i had a final exam in infovis this morning, and it reminded me of why i used to feel quite comfortable being anti-school. i remember the day in highschool when i put the mark twain quote “i never let my schooling interfere with my education” into the little notepad that i wore around my neck for a while, and how true it felt, at 15, as i sat in english class and stared at SAT prep words.

i remember how excited i was, for a while, working at harmony and learning about all the stuff that nsrf and other folks like them are doing around the country to try to make schools better. i read some great books by folks like jonathan kozol and john holt and visited progressive schools around the east and midwest with a group of high school kids who were pumped to do something different. i thought about going back to school to study how to make school better, which struck me as a little odd, but odd doesn’t usually stop me for long. and then as i set out looking for the right school i decided that the thing that really interests me is the transfer of information. how something in my head gets into your head and what we might do with that something along the way to make the odds of understanding better. questions like that underlie good teaching, but it’s more accurate to say that they underlie good learning, and learning happens in more places than just school. as i had known since i was 15. so i widened my gaze to look for ways to learn about how we deal with information, and that is how i found hci.
good story, eh?

now, whether it has to be this way or not, school tends to get better as you go further up the ladder. the hoops that you have to jump through tend to feel a little less arbitrary, or at the very least, the arbitrary hoops are balanced out by some genuine chances to explore stuff that you are really interested in, and to do so on your own terms. i appreciate this, and i even see the benefits that some of the arbitrary hoops from my younger years now bring to bear on the skills that i need to get by on my own. so the question of how i feel about our educational system is a little murkier than it used to be, and honestly, it probably won’t get much clearer until i have kids to bring the consequences home with them. that’s the way it is.

but (and all of this was actually just a tangent that grew from my original point) i still feel comfortable saying that the test that i took this morning was stupid. it was open book, open note, no computer, and we had sample questions to indicate that it was going to be persnickety. as a result, several people were clustered around the printers in the library this morning spewing out hundreds of pages of notes and slides on the off chance that one or two of them would help answer one of the questions. i am not exaggerating about the hundreds of pages, and due to the nature of the test, each person had to print out their own notes.
i cried for the trees.
and the insanity of it all.

as for the test itself, there were 6 questions, and one hour, which means about 10 minutes each, and the questions ranged from things like “describe additive and subtractive color mixing” (optimal time to answer: 2-5 minutes) to “design an interactive visualization that allows users to navigate a multi-dimensional tree”(optimal time to answer: 2-5 weeks).
everyone flipped through their notes, scribbled like mad, looked at each other in stunned silence after handing in the blue books (yes! blue books!), and, let me reassure you, forgot every last bit of it as they walked out the door.
it was ridiculous.

and to top it off, i’m feeling sick today.
a little throat/congestion bug started making the rounds in montreal, hitting richie, then josh, and now me, it seems.
so i was kind of achy and tired and fuzzy for the test, and now all day i’ve been trying to drink juice and rest And work on my capstone paper, which is kind of a hassle.
it’s ok, really, since i don’t feel all that bad; i just don’t want to move much.
i can type without moving much.
so score one for kynthia.

another plus of sitting around the house was i managed to talk to josh (highschool josh, not bloomington josh) for a while on the phone, and he listened to me babble about my capstone, which was nice.
as long as i succeed in capturing some of that babble in a more solid external form this week, things will be looking up.

happy may day, everyone.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 10:15 pm and is filed under ranting, things i do. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.