Printable View
I thought the SCHOOLING part of School was a waste of time, but I went anyways to hang out with friends and improve my social understanding of the way the Female brain works.
It is a complex piece of hardware that has no permanent cheat codes apparently.
Very much so, but your wrong, you can memory hack it with gifts and attention.
Or so I've heard, the only one to actually try it was rec0, and look what happened to him.... *poof*
Like I said, learning the same shit I learned in high school all over again. >:UQuote:
Originally Posted by Kalub™
School in general? Well, the system definitely needs to be reworked. Here is a very interesting read about mathematics specifically, although you can branch that out and say that about pretty much any subject taught in school.
My particular school is great. My only complaint is that the staff are a bit overprotective of the students. For a charter school named "High Tech LA" that claims "Community Ethics" as one of it's strongest points, it seems a bit childish to force WebNonSense down our throats.
One incident in particular really pissed me off, but it's not worth dealing with it in my senior year. I just want to get out and go to college. Anyway...
Last year computer access was taken away after a large number of students were caught using proxies to get around the LAUSD (school district block at the server level) and WebNonSense block. I personally never used that app myself but the entire student body was still punished. Funny, the IT guy always claimed that he had "records" that he could check. Interesting how he couldn't check them when the time came around that they were needed.
We also had a relatively lax "business casual" dress code. The seniors last year were notorious for breaking even that and while there was a "3 Strikes" rule in place, it was never actually followed by the staff. Instead they would send students to the office and bitch to us about it. Their method of fixing this? Around the time computer access was blocked they came up with a brilliant solution. They would punish the underclassmen by tightening up the dress code. Ummm....the seniors were going to be gone in a few months....they really don't fucking care anyway....why are you punishing our class for their disrespect?
Computer access was given back a few weeks later (after numerous classes were hopelessly behind - the photography class was reduced to cutting pictures out of magazines and the programming class had to use TiBasic on TI-89's....lol). I honestly couldn't give 2/3rds of a fuck about computers being taken away. The thing that bothered me was the fact that everyone was blindly being punished for the mistakes of a few fuckups. Although the fact that they took computers away around the time that summer program stuff was coming in was stupid; I found out that I wasn't accepted into COSMOS a week late because I made the mistake of using the school email for it (which they kindly disabled while the computer priveledges were gone).
What upset me even more was that one staff member made a holocaust reference about it, saying that "none of the lower level Germans told anyone about what was going on during the holocaust and said no" and that we were just like that because no one snitched on the people using the proxy. I'm not Jewish and I'm not much of a religious person in general, but to say something of that magnitude about a group of students is a bit too much for my tastes.
Oh, and don't even try to use the iMacs at my school. They are the old "Pod" style ones (with the LCD screen on the "neck" thing) with 256 megs of ram running OS 10.4. The OS is horrifically broken on most of them and things like Word won't open. Hell, on most of the computers word documents will silently dissapear while they are being used/written. These are the only computers we can really use outside of class and it's a shame that they aren't properly maintained. With about an hour of work on each they would be screaming fast, but the IT guy doesn't seem to give much of a shit.
That is a mixed blessing though, considering the fact that full Terminal access is granted to our accounts. :downs:.
Some of the old Dells are in shambles as well, but that is to be expected. They are close to 5-6 years old and should have been replaced long ago. Our IBM's have held up like tanks, although the batteries are finally failing on some of them so that there is less then an hour of battery life. The newer dells are nice - they have Core 2 Duos in them but they have Shitegrated graphics. This year we got a cart of HP MiniNotes - those things are awesome. Netbooks ftw. Normally I'm happy about even having computers at all but the netbooks are really something else. <3.
Would I say that the past four years of hell at HTLA were worth it? Of course. While the staff can be tempermental and unprofessional, the education you get there is top notch. The teachers know what they are talking about and actually enjoy their jobs. I've always been the type that learns better by doing homework then by studying and the staff realize that people have different learning styles. My history, calc and physics teachers are awesome people and are great at what they do. There is a lot of work but it isn't particularly hard. I'm taking AP Calc and AP Physics right now and I'm getting all the stuff that we go over. Our History teacher is actually talking about relevant things (the economy in particular, economics is his favorite topic and he does an excellent job of integrating that into his history class) and he has a very relaxed grading policy.
The best thing about my school is that the teachers are actively trying to get us ready and into college. All of our coursework is pretty much at college level, if not above it. We have a dedicated college counselor who actually gives a damn and who helps us with the applications and stuff. A+ to the school for that.
Oh, and I have friends, lol. And they actually understand me when I babble on about how my C++ Compiler broke itself. Hell, sometimes they even fix the problem. xD.
I still built most of the custom computers for people at my school. Lol.
Lanparties are pretty win as well. They generally are small and not many people play CS 1.6 or CS:S. Lots of Halo and COD fans though.
Lol, I spent an hour writing that.
If I said I envied you, would it matter? I wish my school was like that, sad thing is I know more about what they teach then they do, and it took them 20 years of school to make it to where I was in 10th Grade.
:(
School here is awesome. The grading system is a bit iffy (There's only four different marks you can get, Not Achieved through Excellence), but other than that and one teacher who is obsessed with war and bullshit, and thinks that giving you a book is teaching you, everything is awesome. My classes are relatively small in the last year, the biggest being Calculus with 11 people, and Physics with 3. Social side is great, lots of mates with a common room for us to hang out at lunch. All of the 'cool doods' decided not to stay for the final year, which means they're not distracting the teachers all the time.
The only mandatory subject for your first 3 years (out of 5) of high school here is English and Maths, which is fair enough. From there you can take whatever is available, provided you meet the prerequisites, although if you're good enough the teachers are sweet about you taking classes you didn't take the previous year (eg taking 7th form Chemistry without doing 6th). Social Studies involves world studies, not New Zealand's history which is good because nothing interesting ever happened.
Also, reading over some posts, is it mandatory that you guys do a minimum amount of community service and PE each week? That's retarded. Community Service here is reserved for people who can't pay their fines, or are in trouble with the police.
My school has something called "X-Block" for PE. Every quarter they get everybody in a room and randomly select names. When you are selected you can then pick your X-Block. DDR is usually the first to go for obvious reasons.
We don't have any minimum Public Service hours to do, but we do have to take at least one semester of Internship. We didn't get to pick our internship. While I'm happy with my choice I would have liked to have gotten a place where I do more programming type stuff, even if it is just web programming.
I have a friend who has completed all of the highest level Math, Science and Elective courses (2 choices) and so he gets to choose 4 college classes. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he doesn't need to come in. Lol.
Next year I'm probably going to take a full on C++ course (more to strengthen my current knowledge then to actually learn it - I have a pretty good idea of the basics) or my school's web design class (Javascript and PHP IIRC, I already skimmed through some guides and get the general gist of it). Funny how all these things are C based :p.
I dunno why you guys are bitching about PE. Get out and exercise much?
4 years of water polo, 4 years of swim team. 3 years on Varsity for both. I also started the first surf team before I left. Sports and other social shit were the only way I got through that bullshit.
10 years of soccer, football every recess lunch and after school, massively active in PE, surfing every weekened, and i made an entire camp consisting of felled trees that we cut down with a tomohawk to construck, jetties for our water shit such as canoes, a shack to store our barbie equipment and 2 bridges spanning along a gully as well as other stuff used to construct and improove 2 swings and jumps we had into the river, couple that with 2-3 hours of swimming a day as well as 8-14 on the weekened when available.
back in my hay day i was a fit whipper snapper lol.
i went down to the river the other day to check out what was still there, but sdaly most of it got washed away in the flood, and the simple swim accross the river that i used to do about 8 times daily had me fucking Rooted rofl.
Meh, we don't get a PE class in the IB...not that it really matters to me, since I do some other stuff outside of school, such as skiing, TaeKwonDo, biking, etc...
And about the teachers, ours are great, and are very flexible when they we we have too much work on our hands. They actually try to make our life easier, not harder.