Winter Vacs and St. Cyril

[bursar42]

Well, February break's here again. That one time of year other than the summer I actually get some time off. Of course, the usual break assignments are here to ruin my fun, but what can you do, eh?

On the note of accomplishments for today, I succeeded in diverting English class from actually discussing anything worthwhile and thereby preventing the revelation of my views on yesterday's (::looks at watch:: two days ago's) AIDS educator who came to the school.

Namely, I find it rather sick that this fellow is making a living not telling us anything intrinsically beneficial but instead making a living by telling the entire school (for two periods, mark you) about the misinformed doctor he went to in the early eighties, about how HIV is going to be used as biological weapon (Huh?), and about how he personally got HIV. More repugnant, this fellow seems, like every other speaker who addresses children in times of calamity or about "bad things," to feel some sort of need to talk about how wonderful God is and how spirituality has been his guiding light throughout his entire ordeal. As if I didn't get enough of that last year in Physics. This brings back memories of Ferret's Alcovepost on pediatric psychiatrists' warnings about revealing the whole 9-11 bit to children. (Very quickly, there were suggestions that children under the age of 13 or so only be told "bad men had destroyed some buildings and killed many people, but the government and Mommy and Daddy are doing all they can to keep you safe.") It seems every little thing is an occasion for information suppression followed by indoctrination. I don't know. Maybe the entire thing was supposed to just scare us into abstinence or something. Somehow I get the feeling that won't work on the non-abstaining population. Ah, well. This concludes the Steve the HIVwhore (as in, selling himself by virtue of his HIV+ status) rant. Stay tuned for the Bess N2H2 rant.

Now, I know that a school system receiving federal funds must go through all sorts of shenanigans to prevent the immature and possibly dangerous students from reading things about bomb-chucking and what-not. That's no reason why virtually any research project involving fringe social groups from the 1880s onward is blocked by Bess, the gracious information-denial bot used by the local school system. Anarchism is, unsurprisingly a banned search term which is "very offensive", all well and good. However, there's no reason for blocking Steal This Book. Sure, it does advocate illegal activities, but they're always telling us the importance of primary documents, no? This concludes today's rant section.

This lack of disclosure probably prevented the loss of my tacitly recognized ability to sleep through English class, thus re-proving the maxim about wise people keeping their mouths shut. On the subject of sleep, I have to say I've gotten some lately. I'm a person again! Yay!!! Of course, judging by the extremely erratic moods in this post, I probably need a bit more.

In further news, the Campaign for Social Involvement, the highest-rated sitcom of the season (Well, it would be if it were on the air,) has steadily progressed and, I'm proud to say, has been upgraded to Mid-to-late-September status. Maybe I'll get to June by the time I'm fifty. This accomplishment, accompanied by almost complete forgetfulness of St. Valentine's Day and getting to learn how to focus leakos, has made my day surprisingly good. Of course, this was made even better by getting back several math quizzes I thought I had done rather poorly on (but which I hadn't); the illness of the Scantron lady, thereby preventing the return of the biology test; and the amazing ability of the history faculty to

• Overburden themselves with essays to grade in both Euro and American and
• Fall behind on the sacrifices at the small altar to McKay I'm convinced they have in the teachers' workroom.

All in all, a nice day. By the way, does anyone know why this thing doesn't recognize the OL tag? Did W3C destandardize it while I wasn't looking or something?

Comments

[messiah-complex.livejournal.com]

Don't get me started ranting about the downfall of sex ed. It's not pretty.

My school has an "information-denial" system as well, and I've spent way too much time trying to figure out how to turn it off. I say "way too much" because I don't actually know anything about computers, so trying to figure it out is a lost cause.

[inuki42.livejournal.com]

Yay more Chipmunk-writing! *is happy*

I think school censorship is just dumb - yeah, block out the porn and other distracting, offensive stuff (offensive to a large fraction of the population, that is), but I'd say at least 80% of high school kids have computers at home with no blocks on them. Or only limited filters. So what's the point of having these ridiculously harsh censors on school computers when any kid who's so inclined can just go home and look it up there? Not to mention the fact that the censors block a lot of legitimate research material... End rant.

[juniperjune.livejournal.com]

my high school was always pretty stone-age and we were able to use the computers for all kinds of mischief, but since i graduated they bought about six million new computers and have set up some kind of network whereby all students and faculty have password access so they can monitor our activities or something. they also have some kind of information-blocking program, but i'm not sure which one. the one my parents had at home blocked yahoogroups (and i have no idea why), which was a serious pain.

i wish we as a society had the fucking courage to be open with all information. if a person were behaving the way 'society' has been, i would yell at them for not being honest and stop being their friend.

well THAT metaphor had interesting implications...