Category Archives: School / Education

What a joke of an article in New York magazine. Its premise is that casual same-sex hooking up is a big deal in high schools; bi-sexuality is now very gray; adults are standing by passively, etc. I also loved the quote by the professor who’s "been studying same-sex attraction among adolescents for more than 20 years." Sounds like a great field to be conducting scholarly research.

The meta point that, due to the ubiquity of contraceptives and sex education, casual hooking up/sex has increased among teens while official dating has decreased is true, in my view. But this does not mean we have a culture where teens "kiss anything that is beautiful" and whatnot.

The more serious point in all this is what effects, if any, growing up in a pornified culture will have on the next generation of leaders. Too bad this article went the easy route of picking scandalous quotes from teens which will further the cause of every worry-mom.

I’m fortunate to have been granted a reduced course load to pursue some independent studies and other projects.

1. Irish Writers – An English class with everything from Joyce to drama to short stories.
2. American Lives: Poverty in America – A History elective exploring life on the margins of America.
3. Microeconomics AP – It’s about time I took a formal econ class!
4. Introduction to Calculus – Will prepare me for a college level calc class.
5. Indy Study: Problems of Philosophy – Working with a faculty member to take the MIT OpenCourseWare class Problems of Philosophy.
6. Indy Study: Software Engineering – I’m going to roll up my sleeves and become familiar on a coding level with PHP, mySQL, web servers, and hopefully some of the latest and greatest web 2.0 technologies too.

Of course, this is all as a second semester senior, baby!

A big activity this year for me that I haven’t blogged about has been my school paper. I’m editor-in-chief, but we assembled a rock star team of really smart editors (all girls other than me, go figure) so I try to stay out the way. I think we’ve broken a number of records. Today, for example, we published a 24 page issue, probably the first time in history. The quality of the content is also better than it’s ever been.

The issues one faces in running a small school newspaper are consistent with those in any organization. I’ve been particularly amused at the similarities of bug testing in software development and copy editing the paper: it’s a real bitch to organize everyone’s feedback. There are also interpersonal challenges, where sometime’s personal pride comes before what’s best for the organization. All stuff that gives a real intellectual high.

Great job guys on a terrific first semester.

My friend Ben Springwater at Williams College sent me this essay by a U of Virginia professor that bemoans the state of higher education. It’s the kind of stuff that makes you want to suck the gas pipe – my generation is a consumer culture yearning for entertainment. Oh the good ole’ days, this professor says, when students would have animated conversations about intellectual affairs. Now, they’re too busy surfing their "100 cable channels."

Being so culturally pessimistic is flip, and particularly condescending when coming from the ivory tower. But – but! – this essay does raise some points I’ve discussed on this blog. Incredibly, people still romanticize college and higher ed to an unrealistic degree. People still view it as a melting pot of ideas and the only time you’ll get pure intellectual stimulation for four years. This professor argues, with some merit, that you’re more likely to find students drinking beer to MTV than a novel idea that may challenge the status quo.

There are big problems with education and my generation, but such doomsayer pessimism is not the way to fix it.