Today was picture day. They gave a notice of one school day, so if you weren't at school on Wednesday (the last day we had school), oh well for you. Hope your grandparents didn't want to buy your pictures. (Well, there are always retakes.) I, being a stupid idiot, forgot my money to order said pictures (because my parents and grandparents have to have them). I realized it right when I got to school, so I had my dad arrive with the money. He would come fairly early on his way to work.

It just so happened that I had to have my picture taken first thing in the morning. So we went down to the auditorium and I realized that they would still take my picture even if I wasn't ordering prints. But I wasn't sure what to do. My friend Jarian was in the same situation: his money was on the way and couldn't get there fast enough. I thought I could have my picture taken then and give them the money within an hour, but the photographer people said that they had to take the order at the same time as taking the picture. On top of that, the teacher overseeing everything said that we had to have our pictures taken while the rest of our class was there. So the only solution seemed to be having our picture taken twice. I got a notice to go to the office shortly after returning from having my picture taken. They had my money there, so I went back and had my picture taken again.

Normally the title of the post has to do with what I write about first, but since I thought that what I will write about now is also important, and that it's a point that needs to be stressed to anyone that can read bold print, I made it the title.

I had been warming up to my European history class and basically getting a handle on the work involved. But lately the trend has been for classes to embrace "technology" by going online. And that's exactly what Mrs. Vazquez is doing with this class of mine. All lectures will be online, assignments will be given online, and those assignments will be collected online. That old sickening feeling is coming back to me because online classes don't work.

She created a sort of virtual classroom thing at this site, but the design is so dull that it's hard to tell what is what. You need to jump through hoops to send in a message -- and I don't think they take attachments, so you just have to copy and paste your nice essay into a textarea. Plus, Mrs. Vazquez's writing style is too close to that of some students. She ignores capitalization and punctuation and apparently doesn't check what she writes, as she often makes flagrant typos and factual errors that simply confuse everyone. (Maybe that's why she's no longer qualified to teach English.)

As for online classes in general: I've taken one, and so I know that they are nothing like the classroom experience. To truly learn, you have to have a teacher speak to you and answer your questions using helpful hints like... tone of voice... to get her message across. In an online class, you're trying to learn by reading pixels, and if you don't know something, a teacher can't answer you right away. Your homework and notes aren't tangible. Your teacher isn't tangible either; she's just represented by her words (however well-punctuated they may be). In fact, she doesn't even need to be there, as Mrs. Vazquez has stated many times when talking about this new system. She doesn't need to be there at all. And she wonders why she gets paid like it...

This move to the Internet is supposed to be a time saver. The logic is this: instead of doing our classwork (taking notes and other stuff) during class and doing our homework (reading stuff and answering questions) at home, we'll do our homework during class and our classwork at home. Tell me how this saves time. I think it actually wastes time, because we won't have access to computers during class every day (today, for example). In those cases we'll have to write our homework during class in order to type it later. In other words, time is lost. I certainly don't want to turn things upside-down, doing the reinforcing during the day when I should be learning and learning new material when I'm tired from a long day and want nothing more in the world than to relax.

Personally, I believe that due to the poor design and questionable usability of the web site, I am going to miss notifications of upcoming assignments, which is going to bring my grade down from the A that I've busted my ass for. More importantly, by ceasing to learn things in this class, I'm going to do worse on the final exam that determines whether you get college credit for the class. I'm ashamed of Mrs. Vazquez for making this decision that really only makes things easier for her and harder for the students she's trying to have succeed.

Look, up in the sky! It's the Floating Logos Project, one of those weird art projects you more than occasionally find on the web.

New York Changing: photos of New York City from then and now. It's amazing to see how some things have changed so much and how others have stayed the same.