credit, non-credit

 remember Wings. I rather liked it. It seems like maybe fifteen years ago we had sort of a golden age of sitcoms, generally on Thursday nights on NBC. Anymore most of them seem really stupid where the joke is that they insult each other.

Maybe some people think they are being nice by saying they art too busy, it’s not like a flat refusal, also people like to say they are busy, it makes them look important, like their time is more valuable than yours. I have this Champaign friend who now lives in St Louis where I used to visit him once or twice a year, and he always said he would come up to Chicago when he found the time, and for like ten years I would keep inviting him, but he never had the time. Finally I realized that if you say or think you want to do something but you haven’t done it for ten years, you really don’t want to do it.

I don’t know about that thing where they were trying to teach you statistics, but then they got computers so you never had to learn it. It reminds me of when I was subbing and the kids had calculators and some of them did all their computation, even things like two times three, on their calculators. It was like they didn’t have trust in themselves anymore. Maybe they thought two times three was six, but they weren’t sure until they pushed the buttons on the calculator. It’s like they didn’t have to know anything more about arithmetic, than what buttons to push. It just doesn’t seem right to me.

I favor the idea that the teacher is more of a servant than a boss. The teacher is nothing without students. it’s his job to find some way to impart the knowledge and to some extent, if the student doesn’t learn it is the teacher’s fault. But I am talking about teaching students who want to learn, as opposed to students who are required to learn whether they like it or not, or as I think of it non-credit vs credit.

I guess the difference is that the student in the former isn’t getting a grade, and the student in the latter is, and generally when a grade is given the focus is on getting the grade and whatever you learned in the course is just a means to get there. You don’t brag that you learned the difference between Plato and Aristotle, you brag that you got an A in Philosophy 101.

And in order to decide who gets what grade you have all that cumbersome testing, and all the time that takes, and those shitheads asking what will be on the test so that they can ignore stuff that isn’t, and then even the teacher emphasizes stuff that is easier to test on than stuff that isn’t.

You look at solar and wind and you say the sun and the wind are free, and oil is like an actual material thing that you have to pay for so it must be more expensive than solar and wind. But the thing is those windmills and solar panels are expensive things to build, and not all that efficient. I think it takes more money to produce them than it does for oil or coal, but I have no figures at my fingertips. And that hydrogen fuel cell, is as you say, just a way to transfer energy from one thing to another, it doesn’t produce any energy itself.

That ethanol was all the rage some years back, and you can bet agribusiness was lobbying for it to beat the band, but when they did all the figuring about how much oil was used to produce the corn, it took almost as much as they got out of the ethanol, and I don’t think it’s used anymore.