I started middle school, I had failed classes because the classwork became way too boring, so I was put in a remedial math class. The other students in that class, why were they even let in to middle school? Why was I if I was considered among them who did not know how to add? Worse, I wasn’t allowed to just take a test and get out of the remedial class, I had to wait.

I almost never did well in school because half of it (probably more) was going back over things we’d already covered that I’d gotten the first time. The system pushes through students that aren’t ready to go on to the next level, and those who score highly on tests aren’t allowed to move on quicker, instead we are shoved in the same classes. I failed because it was boring, not because I didn’t know what I was doing, meanwhile the person sitting next to me could barely multiply and divide, but he passed Algebra with a B.

I don’t know how it is in other states, but the California High School Exit Exam looked like an entrance exam to me, the entrance exam looked like a middle school entrance exam, the SAT looked like what a test that should’ve been for my sophomore year. And why can’t I take my SAT scores and go “Look, I know what I’m doing, let me pass and go on to college.”

Why is it that if I get a D (A FAILING GRADE) that I cannot RETAKE it? If I get an F, I can retake it, it’s all good, but if I barely miss the mark, the system goes, oh you’re fine we don’t care anymore and it’s left up to me to take extra steps and pay extra money to go to a Community College to retake classes I don’t even need.

Also, I was told I could retake those classes I got a D in if I got a high enough score on the SAT, I got a 1670. They told me this was plenty enough, but because I wasn’t going straight to a four-year university that I couldn’t retake the classes. I can’t be accepted to a university if I don’t have all my classes, but I can’t retake the ones I need without being accepted.

And what about this idea? Let us take tests (even if they are long with a time limit) to prove we know a subject area and then let us move on. I can honestly say I have learned very little in high school, Algebra II was a repetition of Algebra I (which I’d taken in middle school), Geometry was a repetition of basic math.

While we’re on that subject, how does the education system select teachers? My Geometry teacher was the most ignorant one in the classroom, he confused the students constantly by making mistakes and then having to go fix them. Several times, he made a mistake and never noticed, I had to raise my hand and point out the errors to him. Teachers who can’t teach aren’t teachers. I had another teacher who instead of teaching, played movies all the time for so-called “classwork.” It took the school the whole year to remove him. Why is this allowed to continue?

Thank you for listening to this little rant.

Protesting SOPA, It’s Not Over Yet

You know how my site was replaced by a full page ad against SOPA/PIPA a few days ago? Well a lot of people think the fight is over and won after that day of protest, but no, Congress postponed voting on the issue, they did not vote and get rid of it. The fight is not over, whether or not you have protested to this yet, please do so.

Protest site thing on Google. Or of course, there’s always that little ribbon thing on the top right corner of my page here…

Writing Will be Dead in 100 Years?

I was watching Doctor Who a few days ago, and there was a scene set a few years in the future where a father was teaching his son to read, and at the end of this lesson, the son said something along the lines of, “But dad, I can just get it on audiobook.”

This got me thinking about the future, children of today already don’t want to learn to read most of the time. When I thought of the possibility of writing and reading dead in the future, my first thought was of disbelief, this could not happen.

However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it is quite possible that the written word could die in the future, or at least be dramatically different. Already, we can get computers to read for us, or write things down for us, this could grow to be the predominant method of taking notes or “reading” and eventually as far as making reading and writing unneeded.

Then I thought about how quickly this could be possible, compared to how fast books have gone from being in bookstores to being ebooks online, even going this exaggeratedly far could happen in as little as 100 years. Although, I’d like to hope it takes much longer for reading and writing to go away, and I hope it is never a lost art, always kept alive at least somewhere.

I think language will always be around (at least for the foreseeable future), but how that language is written down may changed to entirely being stored within computers, read aloud to humans instead of being displayed as text on a screen.

But then there’s the possibility that only physical writing will be dead (which still saddens me a little, it’s easier to write on paper thoughts randomly circling each other in a stream of consciousness than on a computer screen). Maybe things will move to a more visual medium on computers but keep the written word, but still, just on the computer, maybe only reading will be taught, not writing.

What do you think? The whole purpose of a blog is to write about something and engage a community into discussion, I’d like to do that. Want to hear from you I do.

Livestreaming Trying to DJ

This post is about the launch of GuardTV (kinda) on Livestream.

My friend Allan and I just got together today after school. We are both aspiring DJs/music producers. A spontanious little bit of fun, we got on Livestream, I made myself an account (guess what the name is) and started recording. It actually has been going quite well.

So anyhow, this is a quick spam to tell you to check us out doing stuff on Livestream. So far it has just been us playing around with VirtualDJ and making some epic mixes and epic fails, but I hope to improve as we go, and go do other stuff too. It’s called GuardTV, we might have epic random shit.

Anyhow, enjoy, go check it out, right now we are live, but you can also look at previous videos, such as the first hour of footage (of me, before we switched to Allan’s computer with it showing him like it is right now).

An Edit & a Remix! I Feel Like a DJ

So in the past several hours of this most beautiful night, I have been organizing my collection of music so that I may better be able to practice my mixing skills and talking with my friend Allan on Skype (while he was messing with a synthesizer and saving presets to use in awesome music-stuffs later), but the most interesting thing I have done tonight would be the remix.

Basically, two days ago, I heard this amazing track by Carbon Based Lifeforms called Photosynthesis. When I played it on YouTube, I found two different versions as the top two results. The first was a live performance at Aurora Festival in 2009, the second was the original track. I loved them both equally, except the audio recording from the live mix went a bit shit at the end of the video.

(Edit: And I just noticed how much I ramble about this, so if you just wanna have a listen, there is the link to click and stuff. Please! Leave a comment on the track or here and let me know what you think of it. Tell me how I can improve, tell me where to buy good hardware and software for mixing.)

So today (er, tonight), I decided after playing segments of both tracks several times to mix the beginning half of the live mix into the beginning half of the original track, then cut it out just before it got to the shitty recording bits and kept it all nice and smooth, with a little side-bonus of keeping the lead synth in there (it was taken out of the live mix).

In the end, I accidentally then used the first clip a second and third time towards the end of the track to sample the best part of the live mix and improve the atmosphere. Or at least that is how it felt to me. For a minute there I thought I had ruined it at the end, but it ended up great, except for the fact that the audio track I was using was chopped at the end, and I couldn’t fade it out fast enough to hide the chop, so that’s a little buggered too…

Oh yeah, that other bit? That was a simple edit using some filters on a creative commons track to remove these high-pitched squeals and crap that were really annoying and painful to my ears. You can see that here.