Cerulean Cordillera

Archive for May, 2009

Just uploaded a bunch of photographs I’ve took back in London. Enjoy!

A Walk Down Memory Lane

I went back to London for a duration of two weeks in order to practice for and complete my G1 Exit Test. While there, I had some free time to walk around the neighborhood. This was the neighborhood I’ve grew up in, the neighborhood that left many memories.

The current machine that I have at home is a system that I’ve built by myself. Back then, I wanted to build a computer that’s roughly around $600, and I wanted it to be a pretty good computer. This was my first dual core machine, and I bought the cheapest dual-core processor out there on the market: an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+. I combined it with a mid-tier graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 7600GS), fetched a random motherboard that worked with these boards, and recycled the rest from my old Gateway computer. Needless to say, I felt pretty accomplished once the computer was in working condition. However, I did make a few mistakes. The first was to not choose a better and more reliable motherboard. The motherboard I got has some issues with its USB interfaces such that I had to buy a separate USB controller card, and it has been very annoying having to go to the back of the computer to plug in any USB devices. The other mistake I made was recycling my old hard drives. They’re beginning to show their age. On my second fresh install of Windows on this machine, those hard drives kept on giving errors, and now some of them spin so loudly that the computer is literally a motor when I turn it on. Such loud noises is a sign that my computer has reached dangerous, critical territory, and really does need replacement before some major catastrophe happens.

Of course, I can always just replace the hard drive, however, I always had an obsession with optimizing my technology, and one thing that really bothers me is my technology not running as efficiently as it could be. That’s why despite the fact that I can still use Microsoft Word on this machine (hey, what machine couldn’t?), I am planning a $1500 budget for a new computer. Clearly, I can’t keep this trend going, as having to build a new computer every two years would be expensive and wasteful. Therefore, this new computer design must be extremely modifiable and last me for a very, very long time. I guess this means I’ll need:

• An extremely flexible computer case for any kind of future changes, including water cooling if I ever feel ambitious enough.
• A motherboard and graphics card combination that supports Crossfire or SLI interface.
• A motherboard that supports DDR3 RAM
• A new hard drive

The other features are all flexible, as they can be changed cheaply and without much trouble. Though, considering that crossfire/SLI means I’ll need to get the latest high-end graphics cards, it just doesn’t seem appropriate to still be stuck on a regular processor, so I can probably still go for a low to middle-end quad core if my budget works out.

But in any case, I want to show you guys the computer case that caught my eye for this new build. It fits my criteria perfectly:

The CoolerMaster HAF 932

From the outside, this thing looks like a humvee. It’s not the most graceful looking box out there, but I’m always for practicality over style anyway, so to me this thing is beautiful. “HAF” stands for “High Air Flow,” and you can clearly see why it’s called that. The case uses mesh instead of full metal for most of the surfaces, thus making it extremely open for air to get in and out of the case. On top of that, there’s a huge fan in front (on the bottom), to the side, and on top of the case, plus a small fan at the back of the case. When all of them are turning, this thing is going to move tons of air. Having so many fans also means the RPM per fan can be slower, thus the case itself should be pretty quiet. The case comes with wheels, meaning I can finally throw away the wheeler board I built for my computer towers. The case will be quite big, but that’s not an issue as long as I don’t carry it around.

The case’s sheer size means that if I ever want to expand to a different motherboard or add more components into it, there will still be plenty of room. This thing can handle up to an extended-ATX motherboard even though I’ve only planned an ATX one. Apparently it’s got holes and space behind the motherboard tray for cable management, which is good for me because my current build has horrible cable management, and it takes a lot of effort to say… even pulling out a hard drive. This thing is designed to be extremely moddable, with screw holes in place for any kind of case cooling system – it’s even got little round holes for running water tubes. Lots of room for future expansions – it means if I get this case, I pretty much won’t be needing another case ever again.

Online reviews for this case have been stunningly positive, with many people (having tried it out) claiming that this is the best case that ever came out on the market. There are some negatives though. Lots of holes for airflow also means the case will get dusty easily, but that’s not something that can’t be fixed by monthly de-dusting. Aside from that, there’s not much other complaints. Another feature that really caught my eye is that mechanisms are in place for installing any hardware inside without the use of screwdrivers. The case can be opened with thumb screws, drives are all mounted  with built-in sliders in its toolless drive bays. Probably the only place I’ll need to use a screwdriver is the one time installation of the motherboard and CPU heatsink and fan (since for motherboards it’s a standard and the CPU depends on the motherboard and not the case). It sounds like installing things in this case will be very fun and easy.

For now, I need to raise that budget first. Expect this project to be carried out sometimes in late June or early July. When it happens, I’ll keep all of you updated.

Last Tuesday, I’ve began my job at AMD’s Markham location. This would be my very first official, proper job, as all of my previous jobs dealt with selling knives at people’s houses and working little jobs in little chain stores. I wouldn’t belittle those jobs, as I did feel I learned much from them, but AMD’s experience will be very, very different.

For one thing, this is an office job. I get a cubicle with plenty of space, and throughout the course of the day, instead of punching timeclocks and following orders strictly, I am free to meet my position’s needs however I want to. Hence, my performance is now completely my own responsibility. If I want to be outstanding, it’s totally up to me – my own initiative, and my own efforts. In a nutshell, I work in a team of roughly around eight to twelve people. Our team is called the Component Quality Engineering (CQE) team, and we basically do preliminary regression testing for component code that come out of the dev team. In order to perform my work, I need to first get familiar with the software associated with my tasks, then I need to gain the necessary experience to make good decisions in monitoring daily changes in the code, and there’s a bunch of miscellaneous tasks and responsibilities as well. All the people in the team have been very nice and helpful so far, especially my current mentor, who has been explaining things to me nonstop for the past week despite having his voice going noticeably hoarse at least twice now. I will try to learn quickly to make their jobs easier.

The software we’re working on is basically the various drivers for AMD’s graphic cards (the ATI cards). Particularly, I volunteered for the application portion of these drivers. The most significant thing I’ll be doing testing for is ATI’s Catalyst Control Panel (CCC). This is a rather visible piece of software that everybody who has an ATI card must be very familiar with, and I have to say, being a part of this company culture, seeing the scale and orderliness of the corporate system here, and working on something that will enter so many gamer’s daily lives – all these makes me feel quite important. It looks like I’ll have to learn VB for this job, but more importantly, I’ll be getting real experience and knowledge on how the software development works in these huge and successful companies, and I think that will probably be the most valuable part of this experience.

Since the past Wednesday, I’ve started driving to work. Traffic in the morning was alright, but traffic in the afternoon is usually horrible. It takes about a bit less than an hour in the morning to get to work, and up to an hour and a half in the afternoon to get back home. The good thing, however, is that I’m already getting lots and lots of driving experience. I look forward to see how incredible of a driver I’d be after sixteen months of driving like this. As long as I’m careful, I’ll be able to avoid accidents. Access to a car also means quite a bit of freedom that I never had before. All of a sudden, my world no longer extends only a few blocks outward from UofT, although I have no idea what new possibilities are opened up. It’s like playing Age of Empires 2 and having just researched the cartography tech – all of a sudden you can see the terrain of the rest of the world, but there’s still the fog of war preventing you from knowing what’s really in those places. Haha, what a geeky metaphor, though I’m sure if anyone has played any RTS game they’d know what I’m talking about.

To everyone else who are starting their jobs: good luck, work hard, and be smart!

Test location: Clinton, Ontario

Test environment:

• one traffic light
• two major roads
• lots of little neighborhood drives
• lots of stop signs
• lots of pedestrians
• maximum speed 50km/h

Test results: Flawless except for one mistake of hesitating during green left turn arrow, risky, but instructor was nice enough to not consider it an instant fail. Final result 90%

I am now a driver

Let me summarize what happened.

There’s this guy, called Steve. He has a mother. One day, his mother was murdered by their landlord. So what does Steve do?

Well, he goes onto the street and finds a random person. He tells the random person about the story and highlights the injustice of the situation and the grief that he felt. The random person sympathizes, but decides to move on like you’d expect any normal person would. Steve however blocks his way, and tries to physically constrain him, yell into his ear, and attempt to forcing him to help Steve do something about the murder.

Then when the police come to take him away for assault. Steve cries “so what?! The inconvenience I’ve caused him is nothing when compared to the fact that my mom was murdered!”

See, this is one reason why I’m not very trusting of a lot of these advocacy groups. They tend to be fueled primarily through emotions when the problems that they’re trying to address mostly require rational solutions. Of course, they know this too, but they’re prone to emotional outbursts, like this one, that only complicates things and does nothing to help solve them.

Also, why does every advocacy group always have to label someone as the villain? The world is way more complicated than the black and white concept of good and evil, and most of these sad and horrible things are the results of decades after decades of misunderstandings and failed negotiations. Every time a group is labeled as evil, I can’t help but to wonder whether that group can really be blamed given the situation they had to deal with.

Story here
Youtube video here and here.

Ah, just remembered something that I wanted to show you guys a while back, but couldn’t because I had to focus on exam studying. A long time ago, somebody showed me concepts of a laser keyboard that looked like this:

At the time, this looked so futuristic that I thought it was only a concept pic somebody made in photoshop to illustrate what keyboards could look like in the future. At least, that’s what I thought until recently, when I found a bunch of youtube videos testing out the thing. Apparently this is really a commercial product now. It costs at around $200. So, here you go, I’m talking about something that came out and hit the geek market as early as 2005 as if it’s the next new thing.

Check out the video here.

According to various reviews, the keyboard is quite usable, although it feels different at first. Apparently if I switch to one of these, I wouldn’t be able to type at the same speed as I currently can. Aside from that, apparently this is supposed to work quite flawlessly. Now I wonder how long it would take for laptops to start adopting this kind of keyboard as norm.

Imagine that. Take a tablet PC, get rid of the keyboard component, and you get just a touch screen. Right beside the webcam hole on top of the screen you get another adjustable laser head that projects a virtual keyboard. A small, thin plastic platform can slide down from behind the screen and fold over to provide a platform for the keyboard if you can’t find other flat surfaces (e.g. sitting on the grass). To make the screen sit still, use some sort of stand like they use for photo frames. The result would be a PC that’s, quite simply, a screen (although it would be a thick screen to house all the hardware).

One thing I wonder is whether the virtual keyboard can detect the act of “holding down” a key. Though I guess if you really need to hold down a key for certain applications and the virtual keboard can’t do it, there’s always the option to get an extra USB keyboard.

Meanwhile, I saw this in a magazine the other day:

And I want it…

On some Internet forum a while back, I encountered a poster who declared his (or her) utter hatred for Shakespeare. From the forum’s demographics, it was clear that this person was a Canadian high school student who was most likely from Ontario. The poster ranted about how Shakespeare was boring, archaic, obsolete, and stupid.

I knew exactly what this person meant. We read Twelfth Night in grade nine, Julius Caesar in grade ten, Macbeth in grade eleven, and Hamlet in grade twelve, and that was more than what I needed to confirm that Shakespeare’s perceived value in high school English education is far from the actual value it brings to the students who had to study it as a mandatory topic. See, the value of Shakespeare in the educated world is almost treated like a religion – everybody acknowledges Shakespeare’s brilliance, everybody says that we must learn Shakespeare; everybody agrees that Shakespeare is a genius, and one who does not know Shakespeare must be uneducated. Yet it seems that nobody could actually put forth a convincing argument on the real practical values of Shakespeare for people who aren’t English majors.

At least, if there is a convincing argument, it certainly isn’t well known – at the very least the high school students themselves have never heard of it. So, I will dedicate this post to examine this subject.

The Godlike Status of Shakespeare

Some people consider Shakespeare to be the best writer in the history of the world. Actually, I think this is quite a popular view. The problem with convincing anyone with this kind of view, though, is that the view itself is highly personal. Consider this: for me to value a piece of writing, the author doesn’t matter, what matters is the text itself – what words are used, in what order, to give what meaning, on both the local (crafting sentences) and the global (overall coherence and impression of the entire work) scale. And even then, it only matters in what images it triggers in my mind and how it affects me, and this is often the result of both the text itself and my own imaginative associations. Different people obviously have different life experiences causing them to make different associations, so ultimately, this basically means the reader interprets the meaning. If the value of a piece of writing is so subjective an idea, then how do you objectively gauge Shakespeare’s “good-ness” as a writer? You can’t. There is no such thing as an objectively best writer in the history of the world. When we’re talking about “best” writers, it’s always somebody’s opinion.

But opinions, of course, count if there exists a large, authoritative common opinion among the millions of individual opinions out there. Is this the case for Shakespeare? Well, there is certainly authority, but the authority isn’t large. University professors, English graduates, novelists, or other elite members of the literary society make up this authority. They’re often well-respected people, and because of this, their values somehow become the social norm despite the fact that they themselves make horrible samples of the general population. Most of them have high respect for Shakespeare, probably because they’ve scrutinized Shakespeare endlessly and found oodles of meaningful literary connections while doing so. Are they untrustworthy people? Of course not. Although academics have a tendency to get stuck in their own values and their own thoughts, they’re at least honest in that whatever they claim is indeed backed by lots of academic work. So, from this we can see that Shakespeare probably is superior to other texts in ways academic in nature. Perhaps the language and composition of a Shakespearean work offers far more interpretation potential than any lesser works, or perhaps Shakespeare’s use of literary devices are incredibly consistent and beautiful. I don’t doubt this, but this only justifies Shakespeare’s position on an academic ranking of literary works, it doesn’t justify Shakespeare’s position in a high school curriculum.

The important thing to realize here is that when we’re talking about Shakespeare in a high school classroom, then lots of things change. Academics analyze Shakespeare because they want to, they analyze Shakespeare of their own free will, and they usually have plenty of background to allow actual progress and work to come out of their analysis. Meanwhile, Shakespeare is mostly forced on high school students with little background. What the teacher usually does is to give a quick lesson on the context of Shakespeare, which is never really enough. This misfit between Shakespeare and the high school students who tries to analyze it certainly yields lots of wasted time with very little benefits. Yet, Shakespeare continues to persist as a central topic of high school English education. The bottom line is that the reputation of Shakespeare himself should not matter, if it’s a misfit, then it is a problem.

What Education Tries To Achieve

English education obviously doesn’t teach English. Everybody who grew up in the English-speaking world knows English by heart because they practice it every day as their only method of verbal communication. The very basic role of English education is to fine-tune people’s English skills, to work out the little bugs and errors caused by bad habits. This would be the reinforcement of grammar rules, fixing awkward sentences, discouraging passive tense, etc… Past this, English education tries to achieve two key goals: to make people understand and appreciate literature of all kinds, and to build critical thinking and communication skills. Literature may include short stories, poetry, play scripts, novels – basically any literary arts. Given a piece of literature, English education builds critical thinking and communication skills by having people analyze the literature and present the results in essay, debate, or presentation format. For this reason, it makes more sense to call the English class a “Literary Arts and Reasoning” class, and it’s only called the English class due to historical and cultural reasons. A high school English class, of course, has one more function – it must prepare college-bound students for college-level materials. Thus, we have a focus on essay writing as well as literary analysis.

Based on these goals, we can set a number of qualities that a high school student must meet, and thus the role of English education is simply to help students meet those qualities.

• A successful student in English should have complete mastery of rules and styles of the English language.
• A successful student in English should have good general knowledge on various aspects of literature.
• A successful student in English should have the ability to think critically about any issue and form ideas.
• A successful student in English should be able to communicate the aforementioned ideas to others through various formal or informal ways with clarity and efficiency.

Mastery of the English language will allow a person to talk and write well. Being able to think critically about issues will allow a person to develop ideas that have value. The last point about communication is merely connecting these two things together, and thus allow a person to easily show other people their ideas. And lastly, general knowledge on literature puts all these skills in the context of an English classroom. If a student meets all these qualities, then he would write essays with thought-provoking content and flawless language, deliver oral presentations with charisma and good material, he should be able to tell you the rules of writing a limerick or haiku, describe the general flow of a short story, and, of course, if you ask him who wrote War and Peace, he should easily respond Tolstoy. Now, an excellent English student should not only be able to do all of the above, but also create art by being able to compose all sorts of writings, whether it be a personal reflection, a poem, a satirical piece, or a newspaper article. Unfortunately, this requirement of creativity doesn’t exist in most English classrooms. “English” is usually separated from “Creative Writing.” I don’t know what kind of pessimistic philosophy is behind this, but until things change, English classes usually don’t require artistic creativity.

Where Does Shakespeare Fit Into All This?

The idea, of course, is that Shakespeare is a piece of literary text. Students ought to read it, understand it, appreciate it, analyze it, gain insight from it, and do presentations and write essays on it. This is all fine except for the misfit I mentioned a while back. If we want a piece of literary text for students to read, understand, appreciate, analyze, gain insight, and do presentations and write essays on, Shakespeare is not the optimum choice. In fact, it’s a horrible choice. Shakespeare is much too mature, too archaic, and too mentally inaccessible for the high school students’ psychology.

When a person is in high school, he generally does not know what he wants to do in life. And in cases where he does, it most likely will not be anywhere close to literary analysis as an academic. Over the past decades, interest in science and engineering fields increased and interest in humanities and the liberal arts continued to decrease. And even within humanities, pure English is not the dominating option. In a high school discrete mathematics classroom, an informal poll showed that more than 90% of students were Engineering-bound (self-report), can similar results be said about English classrooms? Do most people in an English classroom want a career that deals with pure English and literature? Of course not. English is a mandatory subject that everyone must take, so it would not be surprising if the students in it are quite diverse in their interests.

Why is English a mandatory subject? Because education experts believe that the skills and knowledge taught by an English class is useful in a wide spectrum of careers and academic subjects. This is certainly true, but we’ve gotta look at exactly which skills are useful in this manner and which skills aren’t. To survive as an educated human being, having critical thinking skills and decent writing skills is a must. Presentation skills are also very important to someone’s success in both career and social situations. However, a chartered accountant would never need to know any literary work in detail. We can argue that he needs some general knowledge on literary works in order to qualify as an educated human being, but merely knowing a few titles, their authors, and (possibly) their importance would be enough by most people’s standards. Basically, the useful skills that apply to everyone are the non-English specific skills like critical thinking and communication, while non-English specific stuff is only important in that they serve as general knowledge.

If the students in an English class have diverse interests, then most likely most of them would not be inherently interested in literature, not to mention literary analysis. Give them a good poem, some would like the poem because it truly spoke to them, some would subconsciously force themselves to like the poem just because they’re supposed to, and the rest would probably see no point in a bunch of words put together in a (as they’re told) beautiful and meaningful way. If you ask them to do literary analysis on a piece of literature, some would love the idea of analyzing anything, but the vast majority would find that their appeal depends heavily on what it is that they’re analyzing. Basically, if the subject is interesting, then writing an essay on it is much more enjoyable, and if the subject is boring, then nobody likes writing an essay on it. Since the English class at its roots is about literature, most of the raw materials students analyze should be literary works. The question here is which literary work we should choose for analysis.

Writing an essay or doing a presentation are ultimately what builds the student’s critical thinking and communication skills, so therefore we must encourage essay writing and making oral presentations. Encouraging an activity, of course, means finding ways to make the activity more appealing and enjoyable. Previously, we’ve noted that the appeal of these activities in an English classroom depends a lot on the intrinsic interest of the subject matter. Shakespeare lacks this intrinsic interest, and this is what makes Shakespeare a horrible choice of subject for literary analysis, essay writing, and doing presentations.

There are actually two reasons for what makes Shakespeare a horrible choice. To begin, Shakespeare is bland and dry. I once heard of a defense on Shakespeare that went something like this:

Why Shakespeare? Because it is amazing! Full of love and life, humor, fantasy, and tragedy.

Though this may be true to an academic, it certainly does not hold water for high school students. To them, The Simpsons has way more humor, Harry Potter offers way more fantasy, and movies like Titanic are way more tragic. Shakespeare is written for the old Victorian audience and whomever pompous or old fashioned enough to still say they greatly enjoy Shakespeare in later times. If we’re talking about sheer entertainment value (what makes high school students interested), Shakespeare is much too outdated. The modern context renders whatever humor Shakespeare tried to create into corny bad jokes that nobody gets. Twelfth Night is supposed to be a comedy, yet despite having heard an audiocassette version and watched a video version with the rest of class, I did not remember a single moment where the class burst into laughter (heck, I don’t even remember anyone laughing by themselves). The modern “taste” for fantasy is also vastly different from what fantasy is common in Shakespeare’s time. When we look at Tolkien’s middle-earth, for example, we see a cool and mature world where characters involve themselves in passionate struggles where the future of the world is at stake. Meanwhile, if we look at something like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, we see corny faeries talking in strange language, and already we feel the squickiness. Lastly, Shakespeare’s known for his tragedies, yet how many people honestly cried when reading or watching the most famous example – Romeo and Juliet? Certainly I haven’t heard stories where a classroom was silenced by the sadness that emanated from the book, and if I have, no doubt people would have considered it strange. It is clear that in the modern context, Shakespeare has lost most of its entertainment value, thus making it bland and dry.

Of course, we do not read things in English purely for entertainment, but if the goal is to get students interested in analyzing and writing an essay on a literary work, then that literary work has to be at least somewhat entertaining. This is not the only problem with Shakespeare, however. Let’s pretend for a minute that value of entertainment is to be completely ignored. We would then judge texts based on their ability to inspire thoughts. After all, the whole point of literary analysis is to read a piece of literature, have it inspire thoughts within our minds, which turns into connections between ideas – our interpretation of the text, and our last task would be to present this idea in some manner.

Shakespeare is also horrible at inspiring thoughts in all except for the academic because its intended audience does not include modern laypeople. Few people can understand original Shakespeare text. I consider myself to have been a relatively good English student, yet when confronted with Shakespeare’s original text back then, it was impossible to derive anything except for bits and traces of surface meaning, which I can then try to string together to get a plot so basic that it’s not good for anything. The difficulty of understanding Shakespeare lies mostly in the fact that the characters talk much too differently than how modern people talk, and therefore it’s difficult to tell which parts are important and which parts aren’t. If you consider all parts to be important, then you lose the flow of the play, and of course, regarding any important parts as unimportant would certainly cause confusion as important plot points would be missed. Shakespearean text is also filled with metaphors everywhere, such that any attempt to really get what the characters are trying to say is like trying to find a needle in a sea of metaphors. Each metaphor in turn has a million possibilities of what it could symbolize and how it can be interpreted. Faced with all these difficulties, what laypeople like me (and probably the vast majority of high school students) must do in coping is to ask the teacher or a help text (i.e. a “modern translated version”) for explanations. However, once that happens, any of the student’s interpretation would be an interpretation of some interpretation of Shakespeare. It is no longer a direct analysis off the text, so thus it becomes a practice much less meaningful and valuable.

So, Shakespeare lacks entertainment value, which means it doesn’t generate interest in high school students for literary analysis. On top of that, Shakespeare’s archaic language and outdated plot situations makes it so that any quality, original literary analysis is excruciatingly difficult for high school students. So not only are high school students forced to do a task that is boring to begin with, the task is a difficult one too. This inevitably leads to half-assed essay attempts, students trying to make themselves sound knowledgeable in presentations when they know all they’re doing is regurgitating what they’re told, and months of wasted class time that could’ve been spent on something much more constructive.

Popular Defenses for Shakespeare

One popular defense goes something like this:

Shakespeare is undeniably one of the greatest authors/playwrights in history. How could students receive a quality education without studying someone so influential to the English language?

This argument makes no sense. Maxwell’s equations are incredibly influential to modern theory of electromagnetism, all of mathematics ultimately come from the axioms of set theory, history is mostly dominated by the social and economic aspects of society, yet it would be crazy to expect beginners to start with them. We don’t start off our learning in a field by diving straight at the “most influential.” Instead, we find an easy entry point, build up our knowledge and interest with easy things, then we take baby steps toward more and more difficult things. In electricity, we start with simple concepts like voltage and current. In math, we learn basic operations like addition and subtraction. In history, we begin by treating history as a story of “what happened.” Similarly, just because “Shakespeare is very influential to the English language” does not mean Shakespeare fits the high school level.

Note that, it may be a good argument to say that Shakespeare is indeed important, so therefore people should know Shakespeare, his works, and their importance. But note that this doesn’t have to come from literary analysis. A fact-based research project is more than enough to establish Shakespeare’s place in the literary world. For critical thinking and literary analysis, choose other easier, more effective texts.

Here’s another popular defense:

All reading is good for your brain, but reading something as syntactically complex as Shakespeare’s writing is especially good for your brain. It’s difficult for many to comprehend at first because you’re basically learning an entire new way of reading. It is strengthening your mental capacity.

This is, of course, based on the assumption that the brain is like a muscle that can be worked for strengthening. This assumption itself is sketchy enough, but even if we assume it is true, is it worth it? High school English is filled with difficult analysis, even for works that are deemed interesting. So I can easily make the argument that even if Shakespeare is “especially good” for your brain, without Shakespeare the curriculum is already good enough for your brain. There’s also the problem that Shakespeare can prove to be too difficult. An obese man cannot lift the entire stack of weights on his first exercise. For a good deal of learning to occur, the student should be able to read the text and form his own ideas, and any interaction between student and teacher should start with the student putting out his idea for discussion. If at any time the teacher is telling the student what this and that means, then it is no longer a mental exercise any more than merely memorization and regurgitation, yet this almost always happen. In weightlifting metaphor, this would be akin to somebody cheating by letting someone else manually lift the weights as he push the levers – the point of lifting that much weight would be lost. You see the result when students often will be able to put up a decent presentation, but if the presentation is interrupted by a knowledgeable person who attempts to debate the presenters on their points, then chances are they wouldn’t be able to put up a good debate. This would show that their grasp on the material is really thin.

There’s also an inherent problem with the sequential design flow here. The design flow of learning presented by this defense is that learning is threefold:

1. Learning comes from understanding the text
2. Learning comes from developing ideas through critical thinking
3. Learning comes from communicating ideas through writing essays or making presentations

Of course, if you don’t finish 1), you’re barred from even starting 2) or 3). Any crappy Shakespeare essay is likely the result of not being able to finish 1) and then half-assing 2) and 3), and there are certainly lots of crappy Shakespeare essays. This design flow, though sequential in nature, is still worth it if the benefit from 1) is large enough to offset the weight of losing potential gains in 2) and 3). We know how important critical thinking and communication skills are, and I’m pretty confident in saying that the potential (unlikely) gains in 1) is not enough to offset the potential (likely) losses in 2) and 3).

What we should use the Shakespeare time for instead? Simple. Looking at how horrible the logic structures are in many students’ essays, more critical thinking certainly wouldn’t hurt. We could use the time to offer more chances for critical thinking, bring up more varieties of topics, hold live or written/online debates, and write opinion pieces (good opinions must be supplemented by logic). We could also use the time to offer chances for students to develop their creative side by incorporating creative writing elements into the class. Works of creativity, of course, should not be graded, but instead should be published, displayed, and reviewed by peers. This way, people wouldn’t frustrate at the inherent subjectivity of marks, and instead try their best at writing for the incentives of publication and positive reviews.

Here’s another popular defense:

Not everything that we learn in school is meant to be used in daily life. Of course, very few people find general Shakespearean knowledge to be useful. However, sometimes the value in learning something is not literal, but can be found in the experience and how it affects our mind. Someone who studies and really learns Shakespeare will develop mental synaptic connections that someone who doesn’t study Shakespeare will not have. To say that more simply, learning something that you find difficult will make you an overall smarter person.

If not for the last sentence here, I would’ve said that this defense is the “Shakespeare is magic” defense, but the last sentence makes it more respectable. Mental synaptic connections, however, are developed by any kind of learning. It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare, thus making this argument moot. There are plenty of texts to choose from that have a similar degree of difficult (albeit in other ways) that are more likely to be enjoyed by high school students.

Next defense:

Once you get past the difficulty of the writing-style (which DOES become easy to read, after awhile) there are great stories and lessons to be learned in the works of Shakespeare.

My first contention is with the assumption that Shakespeare becomes easy to read after a while. From a student’s perspective, this is not enough. Of course, when I read Hamlet in grade twelve, it was easier to read, but not to the point where I can understand every word and meaning and weigh their importance in the story. And it seems that unless I’m able to do that, I will not be able to write good analysis on it. Other students don’t seem to have done a better job than I had. So although it becomes easier to read after a while, the degree of change is not enough to make Shakespeare’s language any less of a problem.

My second contention here is with the assertion that “there are great stories and lessons to be learned in the works of Shakespeare.” I may agree with it if this is limited only to a literary context – as in, all the “lessons to be learned” are literary lessons (i.e. how to craft words to create meaning). However, if we take this literally, then the defender here is basically telling us that:

1. Shakespeare has good story
2. We can learn lessons from Shakespeare’s story (sorta like a “the moral of the story” kinda thing)

And these two assertions are subjective. My subjective position is that we have way better stories that can be considered “good” that “teach us lessons.”

Next defense:

Shakespeare, probably more than anyone else, is responsible for so many of the word nuances, figures of speech, and the word abstracts of the English language. I would feel less articulate if I didn’t study Shakespeare in high school. Sometimes reading his plays may have seemed very tedious but the end result was a more erudite you.

This is a defense that I find quite logical. The idea is that Shakespeare has so much influence in the English language that lots of other works, sayings, and random little things in life make references to Shakespearean works. However, in the same vein of thought, why not teach Greek Mythology? Why not teach the Holy Bible? Meanwhile, I wonder if this defender’s experiences can be generalized as the norm. I don’t remember the last time I’ve heard of a reference to Shakespeare in everyday life. I know they pop up every now and then, but they seem to be so rare that the effect of not recognizing them is negligible.

Here’s another one:

Shakespeare’s themes, characterisations and beauty of language are beyond comparison in my opinion and I think everyone should be given exposure to the master.

Another wholly subjective argument.

To me, “beauty” is a quality that appeals to the emotions. I was never emotionally affected in an impressive way by Shakespeare’s plays. To me, Shakespeare’s themes are poorly portrayed, Shakespeare’s characters are corny and difficult to relate to, if only because I wasn’t trying to become King or avenge a ghost. The characters do not impress me. Instead, I pity their absurdity and extraordinary weakness. Heeding superstitions, cannot let go of a duty that does nobody good… undeserved but stubbornly respected family values… how are these in any way beautiful? Yes, they’re understandable given the context, but the context itself is not very beautiful to begin with.

And Shakespeare’s writing style being beautiful? For a writing style to be beautiful, it either has to be succinct and efficient, or artistically written in such a way that it moves my emotions. Shakespeare is certainly not the former, and it has never accomplished the latter.

The last argument is something that many people says, so I generalize it as follows:

Shakespeare is a valuable piece of art that everyone should read and appreciate.

I’ve admitted that Shakespeare probably has academic value. Value as art? Very debatable. Where is value in a piece of art? Usually, people agree that the value of art comes from two aspects:

1. Art’s ability to entertain people
2. Art’s ability to inspire thoughts in people

A piece of art is better at entertaining people if:

1. People are entertained quickly (i.e. if it’s a joke, people get it quickly)
2. People are entertained greatly (i.e. people are emotionally affected on a deep level)
3. Lots of people are entertained (i.e. it’s not just the crazy pompous professor is affected)

A piece of art is better at inspiring thoughts in people if:

1. People can easily understand it (because confusion does not generate ideas)
2. People can relate other things in life to it (because thoughts are made of connections between ideas)

Clearly, Shakespeare passes none of the above criteria for most people. Shakespeare can be entertaining to people who mentally live in the old times (mostly academics who work with that context a lot), and it can easily inspire thoughts in people who have the experience and background to easily understand it and relate things to it (mostly academics, again). So, if most people can’t see the value, then does the value exist? Yes, but such esoteric value would be rendered insignificant in magnitude.

Ending Thoughts

Well, I’ve presented my case for Shakespeare to be scrapped from high school curriculums and replaced with other material that brings more efficient learning. As for what those other materials are, that’s outside of the scope of this post. It’s pretty obvious that Shakespeare isn’t the best choice for its slot of time, so logically it’s definitely possible to find a better alternative. Leave Shakespeare to the academics, give students something within their abilities, and then maybe they’ll actually learn things from it instead of regurgitating cliched information to pass the essays and waste time in doing so.

Unofficial marks just came out. The marks fit with what I expected after final exams:

Operating Systems: 90
Computer Hardware: 85
Dynamic Systems & Control: 70
Engineering Economics: 68

Engineering Economics turned out to be the second lowest mark I’ve ever gotten in a university course. Oh well, it wasn’t that important anyway. It looks like I’m still on track with my plan, so I guess that’s a good thing.

Meanwhile, in case some people are wondering where I am. I’m in London until my G2 test on the 15th, then regardless of result I’ll be heading back to Toronto right after.

Final exams have finally ended. I guess I’ll first talk about preliminary results. I had four courses the past term:

• Computer Hardware
• Engineering Economics
• Dynamic Systems & Control
• Operating Systems

Out of the four courses, Hardware and OS were the courses most relevant to my studies, and thus I wanted high marks in those. Engineering Economics was something semi-relevant, while Control Systems is simply a course I had to take to fulfill my kernel requirement. Prior to exams, I had above-average marks in everything except for Engineering Economics. There were four quizzes in econ prior to the final exam, and I had underestimated every single one of them. The core concepts are easy enough and the math is a joke, but I guess having to deal with so many pieces of information in so limited amount of time always gets me at the end. I haven’t failed this much in a course since Signals and Systems in second year.

So I tried my best and gave most of my exam prep time to the econ course hoping for an awesome final mark to balance it out. Despite that, I still made a huge mistake on the final exam. There were five problems where each one would take me about 30 minutes straight of calculations and number crunching. Yet, on the fourth question, I used the wrong approach at the beginning, and only realized how stupid the approach was after I finished the problem. I then had about 30 minutes left, and I had to rush the fourth question again in 15 minutes with the correct approach, and then finish the last question in 15 minutes. Countless errors probably would’ve been made in that mad rushing, lol. I’m hoping the best for that course. Hopefully I didn’t fail.

The other courses are roughly okay. I feel pretty good about my Hardware exam. I didn’t do so well in Control Systems, but I had a pretty good average going into it, and it’s not like I need a good mark in that course. The best news (yet also the most risky news) is probably Operating Systems. Apparently, my adjusted exam mark was a 90%, which combined with near perfect labs mean I’ll get above 90% in the end. However, the professor posted a mark sheet on the course website, and the calculations in there counted my midterm mark of zero. The midterm really shouldn’t be counted since I submitted a petition (I was honestly quite sick on that day). I’m going to hope that an administrative error wouldn’t turn my well-deserved 90+ into a 68.

Now, in terms of the stuff I’ve learned… I’m quite content. Hardware was basically a finish-off of Digital Systems in second year, and it’s nice to learn about computer algorithms for circuit simplification, plus all those different techniques for building all sorts of different types of finite state machines. I’m pretty confident in all those methods now, so that’s good. Despite my horrible mark prospects in economics, I’ve also learned quite a bit from there as it gave a pretty good overview on how engineering firms do all their cost calculations and taxes. I know that if I ever had to do these things, I’m definitely seeking computer-aided help, or if none exist, I’ll program my own (I hate mindless number crunching by hand!). Control systems gave me some good practice in Laplace transforms and matrix operations although I have no idea where I’ll actually use it. And lastly, Operating Systems was the most valuable course this term. I can actually look into various parts of my computer and understand what used to be jibberish to me. The textbook is also a treasure, it’s so well written and so informative that I’ll probably read it just for fun in the future if I ever have the chance.

So, upcoming events now for me include my second attempt at the G2 test on May 11th, and beginning of work at AMD on May 18th. Some day in the near future I’ll also be moving into my new room on the second floor. At residence, Cici and I have already switched into cooking mode. No more eating at Fung, and after two days of successful cooking, it’s good to know I haven’t lost my stirfry skills . Eating awesome homemade food is both exciting and wonderful, especially after a year of badly-made cafe food and expensive restaurants.

As the summer begin, I will be adding more sections to this blog. My MMORPG and Philosophy pages will grow whenever I feel the inspiration to write. Meanwhile, there’s this project I want to attempt. I want to write a beginner’s primer on digital photography (the really basics), and also take lots of pictures – especially around campus during beautiful scenes – and make a library of them. I think too often we students are too busy thinking about our courses, trying to get high GPAs, tests, exams, and stressful things, that the campus – which is supposed to be this romantic and stimulating environment – becomes merely this excruciating distance between our homes and our classes that we have to walk through every day. I saw people taking photographs of the cherry trees behind Robarts yesterday, when the sun was just above the line of houses to the west. It was beautiful, and it would be nice if that moment was captured.