Thoughts and Experiments

I wrote my thought experiment, and I felt that it was extremely beneficial to me as a writer. In my opinion it is a much more efficient way to come up with ideas and hash them out in my opinion. It is also much more enjoyable. It feels like it gives the me more freedom as a writer to do what I want to do, not try and figure out what the professor wants. I feel like that is how most classes are and that isn't an efficient way to learn in my opinion. Yes it teaches the conventional style of writing, but it helps very little for actual thought formation and the ability to think things through. All I feel like most English teachers are looking for is that you "understood the material" which can be total BS because for a lot of these classes I could have just gone to lecture and we would have talked about what the material meant and I wouldn't have had to read a word. I could have just typed what I thought the teacher wanted, scrounged around in the book for some quotes that were talked about in class, and moved on with at least a decent grade. The most difficult thing about doing that would be to write in a style that your teacher wants you to. And to have proper grammar. And spelling. I believe these are all the same level of difficulty once you have been in a class for a few weeks. For the last two you have a function in Microsoft Word that will check your grammar and spelling for you. This makes spelling and grammar incredibly easy, which doesn't say much about the difficulty of writing to the professor. We all have done it, whether we want to admit it or not. We like to think that a lot of our really good grades are because we have proved to the teacher that we understand the material extremely well. This is true to a degree, but we all still (I know I do anyways) tend to write to the professor in the tone that we believe they want. This is how I typically write my papers because that is how convention does it. But in this case I feel like I was writing more how I wanted to. this was good and bad. It is good that I had an extremely good time developing my ideas how I wanted to and in the order I wanted to. The bad is that I have never done that before and so I'm not sure what kind of a grade it will get or if I missed the point of the assignment entirely. But then again all of this could be me reliving all of my old ideas for how to write by "writing for the teacher" and not for the assignment.

I guess this blog has turned into a rant about my faults with the education system, and I'm not exactly sure how, but let's keep this train going! Alright, my biggest complaint about education has to be the lack of the teaching of logic in school before college. Schools teach how to copy ideas, but they don't teach how to come up with your own or how to think effectively, just how to imitate it. I feel like one of the most important things a person can learn is how to think effectively, which is why I love that we have logic classes here. They are exactly what I've been craving from school and more or less what I feel school should be like. It's kind of like the saying "Give a man a fish and feed him for a day, teach him how to fish and feed him for a lifetime" idea. What is the point of being given all of these ideas from the greatest minds, but not giving the students the tools to take them to the next level? I feel like if we as students we were given the option of logic classes before college, a lot more students would make it to college in the first place. Because it seems like a large portion of our population doesn't have a very developed ability to use logic because it doesn't seem to be one of our priorities. I feel like this is a major loss and something that we need to focus on if we are to continue to survive as a species.

I believe I am done ranting about my problems with education in America because I am say what I want but the major other problem I have with schools, their lack of interest in the students' needs, kind of gets in the way. It is true that Western does a lot to help and seems to care about their students more than most other schools. But if you go to UW, you are treated like a number. And here I go ranting again. So it is about time I end this blog.