Blitzney the Roaming Gnome's blog

As I begin the tedious, draining process of applying to college, I have to wonder about the direction of college admissions in this country. Everything has become so charged with competition and anxiety that the whole process is miserable. There are probably students trying to stab other students in the back so that they can just get ahead in this infernal race. I want to go to school with people I will enjoy being around, not people who believe academic excellence can only come at the expense of someone else. To all parents: please try to keep this process in perspective and help your teens relax as much as they can. To my peers: remember, education is often outside a classroom.

When I was in eighth grade, a boy in one of my classes started sexually harassing me. It was incredibly uncomfortable, and I set up a time to speak to my teacher alone. I told him about the situation and asked him to talk to the boy. He said he would. Two days later, I asked him if he had done anything (because the boy was still harassing me) and he said that he hadn’t and that I wasn’t really being harassed – it was all in my head. I was absolutely infuriated and went to the vice-principal who then talked to the boy. However, the horrid situation was not over. The boy came up to me in and we got into a heated exchange when he accused me of getting him into ‘a bunch of trouble’. One of my teachers (two taught the class) came over and told me to “stop being part of the problem and start being part of the solution”. The boy was not reprimanded. Eventually, I managed to get the harassment to stop, despite the two teacher’s good-‘ol-boy attitude. The reason I’m writing this is because I didn’t really know my rights and it took this incident to do some research. I don’t want anyone to feel helpless like I did. There are many great sites on the internet that can educate you about this topic. A place to start would be:  http://www.eeoc.gov/types/sexual_harassment.html

Even though I have been living with it for several years now, No Child Left Behind still raises my hackles to no end. My high school has narrowly escaped losing their funding just because their test scores haven’t increased astronomically from the previous year’s scores. Reducing students to numbers, to regurgitating robots, and teachers to dictators of meaningless information is the slow slide into educational death. I know that throwing money at a problem won’t solve it; however, I think it is common sense that schools’ problems aren’t going to disappear if they lose funding. I find that the best teachers are not those who teach to No Child Left Behind, but those who teach in spite of it.

So, I was looking at the Weasel Awards some more, specifically at the Weaseliest Pundit/Reporter section. I noticed that Michael Moore was named as the weaseliest, while Anne Coulter came in third. This seems unfathomable to me. I know many people think all that
Moore says and does is a huge load of malarkey, but he beat out Anne Coulter???? I don’t understand how a liberal alarmist could possibly be more like a rodent than a misanthrope like Anne Coulter. Sure, maybe people don’t like Michael Moore because of his unpopular views concerning the Bush administration and 9/11. And then we have Anne Coulter… this is the woman who bashed 9/11 widows because they pushed for the 9/11 commision – she said “These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them. ... I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much ... how do we know their husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy." Yeah, a guy running around w/ a video camera is sooo much worse than this woman spewing hateful swill.

I was interested by the (highly unscientific) poll results of the Weasel Awards. George W. Bush was named as the Weaseliest Politician. What a surprise. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iranian President) and Kim Jong-il (leader of the Democratic People's
Republic of
Korea) fell later on in the list. Indeed, the American people have found our president to be far more duplicitous than other leaders who like their dangerous weapons. Maybe this is a knee-jerk reaction as a result of our never-ending commitment in
Iraq. Maybe this is because our president is probably not intelligent enough to say nuclear weapons, much less use them effectively as political leverage.  

Okay, so my previous blog was cut short because I had much stuff to do…. Anyway, I was discussing the philosophy of John Searle. I’m sure I’ve just scratched the surface of his ideas, but I do know a little. For instance, I think one of the most important points Searle asserts is that animals, like humans, have memories and intentions. However, the important distinction is that an animal knows only what its senses tells them, i.e.

Okay. I know most of my blogs should pertain to current events/social justice/ and stuff of the like. But… I am going to take a slight departure to talk about philosophy. Every week (or at least most weeks) I go to philosophy club after school on Thursday. It is one thing that I look forward to A LOT because I know that once philosophy club starts I can think in a way that is exploratory – and has nothing to do with school but everything to do with my own life. This week we discussed the philosophy of John Searle, who philosophy pertains to the nature of language. We read about a third of an essay he prepared for a college lecture and it was absolutely FASCINATING!!! He argues that other people (read: linguistic philosophers) have made the mistake in believing that language was an already existing construct; rather, the evolution of humans parallels the evolution of language. Very interesting…

My school had a mock election today at lunch. I didn’t vote in it for two reasons: a) it isn’t even the real thing and b) I had my very first Gay-Straight Alliance club meeting (see my other blog for more about this). This event made me think about the nature of voting. A lot of underclassmen didn’t want to vote because, quite frankly, they didn’t care.