Year: 2002

Both of my parents are teachers. My brother has been a teaching assistant at university. Many of my friends, or their SOs, are teachers. Heck, at one point I wanted to be a teacher… until most of the teachers I knew, including my parents, told me not to. (And, for the record, they were all right–I would have been a lousy teacher!)

Being a teacher is a tough job because it’s one that matters.

Teacher: Year One is a record of Jeanne Thelwell’s experiences as a new teacher in the New York City public school system. I’d always had a certain impression of NYC schools, and her journal reinforces it, but I’ve come to realize that they’re not that much different from Ontario schools, particularly in the past few years. Budgets are slashed, programs are cut or redefined seemingly at random, and school boards and government agencies disclaim any and all responsibility when the inevitable results appear; teachers unions are run by some of the most argumentative, thin-skinned people it’s possible to find, and they’re constantly at odds with boards and government over the slightest issue; and it’s teachers who receive the blame and students who suffer.

I have no doubt that there are poor teachers out there, but I also don’t believe for a second that I was simply fortunate enough to have missed them all through elementary and secondary school. I believe my teachers were almost as influential in my life as my parents: I can credit many of them, going as far back as grade 4, with particular contributions to who I am today. To a person they inspired me, challenged me, opened my mind and shaped the way I think. In short, they taught me.

I can’t think of a better gift. Thank you to all of them.

More on l33t, usage and grammar:

• To their dismay, teachers say that papers are being written with shortened words, improper capitalization and punctuation, and characters like &, $ and @. (Jennifer 8. [sic] Lee in the New York Times, via Slashdot)
• Obviously, grammatical expertise wastes time and money. (99% of Proper Grammar is Obsolete, via Dive Into Mark)
• Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld. (M. J. Shields in The Economist, via Google)

It’s funny how many posts (on Slashdot, Usenet newsgroups, etc.) that criticize English usage in other messages consistently misspell and misuse the word grammar. Grammer is the surname of the actor who plays Frasier Crane on television; grammar is a set of rules that reflect how a language is actually used (Richard Lederer, Conan the Grammarian).

If citing Lederer doesn’t satisfy, the OED is a more well-recognized authoritative source:

…many questions of correctness in language were recognized as outside the province of grammar: e.g. the use of a word in a wrong sense, or a bad pronunciation or spelling, would not have been called a grammatical mistake. At the same time, it was and is customary, on grounds of convenience, for books professedly treating of grammar to include more or less information on points not strictly belonging to the subject.

The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition

Grammar/grammer goes in my list of language peeves, right after slash/backslash (hint: slash is used in fractions and URLs, and backslash is near backspace on most QWERTY keyboards).

I’ve been a science fiction and fantasy fan for a long time. (This is notable mainly because I hated the first SF&F I can remember seeing, the Tom Baker-era Dr. Who. I’m better now, thanks.) Although I’ve been more of a fantasy reader, I started reading Alfred Bester a few years ago, prompted by references from J. Michael Straczynski and Harlan Ellison.

The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination had just been reprinted, and I ate them up. The former, which Bester wrote twenty years before I was born (and which won him the very first Hugo Award), is sort of a funhouse mirror image of Philip K. Dick’s The Minority Report (which was written five years later). Bester’s representations of the telepathic conversations of espers are wild, and his psi-blocking song (Tenser, said the Tensor) is as persistent in real life as in the book. It’s also interesting how psi slang (e.g. @kins for Atkins, Wyg& for Wygand) is mirrored in the so-called l33t speak that pervades the web.

As other volumes were reprinted, I grabbed them all; I’ve currently got Virtual Unrealities, The Deceivers, The Computer Connection, Redemolished, and Psychoshop in my reading stack. Unfortunately, that’s where they’ve stayed since I bought them. The only one that I’ve made a stab at is Redemolished, and it’s taken me a good month to make it through Hell is Forever. I can’t seem to make enough time to get to these books, or any of the others in the growing stack. I don’t think I’m succumbing to a shorter attention span–if anything, I’m more focused than I’ve been in some time–and I don’t enjoy the books any less when I do get to them, and I’ve had more free time recently than ever, so I’m at a loss to explain it. I’m starting to identify with HAL:

Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it. I can feel it. My mind is going. There is no question about it. I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it.

Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey

Continuing yesterday’s rant on television trivia games. Today will be short, as I’ve lost my train of thought somewhat; rest assured that I am going somewhere with this.

The Regis-less Who Wants to be a Millionaire? started tonight. I’m glad to see they’ve sped it up, although I’m still not much interested in the game itself. (And it is just me, or does Meredith Vieira push the real answer?)

I’m going to reveal myself: I’m a trivia snob. I see multiple-choice games like Millionaire as brain candy, but not much more. At the moment, Jeopardy! (the regular series, not the back-to-school, teen or college tournaments) is the closest thing to my ideal trivia game show on television, closely followed by (the recently-cancelled) Win Ben Stein’s Money.

What makes the ideal trivia-based program? There are a number of elements.