Nerdfighters Gazette

Have you ever felt like the one who knew you most,

Could never tell what was on your mind?

That someone who could understand your every thought,

Must be impossible to find?

I feel that dreadful feeling every morning, every evening,

Of every single monotonous day.

Though I push back the loneliness every minute I’m awake,

I’m never able to push it away.

So tell me that you’ll always love and cherish me,

Or tell me that you’re my friend.

And I’ll know your words are only half the truth,

Because this loneliness still won’t end.

Once again, I wake up at 7:00 a.m.

I’m not late to school, even though it starts at 7:30.

I work silently in first period, with only a few sentences exchanged with my two friends.

Second period Geometry is boring. I read most of the time.

Third period is a joke, and so are the people I’m forced to sit by.

Nothing new is learned in fourth period. I am seated in a group with the girls who talk about me behind my back.

Lunch is full of reminders that people hate me, as we play card games at the table.

Band is fifth period, and I sit quietly unnoticed.

Few people talk to me in gym sixth period, and most of those meanly. Even though I know a lot of the people in my class.

Seventh is a contest between my friend and I to get the best grade.

I stay after school for whichever sport or activity I am currently involved in. Who knows which one?

My mother picks me up sometime from 4:00 to 7:00, depending on the activity.

We get home and walk inside. I go to my room.

I cry, mostly out of loneliness. And it’s just another ordinary day for me.

Three years ago today a great man participated in the challenge he was put to by his brother. That great man was Hank Green. On the 8th of March 2007 he had to give away eighty seven and a half peeps to the public, needless to say he found this difficult.

I challenge you, the reader to show your appreciation for this great act of kindness, by trying this yourself.

Anna: “Hi. You’re early. I was just masturbating.“

Mark: “That makes me think of your vagina.“

You had me at “masturbating”. Those, by the way, are the first two lines of dialogue (after a quick prologue) in The Invention of Lying, a romantic comedy written and directed by Matthew Robinson and comic genius Ricky Gervais.

The story is set in an alternate reality where humans haven’t evolved the ability to tell a lie. Everyone tells the absolute truth and speaks very bluntly. Because of this, there is no such thing as fiction, deceit or even religion. That is, until screenwriter Mark Bellison (Ricky Gervais) has an epiphany and tells the world’s first lie…

Reader: “Hey! How about a spoiler warning first you jerk!“

Louis C.K., Ricky Gervais, Jennifer Garner

Oh calm down easily excited reader. You find all of that out within the first two minutes of the movie. Now, as I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted…

This romantic comedy is one of those “high concept” romantic comedies, which basically means that they tried to think outside the box while writing a romantic comedy. And they did. So far out of the box, in fact, that they almost completely left the “romance” out of the romantic comedy. Mark is in love with Anna (Jennifer Garner), but she doesn’t find him attractive and this keeps them from being more than just friends. For the entire movie. Mark pines for her, and she reminds him that he’s fat and has a snub nose. It’s very robotic, as is Jennifer’s performance. Even her mannerisms are robotic. We’re supposed to fall in love with her, but she is such a shallow person that we tend not to care about her. Stay friends. I’m good with that.

The comedy aspect is what shines. With a ton of great cameos from some very funny people like Christopher Guest, Tina Fey, Martin Starr, Stephanie March, Jason Bateman, Stephen Merchant, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Edward Norton amongst others, it’s hard to go wrong. The front end of the movie is packed with hilarious takes on what familiar situations would be like if people didn’t lie. And then there are more funny situations like that. And then even more…

I wish I could explain this & do it justice.

Okay, so they kind of run that concept into the ground. But not long into it they switch gears when Mark tells that first lie. Same dog, new tricks. No matter what Mark says, people believe him without a second thought because there is no such thing as deceit. Bank tellers, hot women on the street, casino pit bosses. All easily hoodwinked. And then they run that concept into the ground until finally Mark has to deal with the consequences of some of his more elaborate lies.

Overall, the movie is enjoyable if you’re looking for a comedy that will take things  to ridiculous places. Although it can be repetitive at times, Ricky Gervais’ performance helps keep things from feeling completely stale. Louis C.K. is great as Mark’s alcoholic best friend Greg. And you’ll love to hate Rob Lowe as Brad Kessler, another screenwriter who works at Lecture Films with Mark.

THE VERDICT
This movie reminds me of the first time I had sex. Lots of laughs, very little romance, and a fairly stiff and unconvincing performance by the leading lady who kept reminding me that I was fat and had a snub nose. Oh, to be 17 again…

High-school age Nerdfighters who subscribe to the New York Times will no doubt have read with interest the article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine entitled “Building a Better Teacher” (for those that don’t subscribe, the article can be found here. ) As I sat at the breakfast table reading that article, I found myself simultaneously laughing and trying very hard not to cry at the sheer stupidity of the entire article.
Anybody who has survived any amount of time in a public school system is probably used to bureaucratic hand-wringing about, well, whatever it is that worries bureaucrats who haven’t been in school for forty years. We get used to having our achievement measured by standardized tests that ignore the fact that we’re human beings in favor of the fact that if they test us enough, eventually they can make some sort of bar graph with it to present at a meeting. And apparently the revelation that has come out of thousands of hours of School Board bigwigs’ meetings is, in the words of the New York Times, “Teachers working in the same building, teaching the same grade, produced very different outcomes.”
WOW. Hold on a second here, NYT, do you mean to say… that teachers aren’t just automatons force-feeding information to unresponsive students? That there exists such a thing as a good teacher and a bad teacher? And…wait, are you trying to say that good teachers do a better job of teaching students than bad teachers? MY GOD, I THINK MY MIND JUST GOT BLOWN! (That’s the kind of high-quality logical thinking that they just don’t teach us in school!)
The article was all about what makes a good teacher, how to get good teachers teaching and how to make a bad teacher into a good teacher. I won’t talk too much about the contents here as you can go read it yourself; suffice to say that it quoted teachers and meta-teachers (I think they’re actually called “educational consultants or something; but meta-teacher is clearly a better word for the people that teach teachers how to teach) to try to make sense of, in a nutshell, how teachers should teach.
The one group of people that wasn’t consulted– and in fact was barely mentioned in the article, was the students. In failing to consult the students about good teaching, they are overlooking the one group that has done the most extensive and, more importantly, recent research on what makes a good teacher. Students know what good teachers are because they are forced into daily contact with both good and bad teachers. And any student, having done this involuntary research, can see that most of the NYT article is made up of various flavours of bunk, blarney, baloney and bullshit. For example: the concept of “The J-factor”, which is “a list of ways to inject a classroom with joy, from giving students nicknames to handing out vocabulary words in sealed envelopes to build suspense.”
*facepalm*
I don’t know about you, but the thing that gives me the most joy in a classroom is to be in the company of an enthusiastic and intelligent teacher who cares about the subject, cares about the students and genuinely wants every member of the class to both pass the exam and to get something out of the class that can’t be tested: a love of learning and a new way of thinking about our position as human beings in the world.
That’s what makes a good teacher. Not vocabulary words in sealed envelopes. What “educators” (which is apparently some sort of umbrella term that not only includes teachers, but also people who have never set foot in a classroom in a teaching capacity and spend their days dreaming up new “initiatives” to help teachers do their jobs better) don’t recognize is that STUDENTS WANT TO LEARN. We want to learn to pass the course, and we also want to learn because the vast majority of students do have a genuine love of knowledge and respect for human ingenuity and learning.
My recommendation for an “educator” who wants to know what makes a good teacher is that they visit Rate my Teachers. There they will find honest feedback and ideas for improvement from real students who are impacted by the decision of School Board bigwigs. Only when students and teachers are recognized as real human beings with emotions, faults and desires is either group able to make a real impact on the other.

***While I’m on the subject of teaching–and because the NYT article contained some discussion of the teaching of math– I would like to recommend that anybody who has ever struggled in math and blamed themselves read A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart. It’s a PDF file and you should download it because you’ll want to read it again and again. It is a fascinating, innovative and completely true exploration of the state of mathematical education today and if you have ever beaten yourself up over your perceived “mathematical incompetency”, you need to read it. It’s so good it might even serve as brain bleach after the extreme fail produced by the NYT article.

Please write in the comments about your views on education, teaching, your favorite and least favorite teachers and what makes them so.