notes on Tuesday night

[alexr_rwx]

- Paul Graham is one hoopy frood. Not only does he write books about Lisp and essays about programming, he's put out a lovely essay on the topic of essay-ing, surprise and being observant, and the development of weird situations in society like comb-overs and highschool and English departments. Here's an excerpt:

For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.

Yes, this was on /., but a lot of you don't read /., and a lot of you who do wouldn't follow a link from it to read an essay about essays by a guy who normally writes about Lisp. But I've read the article, and it's excellent... and I recommend that you read it too. So there!

- Earlier on tonight, Mike and I got our compilers project working, with nearly six hours to spare. *jubilation*

- Everybody likes the new gym at Tech. Everybody. It's lovely, and I'm pleasantly sore :)

- Congrambolations to Tim neuroticmonk on his 100 days of uptime! We're from the band Limozeen!

Comments

[agonistes]

I think you know what I'm going to say.

[rheavatarin.livejournal.com]

I don't know. I think that by his definition of an essay, you would not consider that particular paper to be one. It is, however, extremely well written, persuasive, and interesting. Frankly, I agree with it muchly. Writing is too important a subject to be wasted on critical analyses of literature. Perhaps in high school, instead of four years of english they should split it into two years of rhetoric and two years of literature. Yes, I think that would be best. Hell, it doesn't even have to be creative rhetoric. Instead, given an array of topics or one tremendously vague topic write something interesting. It would force the students to both learn enough about a topic to find something interesting to them to write about, and (equally importantly) learn how to write interestingly about something that will make the topic interesting to someone else. I must mention this to Christin and bounce ideas off of her, perhaps to the gainful benefit of some future high school that she teaches at.

Thank you for alerting me to this most excellent idea. =)