I started out with nothing and still have most of it left

^Quote from Seasick Steve, the famous hillbilly^

I just like that quote.

Recently I have been thinking immensely hard about things to blog about. To me, this blog has been an opportunity to take my mushy concepts and sloppily throw them against a metaphorical canvas see how it turns out. I think I've been stressing a bit too much about how it looks at the end of things, causing me to hold back in my posts. I've observed another thing (I observe everything in case you haven't noticed, haha that's like a pun, you observing my observation skills), and that is that I don't research or cite sources very often, which I initially saw as a negative, and something I should be doing. But then I thought, "Why the hell would I do that? This is the internet, I can publish any outlandish tale and someone, somewhere will believe me." I don't aim to create a revolution based on the notion that all Gummy Bears are actually tiny doses of demon that eventually turn us evil from the inside out and cause an all-out fission of all known things, I'm simply stating in a grandiose fashion, "I think what I think and I don't need someone's supporting evidence to think that". To confuse you further, I do have valid sources to draw from, I just don't cite them. I don't see the point of listing a bunch of things other people have said in their exact words, or even following closely to their words, because if all I say is someone else's words, then I'm not really saying anything at all am I?

I just finished watching some videos of pick-up artists in action, even them giving seminars for people to educate themselves of their methods. I know what you're thinking. You might be (and probably are) thinking that I'm a lonely, desperate person who has a severe lack of luck with the opposite sex; I've never had a relationship or have blown it when I had a chance. By power of suggestion you are most definitely thinking that and I'm now telling you that the hypothetical description of myself is false. Why not? Why not suggest an inaccurate conclusion and then deny any chance of it being true, which only further highlights the statement, "I was lying about lying and I actually have terrible luck with women, but I deny any notion of that even though I watched those videos and then told you why by describing someone to whom those videos would probably appeal the most, which was supposed to have the opposite effect but most people are able to read between the lines and see the truth!" I've already told you I watched those videos, for one reason or another, why not assume that I'm desperate and lonely? When you see a pregnant girl who's in high school do you automatically assume it was through fault of her own? Most people do, but the possibility is there for the thing God did to Mary, whatever the clinical term is, could've been rape, *!sensitive topic alert!* but statistics say it probably wasn't, so it's isn't unreasonable and even justifiable to think that she is someone of poorer socioeconomic status who got knocked up by her much older, dead-end-job-working alcoholic boyfriend. Now, through all of that did I confuse you, or did I confuse you? You haven't the slightest idea as to what I'm trying to say, you certainly don't know where we're going to end up, but I probably distracted you, if only for a moment, from those videos I started with.

In these videos, these pick-up artists, whether you like them or not, are really good teachers. If you subtract the material they're teaching and just evaluate how they're teaching the principle would hold true. I realize I do this a lot, and not suprisingly seeing as my experiences are limited due to my age, but these guys really reminded of my old German teacher. Like it was eerie how similar their techniques of presenting and discussing concepts were to my German teacher's. To completely remove any reservations you may have of these people as people based on what they're teaching, assume they teach a class for continuing education for working adults, say they teach Marketing. Apply the same methods and techniques they already use, and you have a wonderful marketing class. Mr. Ayers, if you do happen to read the blogs, which is improbable based on the sheer volume of posts there are to read, you use a lot of these same techniques as these guys. As from what I can tell Mr. Ayers, you are big into lectures, which is fabulous. Some teachers try to avoid lectures like the plague "because they're boring". No they aren't!!! You make something boring, something isn't just boring because that's the way it is!! My old science teacher (there's the previous teacher references again) delivered nearly 100% of his cirriculum via his own words, and you know what? He held the attention of the students! If he couldn't hold their attention, it wasn't a lack of ability or charisma on his part, it was the student's inability to focus and/or stay awake/hide their hangover/their addicition to texting/being uninterested deliberately etc. And if you're thinking, "some people don't learn well from listening to lectures," I have a huge balloon -popping-needle counter for that. Not only did he talk; he drew things on the board, and not just a general outline of things, he illustrated several pages worth of information with the space of a medium-sized whiteboard. Not only did he just talk and illustrate things, he brought in materials that related to what we were studying. For example, a very old camera to demonstrate certain properties of optics and how light behaved and what not. Boom. you have the three majors learning styles: lecturing and note-taking, visual, and tactile. In addition to all that, his goal was not to fill the student's head with a knowledge of test answers and one-liner definitions, his aim was to get the student to understand and at the very least have some idea how to apply this knowledge when necessary. He was a true believer in understanding concepts, the details of which are not nearly as important as understanding the idea. Who cares if you know the melting and freezing points of all the noble gases (which are extremely close and difficult to achieve)? Who cares if you can't rattle off all the possible formulas necessary when doing calculations with circuits? What's the point in memorizing something you will probably never use again except on a future test, also with the exception of it being used often in your chosen occupation/field of study? My math teacher was exactly the same way. He told us the first day that we would remember about 50% of the total material covered during the year, which was fine, because he didn't want us to memorize theorems or equations. He wanted us to think about math as a way of illustrating something as true or not true, he wanted us to view math as a way of representing the physical world as number, which is what mathematics are. Same as with my science teacher, he explained things with words, pictures, and physical demonstratoins that involved us. Why then, if people have figured out that teaching this way works, are there so many bad teachers? (Mr. Ayers I realize I have turned a paragraph that was originally intended to analyze and generally praise you on your teaching into a debate that has been a source of anxiety for me for a while now, and for that I do hope not to disappoint.) There are a lot of bad teachers! I'm sure everyone has had one which fits the description. Need I go into detail? Reread all the good things in the above paragraph and then imagine the opposite, with a much more limited delivery method. Add in unnecessary homework and textbook reading and you've got the poster child of bad teachers. Now, I don't mean to say that anyone who is new to teaching or is trying to iron out their hiccups in their approach is a bad teacher, because #1: they're new #2: they're adjusting, which is never easy when you have 100 students who expect a lesson every day. If a teacher doesn't adjust or the very least attempt to quite honestly they should fired on the spot. I've seen good teachers be fired on the basis that they have lesser seniority, have less students enrolled in their classes, or are too old and expensive. Rather, the school would like to hire less qualified people because they're cheaper, but they'd also like to keep those on who are incompetent but have worked there a long time, which also means they're expensive.....hmmmmmm. I know I've mentioned the film Waiting for Superman before. A behemoth problem with public education is tenure. As Geoffrey Canada put it, "If you are a teacher, and you manage to maintain breathing for two years, you have tenure." For those of you who don't know or are too lazy to search it, tenure is a contractual obligation for the education institutional that basically prohibits the firing of a teacher short of murder or sexual abuse of a student. Tenure was originally solely for college professors who conducted research, and was obtained over a course of something like 25 years. Tenure was intended to protect the professor's job from being terminated on the basis that their research was controversial or offensive to some. A modern example would be stem cell researh. If there's a professor conducting stem cell research at a college, it isn't in the power of the school to fire him for it. The government may take away his fetuses, but the school can't fire him because what he was doing was seen as unfit by a group of people. As times goes on, tenure is gradually introduced to the other levels of education (public schools). Now we have system that is legally bound to keep teachers on their payrole no matter how low their test scores, how late they are to class, the severeness of sexual abuse they inflicted on a student, or just how crappy of a person in general they are. That sounds so mean but I'm not taking it back. My fourth grade teacher was an old witch, and she just was not happy to be alive. Why would you let someone like that be a teacher of young children? Does it make sense to hire a serial killer as a nanny? I realize that's a gross overexaggeration but my point remains valid. People who aren't good at what they do are neither deserving of a position in that particular field nor taxpayer money to pay them and "rehabilitate" them for the things they've done wrong.

This post is 1841 words in length. (just in case you were wondering)

Boom. Roasted.