It's only been 8 hours since my last post, and I used that time to sleep. But I figured I may as well take advantage of all this spare time I have this morning by blogging. Last night's post counts as today's, but I'll keep writing as if this is a new day. I'm about 3000 words behind, so I could catch up if I just had one solid post. Unfortuately, I don't think this will be it. I'll try though.
The other day, I saw an advertisement for Brainetics. It's supposed to be athletics for you brain, hence the name. Since it's one of those ads that go for like 20 minutes and sell you stuff, I assume its a scam. It looks pretty interesting though. The ad consists of this: A guy is teaching an incredibly racially diverse maths class, full of model-standard ten year olds. Seems normal, this clearly isn't set up. The teacher asks a stupidly difficult question, and the children all jump at the chance to answer it. Now, I'm in university, and I don't really know how to multiply. And these kids are multiplying double digit numbers. I can't compete, I don't know my 42 times tables yet. So, I am impressed by these wonderfully diverse, intelligent mini-mathematicians. But that's all part of the plan. The ad then begins to tell me that MY children can also have these same math super powers. I'm guessing my children come in the box with the flashcards, or are they sold separately? Anyway, it's supposed to teach kids the easiest and most effective maths strategies. If it actually does what it claims to, then it seems amazing. But as with most things, with the effort you put into making this work, you might as well put the effort into learning maths the normal way.
Many people have made points about it being all shortcuts, and no real learning. They say that children will have trouble later on in high school, when they're required to make their own equations and think outside the box. This is probably true. After all, there is the Law of Associative Inhibition that states that: “If a is already connected with b, then it is difficult to connect it with k, b gets in the way”. In this situation, maths is already connected with the brainetics strategy, then it is difficult to connect maths with another strategy of learning, because brainetics gets in the way. You learn something, how to use a cash register for example, then when you are presented with a new one, you're disorientated, making mistakes all over the place. This is what will probably happen with braintetics. It seems good for the younger years, when they're still learning the basics of maths, but when the kids get to older grades, they're screwed. The parents are also screwed over by the payment plans. They can pay $100 up front, or they can pay a $15 trial, then fork out 2 payments of $99. So, you can take a risk and pay $100, or be really careful and wary of it's scammy-ness, and pay $213. Not suspicious at all, is it?
Enough about that. During my internet trawling to find a blog topic, I was linked to the MMMBop video, by Hanson. If you've somewhow escaped the unpleasantness that is Hanson, here you go. Actually, it's not that bad. But it could get annoying if I heard it constantly, as what happened in the 90s. I did some research on the song, for some strange reason, and I came across something brilliant. A high school in America came up with a fundraising campaign called "Stop the Bop". The school played the song constantly before class, after class, and between classes until they raised their target amount of money, and "Stopped the Bop". Now, I think this is genius. Seriously. I want to go back in time to when my grade was raising money for formal, just so we can melt some brains and earn money at the same time.
Speaking of formal, it's been nearly a year now. For you Americans, formal for us is your prom/graduation/I don't even know.
That was a picture from my formal.
But everyone graduating this year is going on about how excited they are/were at graduating. I just want to go back in time now, and relive that time from graduation to the start of uni. It was easily the best few months of my life. I don't regret not doing stuff, I just want to relive those times because they were so much fun.
Also. I bought some iTunes gift cards for myself, since the Cleaning Nazi won't let me use credit cards online. I bought Angry Birds for my iPod touch. I didn't know what the game was, I just saw that it was rated highly and that people seemed to like it. I started playing it... and I LOVE it. It's physics based, where you shoot birds out of a slingshot and into various structures built by pigs. The aim of the game is to destroy the pigs and their buildings. It's not a difficult concept to understand, but the game is quite challenging. It's surprisingly fun, and it's a real time-eater. Also, pigs make terrible engineers. Their strategy seems to be, "lets make everything out of wood and glass, just to make it easier for the kamikaze birds to plough through". I don't mind though. It's fun, and totally worth the few dollars I spent on it.
Anyway, I think that's enough for the moment.
Word count for this post = 956
Total November word count = 27, 878
Yeah saw a commercial for that Brainetics thing and I don't see how kids can do that really.
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