I started working on way too many tech projects including a project to take the paper out of debate.
I wasted lots of time.
I taught at a summer camp with 4 days notice and no lesson plan (and no sleep during the week). It taught me some lessons about teaching, such that handwriting, no matter how horrible, can still help. It showed me the other side of kids not paying attention (Get off my lawn!). It made me realize just how valuable debate and debate camp is.
The world of debate is uncertain, but I realize that I like coaching and the debate community.
I listened to songs about cars, but I still can’t drive.
I wrote a document about how to use MS Word like a pro. Now you can too!
This time, I didn’t smuggle myself in the luggage car (it was broken); instead, I made myself the center of attention with my power strip.
2009-09-01 - Post Summer Verbose Letter
On the Horizon: Essay Analyzer, Vi, Open Office
I’m one of the project directors for next year’s Dance Marathon Hackathon. Dance Marathon was an organization dedicated to fundraising for FACE AIDS, and the Hackathon was designed to connect technically inclined people, who might not otherwise be interested in public service, with nonprofits. During the 24 hours when the Dance Marathon dancers are dancing to fundraise, the Hackathon hackers are working on tech projects for nonprofits.
Over the summer, the other project directors and I have been meeting on Skype to plan various aspects of the Hackathon. Mostly, we’ve discussed the website (dm.stanford.edu/hackathon), organizations that we want to work with, our integration with Dance Marathon, hacker registration, letters to send to nonprofits, and what we want the overall vision to be.
Mostly, this has just meant logistical work, but it’s good to get working on it.
I’m on the tech team in the ASSU (student government) executive cabinet. I’m the only person who was on the web development team last year, so I’ve been the main person dealing with the current website (assu.stanford.edu). So far, I’ve put together a draft of a student jobs website and updated one of the modules on the website so that you can link to a specific javascript-hidden part of any page (see *). I’ve also done some smaller jobs on the site and have been working with other people who want to manage their own parts of our website or their own sites (ie, greenstore.stanford.edu, gsc.stanford.edu), and soon I’ll be making a module to make it easier for our site to interact with Twitter and Facebook.
* for those interested: we use a content management system called Joomla, and there’s a free module for it called Tabs and Slides within Content Items that lets you split up one webpage into different ‘tabs’. Each tab is like a page of its own, but they’re all on the same web address. The makers of the module didn’t provide any functionality to automatically load a certain tab when you loaded the page as a whole, so I had to delve into their code and make some additions.
One thing that this showed me was how difficult it can be to go into someone else’s code when they don’t have much documentation. You almost have to read through the entire program even if you only want to change one small part just because it isn’t obvious what everything does when you first look at the code.
I did some website work for my sister’s nonprofit, the Pain Society of Oregon. They put on continuing education conferences for doctors about pain management.
This gave me the opportunity to learn a lot of the things that are happening in basic web programming. Before, I had done some website work, and I could understand conceptually what each of the web programming languages did, but I didn’t do much with them, so I had less of a holistic understanding. Now, I feel familiar enough that I’m comfortable jumping in to a web project even if I didn’t immediately know all of the details.
One thing that this showed me is how relatively easy it is to make moderately powerful sites even with only basic computer science and web programming skills. Even though it took me a while to figure out how to make any changes to the site (because I had to read articles online about how to make those changes before actually making the changes), and some of my changes might not have been the most elegant, my sister says that she likes the look and feel of the site much more now.
Early on in the summer, I discovered that Whitman College’s Policy Debate team went entirely paperless during the 2008-2009 season. This is incredibly significant in debate as a whole: Whitman proved that it could be done, and now other teams are trying to go paperless. This has a number of benefits: it helps with organization during the debate round since every piece of evidence that you use is in the same place rather than scattered across your table and your opponent’s table; it helps with getting to debate rounds on time because you don’t have to cart around 4 tubs of evidence; it helps with cost because checking 4 tubs and a cart on an airplane is expensive, and when you don’t have so much luggage, you can afford to rent smaller cars when going to tournaments; it helps the team stay organized because you can more easily share and format evidence; and there’s a lot of convenience and cost just from not having to print thousands of pages of evidence.
The Microsoft Word template that Whitman had been using for paperless debate did everything that it needed to, but it was programmed in a rush (they decided about 3 weeks before the debate season started last year to go paperless and then just pushed forward), and the person who programmed it didn’t have any formal education in computer science – they just picked it up because they needed to learn to get the job done. As a result, I sent Whitman’s debate coaches an email and started developing my own version of the template.
The template is a continuing work in progress, but I’m fairly satisfied with it. It does everything that Whitman’s old template does, plus it has a few new features that make it easier to select certain pieces of evidence and to debate paperless overall. Also, sharing my code with Whitman influenced them to implement some of the same features that I did, moving paperless debate as a whole forward.
One thing that this showed me is the language-independence of computer science. So far, I’ve taken classes that used C++ and Java, whereas the only programming language that can interact nicely with MS Word is Visual Basic for Applications. Despite that, though, the same principles that I learned in my programming classes applied: decomposing a bigger problem down into smaller parts, and then coding each of those small parts (which also lets you re-use those smaller parts a lot of times); using references whenever you don’t know how to achieve a certain function; testing all of the edge cases to make sure that your program doesn’t have any big bugs in it… In general, even though the first time I ever looked at Visual Basic code was programming the template, I was able to do a fairly good job because Stanford’s CS classes taught me to think like a programmer.
Another thing this project showed me was that some languages are much nicer to work with than others. Visual Basic can do (almost) everything that other programming languages can, but programming in it feels very wrong. The parts of the language that were designed to make it seem ‘simple’ to program in (ie, less use of curly braces {} to denote blocks of code) make the language feel overly simplistic. That is, other languages might have a slightly steeper learning curve, but after you learn, it’s a lot easier to do powerful stuff in other languages than it is in Visual Basic.
I also discovered that there are a lot of tech-interested people in the debate community. After I posted the template, someone else said that they were working on their own template for paperless debate. They had been working in visual basic (and, I suspect, programming as a whole) for a while longer than me, so they looked over my code and gave me a bunch of tips.
Whitman’s coach also told me that he’s developing a program to tabulate debate tournaments (ie, decide who judges which teams in which rooms) and offered me a job helping with it. There’s a long list of features that he wants added and bugs that he wants fixed by the end of September. It should be quite a project, but it’ll be good to get to know what’s going on in a tabulation program behind the scenes.
One program that I’ve been wanting to work on for a while is an essay analyzer. I discussed this in the previous letter. I still haven’t started. It’s still on the horizon, but it might not get done for a long while.
Another thing that I want to do is improve navigation in MS Word. There’s a program that programmers use to write software called Vi (or VIM – Vi Improved) that has a lot of powerful features for navigating around a text file. It works in ‘modes’. The main mode, ‘normal’, doesn’t let you insert text, but it makes it very easy to navigate around a document. You can press one key and enter ‘visual mode’, which lets you select text easily. You can press another key to go into ‘insert mode’ or ‘search mode’ or ‘command mode’, each of which lets you do other things to the document.
This would be very helpful for debate because now, whenever you want to use a piece of evidence, you have to format it properly and underline it (in a debate round, you don’t read the entirety of a piece of evidence – only the snippets that you underline). Now, you either have to use the navigation shortcuts built in to MS Word or use your mouse, and neither strategy is particularly fast. With Vi features, I would be able to press “10w” to move 10 words forward, or “63b” to move 63 words back. I could press $ to go to the end of the line and _ to go to the start of the line. I could press “d$” to delete everything up to the end of the line, or “5iab” to insert “ababababab” where the cursor is. I could press “v2/Country” to select all of the text between my cursor and the second time the word “Country” appears in the document.
In other words, if I programmed Vi functionality into MS Word, it would be very convenient for navigation, especially when formatting evidence for debate.
Another thing I might want to do is get away from MS Word. Open Office, a free and open source office suite, is almost as good as MS Office, but it lacks a few features that I really like. Notably, its document map is worse, it doesn’t have a ‘normal’ view (so there’s no way to get rid of the space inbetween pages), and you can’t view all nonprinting characters (particularly page breaks).
Because Open Office is open source, that means that I could go into its source code and edit the program so that it had those features. It would likely be very hard to do – it’s difficult enough to go into a small code project, and Open Office is one of the biggest open source programs out there – but it would also enable me to permanently switch to Open Office, something that I’ve wanted to do for a while.
Programming in Open Office would also be much nicer. If I were to write my paperless debate template for Open Office, I wouldn’t be forced to use Visual Basic: I could use Java, JavaScript, Python, and several other languages. All of them are, in my experience, much nicer to program in than Visual Basic.
July 10, I went to the Oregon Country Fair. This is one of the experiences that most strongly demonstrates that the anti-consumerist in me is much stronger than the hippie in me.
Even though it was a gathering of hippies from all across the Pacific Northwest (even if it is mostly Eugene and Portland), I could only see it as fetishized consumerism. They are environmentalist, but they bring their own electrical generators that are less efficient than the power suppliers in the area. Structurally, it’s the same as any other fair – lots of places to buy overpriced food or trinkets that you don’t need. Yes, there are cool parts to it, but it saddens me that ‘hippie’ is nowadays more about nudity, drugs, and the color green and less about politics, social change, or environmentalism.
Bohemia Mining Days is a smaller fair in Cottage Grove. Fun for an afternoon, but nothing special.
The fashions of middle and high school age kids was interesting, though. Everyone seemed to be some variant of punk/goth. And it seems like there is no age too young to have a cell phone now. I feel old.
I saw a few movies. Gran Turino, Harry Potter 6, Flatland, and maybe one or two others. They were entertaining, but none were really impressive.
Flatland was about a square that lives in a 2d world and sees a visitor from the 3d land. It was based on a book of the same name. It was a fairly good introduction to thinking about the idea of more than 3 dimensions, but, as a movie, it was lacking.
I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A bunch of my friends at Stanford got me into it. It was fun. There were a lot of interesting themes. And some of the episodes were masterpieces: in “Hush”, fairytale monsters take away people’s voices about 5 minutes into the episode, so for a half hour in the middle, there is no speaking whatsoever. It had beautiful music, amazing acting, and was overall good.
If you too are a Buffy fan, feel free to ask my why Spike is the most heroic character.
I watched Avatar: The Last Airbender. It’s a Nickelodeon show for kids, but it’s still pretty good. It’s set in a fantasy world that has a little bit of technology, four ‘nations’ (one for each of the Ancient Greek elements, earth, fire, air, and water), and a mythology that blends a bunch of different ones. People can do magic by ‘bending’ the elements around them. The protagonist is Aang, the Avatar (the only person who can bend all four elements) and the last Airbender (because the Fire Nation wiped out all of the others). He’s a little kid (frozen in time for 100 years), so he has to learn all four of the elements and end the Fire Nation’s war.
The fact that it was a kids show was apparent, but it was interesting nonetheless. They presented complex moral issues very nicely.
I discovered some new youtube videos.
“Auto Tune the News” is a monthly series where a piece of news is changed into singing. There have been 7 so far (I think). #5 and #6 are the best. They had also done some historical speeches (ie, MLK’s “I Have a Dream”) and some presidential debates.
“The Guild” is a youtube TV series with 5 minute episodes. It features players of an online game that decide to meet up one day. It isn’t all that great, but it’s kind of funny. They also released a music video called “Do You Want to Date My Avatar” that is very good.
Continuing with my interest in the social implications of the internet, someone released a video called “Social Media Revolution”. It’s done in the style of the “Shift Happens” / “Did You Know 2.0” / Michael Wesch videos. I don’t think it would be popular if those videos weren’t excellent and viral. “Social Media Revolution” pales in comparison to Michael Wesch’s videos. It isn’t done very creatively – it uses the same music and style as “Did you Know 2.0” / “Shift happens”. It even uses some of the same statistics. It’s also kind of weird in that it was made by someone interested in marketing rather than education or the internet in and of itself. There are also some hokey elements – for instance, it was made by Erik Qualman (the person who, I guess, coined the term “Socialnomics”), and one part of the video quotes Erik Qualman as if he were a third party. And it says “Welcome to the world of SocialnomicsTM”. I guess it just feels like I’m being advertised to for some product called “Social Media”.
I played some video games. I’m playing a level-one game for Final Fantasy 9. Interestingly enough, even though I’m level 1 rather than level 50 or 60, at the point of the game where I am right now, I’m at least as powerful as any other time I played FF9. Largely, the difference is that I’m forced to think about each fight that I get into, so I’ll put on the right equipment and adopt an actual strategy rather than just mashing buttons. The one part that’s annoying about it is that, in order to stay at level one, you can’t kill any monsters (except for bosses) because then you would get experience points and go up levels. In other words, the hard part is not being level one, but staying at level one.
Recently, I finished a modded game of Planescape: Torment. It is a very excellent game – more like reading a well-written novel than playing a game. I wish there were more.
I also started a modded game of Baldur’s Gate. It’s similar to Planescape, but it’s a little bit bigger and a little bit less polished/immersive. BG has a cool world, but it doesn’t make me keep turning the pages quite like Planescape.
Also, Dungeons and Dragons Online is going free to play soon. I signed up for the beta, so I’ve been giving it a try. It’s very good. A while back, I tried playing an MMO (short for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) called “Perfect World”, and after sticking with it for a while, I was disappointed that the game wasn’t very creative. Everything seemed to be the same “Kill X number of Y type of monster for me”. The game got repetitive. DDO, on the other hand, reminded me a lot more of the original Everquest (which, at the lower levels, was a lot less repetitive). There are a bunch of different races and classes; each class has a bunch of different ways that it can be played; there are different quests that you can do to advance. Overall, the game involves more thinking than just hack and slash. The free version of DDO is supposed to go live soon (originally, it was going live in early August, but apparently the company that makes DDO is willing to push back the release until they’re completely satisfied with the product).
The last week in July, I was teaching Java at a summer camp. The camp was run by Matt Fraser, the director of debate at Stanford, who also owns a company called Education Unlimited that puts on summer camps. A few days before the start of the camp, he gives me a call saying that his regular person flaked on him, and he needs a replacement. I accepted.
The hardest part of the job was working on the lesson plan. There was a short set of guidelines (basically, the things that they advertise on their website) – teach Java using Karel the Robot; teach some graphics; they should have some sort of final project by the end of the week – but nothing was provided to me. I had to come up with all of the handouts, assignments, lecture notes, examples, and class guidelines. Thankfully, some of my former teachers at Stanford agreed to let me use the curricular materials from when I took their classes, but it was still a lot of work getting it into a form that would work in a one-week timeframe. Because I made everything in such a rush and because it was my first real teaching experience, I didn’t quite have time to craft my lessons in a form that I would use again (or organize my actual curricular materials such that they would be coherent to a third party), but I did learn a lot.
For one, it’s good to get feedback frequently. I passed out note cards asking people what they thought of my teaching style two or three times, and I made a remarkable improvement after each set of feedback. The first time, they overwhelmingly asked me to slow down. The next time, I discovered that I would need to create a separate set of assignments for the kids who understood the material intuitively so that they wouldn’t be bored.
That also taught me that passing out written feedback forms can work where asking them personally (either individually or in a group) fails. Because I asked them those same questions, and noone told me to slow down or asked for harder material before I passed out the note cards.
I also learned that a projector is not a substitute for a whiteboard. Even when teaching computer science, there is something about writing out examples on the whiteboard that just works. Despite my horrible handwriting, the kids learned better when I did some of my examples on the whiteboard.
I now know why teachers use so many examples. Even though it only takes one example for me to understand something about any of the sciences, if a student is having a harder time, two or three examples on one subject helps.
Also, everyone can understand how to program basic graphical stuff even if they don’t understand the basic math stuff.
I still don’t quite know how to deal with the disciplinary issue. About 2/3 of the kids started playing a cheesy restaurant-running game on Facebook, and they would divert their attention from my lessons or their assignments to play the game every once in a while. Since, despite that, they were mostly engaged with my lessons, I decided to let them do as they wished.
Partly, my reasoning behind that decision was that it was a summer camp where they came (mostly voluntarily) to learn about computer science. Education was in their own hands, and it was their choice on how much they wanted to get out of the experience. I’m not really satisfied with that reasoning though: that feels like giving up on the idea of comprehensive education. A good teacher would teach fast enough that it would be hard to not pay attention and effectively enough that everyone in the class understood.
Part of my reasoning was based on my own limitations. I don’t know how to effectively discipline high school age kids. I have had lots of teachers that didn’t know how to discipline the classroom, and the ones that tried and failed were worse than the ones that accepted some degree of disorder. Those teachers weren’t as good as the ones that knew how to discipline a class that got out of hand (or the ones that taught well enough to avoid disorder in the first place, or the ones who knew how to shape disorder so that it worked to their benefit – that’s the best), but I’m still not quite that good. Also, I get the impression that the teachers that are good enough to avoid disorder work very hard and long on their lesson plans, and I simply didn’t have enough time to get something working that well.
Part of my reasoning was also based on my own experiences. There are legitimate reasons to not pay attention to the teacher. At the beginning of my Frosh year, the director of SLE said that we could use laptops for notetaking during lectures but that we weren’t allowed to do anything else because the lectures would move too fast. That was a lie. There were a handful of lectures that were so captivating that I did not switch away from the document on which I was taking notes, but there were also plenty of lectures that had about 5 minutes of material, a boring voice, and filled two hours of lecture time. In those lectures, I was able to read the news or Wikipedia articles or do homework and still get just as much out of the lectures as if I were paying attention the whole time. In these instances, when the teacher is not effectively engaging the student, it’s legitimate enough for the student to take the education into their own hands. Games, of course, are a slightly different scenario, but the point remains.
My high school lit teacher recommended a few books to me on how to teach so kids listen: “Me Talk Pretty One Day?”, which is about using humor, and “How to Talk so Kids Can Learn.” I still haven’t gotten to either of them, but Stanford has both of them in the libraries.
Teaching at a non-debate summer camp also made me realize the value of debate and debate camps. The only summer camp that I had ever been to as a participant was a debate camp, and I never went for fewer than 4 weeks. This camp was one week long. The difference symbolized by that difference in time is embodied throughout the rest of the camp experience.
7 weeks (I went to Michigan’s 7 week debate camp before my Junior year of high school) is long enough to get into a topic. 4 weeks is long enough to teach something. Even 2 or 3 weeks is long enough. But a 1 week camp has a day for getting situated, a day for some sort of recreational activity, a day for getting wrapped up, which leaves about half a week for instruction. With that short of a time, you can babysit and entertain kids, and you can get them interested in a new idea, but you can’t get very deep into a subject at all. Even 4 weeks (Gonzaga University debate camp before my Senior year of high school) can be short when you have a big enough topic. And most topics are big enough.
Debate camp also feels much more streamlined, and you can see that reflected in the price. There are dozens of camps across the country all competing to provide the best education on one topic. Most instructors are coaches of some sort. Most have also been to a debate camp as a participant in the past. Even though debate camps put less of an emphasis on professionalism, because they are such an institution, they feel very polished. The price also reflects this streamlining: I think that all 13 of my students paid almost $2000 for a week with me. For my first 4 week debate camp, it cost 1800 (though I spent another few hundred buying my own food – I didn’t buy the meal plan). My 7 week debate camp cost under $5000 (food included). My last 4 week debate camp was $1000 plus food (it cost less because I was in the Zag Scholars program that only a few kids get accepted to. Gonzaga wants to be a top national camp, so they give good debaters a price break).
There is also a greater expectation that debaters are responsible and independent than other campers. At debate camp, it felt like the expectation was that everyone could take care of themselves. There was still curfew and separate boys and girl floors (except at Zag Scholars), but it seemed like the camp treated debaters like adults (or they just didn’t want to micromanage us to the extent necessary to do otherwise). One of the ways that debate camp achieved this was by allowing more unstructured time. Where a non-debate camp would structure some cheesy event (ie, mandatory-participation talent night), the debate camp would simply allow free time. Also, the debate camp cautioned debaters where the non-debate camp mandates campers. For instance, the debate camp might say to not be out alone after dark because there could be meth users roaming the campus (Gonzaga, in Spokane, Washington), whereas the non-debate camp might require groups of three when walking in broad daylight on Stanford’s campus (rich, safe area).
At debate camp, you’re also there because you want to win. You probably had to coerce your parents to fund the camp, if you didn’t work to pay for it yourself and you probably have any number of other things you could do other than debate. You would feel cheated if you weren’t getting the most out of your money. As a result, the debate camp will use almost every hour of the day for doing debate work. At Zag Scholars, I happily worked myself to exhaustion. There were lectures, practice debates, and labs starting in the morning and sometimes not ending until midnight with only breaks for meals, and then I would do research late into the night and getting about 6 hours of sleep to finish up an assignment. That was what I paid for; that was what I expected. A non-debate summer camp, even if it was extremely competitive, probably couldn’t work their kids for 14-16 hours per day without getting lots of complaints.
Debate, as an activity, lends itself easily to a very mature model of education because 100% of what you learn is applied. You aren’t learning so that you can get an A; you aren’t even necessarily learning because you like learning. You’re learning to win. Every debater is paying attention to a lecture in camp (or not paying attention) or doing research, or doing practices for the sake of putting their skills and knowledge into practice in the next competition. This means that there aren’t really any subjects that are off topic. Anything that might be useful in a debate round is a legitimate topic for discussion. This makes a censored education nearly impossible. You can’t stop a topic from entering a debate any more than you could stop it from entering Congress or the Supreme Court. In other words, debate teaches you everything and motivates you to learn everything, so it is impractical to expect that your debaters learn anything short of everything. Intellectually, debaters must be adults.
I guess debate camp felt kind of like college (with some important differences), whereas non-debate camps felt less academically free than high school.
Since I was hired in such a rush, I didn’t sign the contract where I agree to teach until my last day. Most of the contract was fairly benign – it was basically legalese for “you agree to teach and to be responsible” – but the intellectual property clause (bundled in the subsection about my responsibilities) surprised me.
I got the impression that it was written by someone who didn’t specialize in intellectual property law. I’m not a lawyer, but I do read a lot about intellectual property and pay attention to the current court cases about intellectual property. The way that the clause was worded seemed to me like it would have me give to Education Unlimited (the camp company) things that I didn’t have legal rights over (ie, the software that I had the kids code with; the handouts that Stanford made that I re-used). I also think that it was much more heavy-handed than most intellectual property agreements in that I would have absolutely no rights over the intellectual property that I created (ie, lesson plans, examples, assignments).
This is especially true of educational intellectual property. I guess the for-profit education model is different from the non-profit education model, but at Stanford and in all other non-profit educational experiences that I have been a part of, the paradigm has been that free and widespread access to information is a good thing. I guess it’s part of the mission statement of schools – helping the dissemination of information. As a result, my professors actively collaborate with people from different schools, and they release their handouts under a license that would allow anyone that’s part of a non-profit educational venture to use their handouts. In other words, if I were teaching computer science at a college, I wouldn’t have even had to ask my professors to use their handouts and assignments.
I had known for a while that I didn’t like restrictive copyright which, in my mind, limits creativity. This, however, was the first time I really put that to the test. I didn’t want something that I created to be limited to copyright. I didn’t care about whether or not I would get the credit for the assignments, but I would not feel comfortable if I couldn’t give away my work to any other interested educator. There are times when competition can be healthy (ie, debate), but where the education of youth is concerned, I fundamentally disagree with competing via limiting knowledge. I think that it is bad if a student suffers, not because they had a bad teacher, but because they had a teacher without all of the necessary tools.
This might make employment slightly difficult – my opinion on education is the same as my opinion on the intellectual property behind life saving medication and most other necessary forms of intellectual property – but I guess I’ll jump that hurdle when I meet it. I could always shoot for a job at Google’s nonprofit, INSTEDD, that uses open source software to respond to disasters. I guess I would even be fine with closed source software as long as it was used for the social good and was mostly free – like Google Flu Trends – but the model of helping people for profit with closed source makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong. Given a choice between helping people and money, I choose helping people.
I am very proud of my debaters at Palo Alto HS. They seem very excited about the upcoming topic and have been doing a lot of work on their own. I have high expectations.
One team even wants to do paperless debate! That was what originally inspired me to make my own version of the paperless template rather than just helping Whitman with their template.
I’ll be stepping up the amount of coaching I’m doing. At least for the beginning, I’ll be coming in twice a week (I arrive on campus August 31, whereas Ben Picozzi, the other policy coach, doesn’t get to campus for a few more weeks), and I’ll probably be going to a bunch of tournaments. And I’ll be interacting with the varsity debaters in addition to the novices.
I really think that I like teaching. And debate and working with kids.
I am very unsure about debate for the upcoming year.
I want to ensure that Stanford’s policy debate program maintains a presence so that, in the future, anyone who is interested in debate and interested in going to Stanford can debate at Stanford. However, there aren’t enough policy debaters to have a team atmosphere. There isn’t a critical mass that will influence me to spend my nights doing speaking drills and researching. I want to maintain the institution of debate, but I’m not sure that I’ll be able to actually debate.
Particularly because there are a bazillion other things that I’m excited about spending my time on. Like the tech projects that I already talked about or planning events for the Queer Straight Alliance.
And I think I like coaching more than debating. I would rather do research for my high schoolers than for myself. I feel like coaching helps students with a fundamental part of their education (particularly: critical thinking, public speaking, confidence, politics, philosophy, social justice), whereas I feel like I know enough that I don’t need debate for those parts of my education. Debate would still be educational for me, but it is more important for my high schoolers than it is for me.
I met up with Owen Zahorcak, my high school debate coach, and some friends that I made in high school debate. It was good to see everyone again, especially since I haven’t seen most of them for a year. We mostly just reminisced. We talked a little about the upcoming debate topic, and I talked with Owen a little bit about tech stuff (he isn’t a programmer, but he is computer literate and knows some basic programming stuff, so he is interested in the same tech things as I am) and life stuff. Mostly, though, it was just stories from when we debated.
And Owen got a Google Android phone! It really is that cool.
My music interests have remained mostly the same. I’ve gained a new appreciation for some old bands, though.
I’ve been listening to Blue Scholars and Common Market, Washington based hip-hop groups, recently. Their music has a good message (politically / philosophically) and is very community-oriented.
I just started listening to Sweatshop Union. They’re a Canadian hip-hop group. They had one song that I heard on Pandora (“Hit The Wall”), but I just discovered that they had other good songs too. Their politics are good, and they even integrate snippets of Noam Chomsky speeches into some of their songs. There is also a female voice (political person giving speeches) on some of their songs that I KNOW I’ve heard, but I can’t remember the name. It’s been bugging me immensely.
What I like about them is how comprehensive their social critique is. Most progressive hip hop groups have a few songs without that much critique in them (ie, miscellaneous love songs) and a few songs about class or race or some other issue. Sweatshop Union is entirely political, and their songs touch on everything. For instance, “Thing About It” talks about the media and activism, militarism, intellectual property, the environment, GMOs, water privatization, and probably some stuff that I missed.
Another thing I’ve been thinking about recently is the role of the artist in different philosophies. I’ve noticed that there are a lot of self-justifying philosophies. Ie, Plato creates a world where the philosopher is king; preachers come up with a world where listening to preaching is the only road to eternal salvation; authors speak out against science and the enlightenment in favor of art. But the messages that seem most strong to me tend to be the ones that realize that art is a starting point, not an ending point. In Camus’ The Plague, the act of writing is important, but none of the people who write quit their day job. Every writer in the book, including the narrator of the book, recognizes that their first duty is to combat The Plague. The doctor or the volunteer is more heroic than the writer. In “Thing About It”, the chorus is “But the thing about it is we can’t just sing about it / we can’t just sit around and wait until they fin us out / we figure out where we’re going while we live in doubt. / If you want my truth, listen how and just think about it. / Thing about it is we can’t even think about it. / Can’t afford a minute’s time to think about it, bring about a change, so / take a second and shake your head and then, / take a step ahead and think about it”. The artist is only important as a catalyst for thought and action for social change.
I also got turned back on to The Magnetic Fields. They make a bunch of interesting songs that seem more about exploring a particular theme than just putting together pleasant sounds. They have a 3-disc album, 69 Love Songs, that explores many facets of love and love songs – they aren’t just love songs, but songs about love songs.
They also have an album called “The Charm of the Highway Strip” that explores the implications of the highway and mass transit generally. I only recently started appreciating the album because previously I had just listened to the songs independently rather than listening to how each of the songs interact with each other.
For instance, the first song, Lonely Highway, is about someone leaving a town, and it verges on being a love song to a highway: “Lonely highway, only friend, / you’ve got me to keep you warm again. / Lonely highway, don’t you cry / Let me hold you in my arms tonight”, and the next song, Long Vermont Roads, fights back against that idea: “after all those trains and all those breakdown lanes / the roads don’t love you and they still won’t pretend to / after all those days on the god forsaken highway / the roads don’t love you and they still won’t pretend to”.
Some of the songs go into social implications. For instance, Fear of Trains discusses someone who resisted mass transit because of the effects of modernization on her local culture: “it was the government train that took away her childhood, / it was the KKK that took away her past, /it was the white man’s will that her’s be broken, / but that barefoot girl had grown too fast”.
The last track with lyrics, Sunset City, closes the first track nicely. Rather than featuring someone running away from a city, Sunset City features someone who moves on to the next city: “Oh Sunset city, I’ve got to see the world / don’t hold me too tightly; don’t whisper my name. / Sad eyed baby, I’m not that kind of girl: / when the dust stopped rolling, there’s no more to the game”.
My open source ideology also extends to my media. I finally moved on from Winamp to VLC. Each of them let you play songs and videos, but VLC is open source. Because it’s open source and still in active development, it’s also much more feature rich than other media players. It can play basically every type of media file – mkv, ogg, flac, flv – in addition to all of the common ones. It lets you record. You can set it up so that it’s controlled from online. You can change the playback speed of songs and videos; I’ve found that I can watch videos at 1.5x speed and still catch everything without any difficulty. You can add in custom subtitles. And much more!
There are a few rough edges, but it feels good using a media player that I can ideologically support.
I made a few brief comments on SLE that I gave to my section leader.
Interestingly enough, I think I’ve written some form of letter regarding the humanities part of my education pretty much every year since I started high school. My most recent letter, though, had more comments, so I’m more hopeful about some of them being implemented than in the past. For instance, there are a few ways that they should be using technology that would make everything so much nicer – ie, recording lectures and posting them online. Then, when there is a dinner for people who might want to major in History, I can actually attend rather than attending a lecture that could I could easily listen to later. There’s way too much going on on campus to make it to every class.
What class will I comment on now that I’m not taking any humanities classes?
I was inspired to write a document about the features of MS Word for my debaters. However, when it got long enough, I decided to release it to the entire debate community. It’s posted to my website at http://stanford.edu/~samking/debate/paperless-current/ if you want to read it for yourself.
I go into a bunch of the features that Word has the most people don’t know about that will help people format their documents more precisely and quickly. This is particularly important if you use large documents or a lot of documents or if you make documents that a lot of people end up using.
It’s long, but it’s (mostly) comprehensive and is searchable and indexed if you ever want to learn about one specific thing.
Also, my Paperless Debate template might be helpful even for nondebaters if you want to deal with documents quickly.
Since I’ll be 19 on September 15 and, at the beginning of Summer I didn’t even have a permit, I decided to start learning to drive.
I still don’t really want to drive in any situation, but I realize that there are times when friends need rides or where public transportation isn’t an option.
At this point, I still don’t have a license, and I’m not quite comfortable going fast, but I’m starting to get the general feel for the car.
The Union (Plumbers and Pipefitters Union Local 290) president said that he would mention a scholarships that I won from the union at one of the union meetings. This prompted me to attend a union meeting.
A lot of it was just logistics – jobs that are in town now, proposed changes to the union constitution – but it was a nice look into union politics. For instance, I saw the need for lobbyists to push through pro-labor legislation and lawyers to fight back when companies use illegal anti-union tactics (ie, refusing a union contract in favor of a non-union contract even though the union was the lowest bidder).
Labor for the win!
As much as I wanted to smuggle myself in the luggage compartment in the video game car, that didn’t quite work out this time. As it turns out, all things electric in that area had failed. None of the arcade games and none of the outlets were working. I then spent about 15 minutes looking around for an outlet. This Coast Starlight didn’t have any outlets in the Café car. The only outlet that I could find was in a horribly inconvenient location by the stairs in the viewer car (the one that has glass walls so that you can watch the scenery). I plugged my power strip (with a long cord) into that outlet, put it in a convenient location, and found a seat. Shortly, every slot in my power strip was full – mostly people charging their phones.
I spent most of my time writing this.
I’ll take CS103 (mathematical foundations of CS; 5 units) and CS107 (the next intro programming course; 5 units).
I’ll take Urban Studies 131, a weekly lecture series on social entrepreneurship (1 unit).
I’ll take a Feminist Studies class on relationship abuse (2-4 units). I know a few other people who are taking it. I’m not sure whether I’ll take it for 2 or 4 units.
I’ll take a history introductory seminar on US foreign policy in the Middle East (3 units). The professor seems very cool.
That, in total, is 16-18 units. I’m not quite sure what I want to do with my remaining units. I might take a one unit voice class. I might take a one unit yoga class. I might take a two unit intro to music theory.
I might end up taking the feminist studies class for 2 units, looking for a 3 unit class, and taking the voice class, the yoga class, or both.