Well, here's a little summary of what nobody tells you about being in your thirties:
You wake up with stiff muscles and creaky joints and need an hour or two to walk it off, even if the most strenuous thing you have done a day before was hoovering. Bastard treacherous body.
You can still down the pints as before, but you have to run to the toilet more. A lot more. And quicker.
You promised yourself that you will keep up to date with technology and internet developments but all of a sudden it takes you a while to catch up with new concepts. Trending on twitter...? Cloud storage? 4G internet network...? Erp?
Spending Fridays and Saturdays drinking excessively and Sundays recovering suddenly seems like a massive waste of time, there's box sets to watch, friends to meet up with for a coherent conversation, discount bowling in the mornings and sword fighting classes to go to and movies to see in Imax. Sleep all day..? No thanks.
Baby jokes have to get toned down a lot, as there's pregnant bellies everywhere you turn. Hm.
And to top it off, your mid life crisis is lurking to get you before you hit 40. I think we need a new name for it, unless the living expectancy suddenly went down a lot (unless you live in Glasgow, then your mid-life crisis should be at 25).
Happy 30th birthday Jimmy!
Sunday 26 May 2013
Wednesday 22 May 2013
We don't need no education
Education is something else now, isn't it?
When I was at school, we were taught facts and figures, had to memorise endless battles and names and themes and geological stratas and capital cities of various countries and schematic pictures of insides of various animals and equations and chemical compounds and tables of German verbs and as much as it was annoying and felt pointless then, you couldn't help but practice your memory every day, your stealth (because it's a long established tradition in Polish schools to prepare elaborate ways of cheating for class tests/exams) and as hard as you tried to pretend you just prepared for exams and forgot everything the next day - some of it sticks deep in your brain in a form of general knowledge sludge and it leads some people to win hundreds of thousands of local currency in these random tv shows and be brilliant in their careers because they just know things.
My impression of education in UK these days, based on going to different schools to interpret during parent's meetings and such, is, that it all tries so hard to be interesting and entertaining and group work oriented that it leads to chaos and confusion for everybody. There's a volcano model building one day and igloos the next but the average school child doesn't know where to go to see a volcano or where exactly Eskimos live. There's Vikings and personal development projects and cooking and learning about different cultures and some maths and it's all neither here nor there, shiny and superficial.
Then, the time comes for exams and panicky memorising all you can with an untrained memory and then you end your education and suddenly realise that you will not get two weeks off every month off any more, but rather - two weeks every year and that you are expected to know a lot of things without consulting uncle Google every five minutes and do a lot of things to somebody else's timetable instead of cute group projects in your own time. Quite a bit of mismatch there, between the idealistic changes in education, curriculum of excellence and personal development and then the boring, grinding reality of office/factory/shop work?
But hey, maybe these idealistic changes will spread. Maybe, soon, the fact that we have ready access to all human kind knowledge in our pockets will register. Maybe, in a generation or two, our civilisation will be that of tech idiot savants swimming in the cyberpunk-sque bright ocean of digital information, shiny and superficial, darting here and there and finding what they need at this particular moment, abandoning bits of knowledge as soon as they stop being relevant to their highly specialised tasks. And who can say if it's better or worse than being a monkey with an overdeveloped brain, crammed full of facts and figures you rarely use on top of primal fears and phobias.
Damn you, internet, it's all you fault as usual...
When I was at school, we were taught facts and figures, had to memorise endless battles and names and themes and geological stratas and capital cities of various countries and schematic pictures of insides of various animals and equations and chemical compounds and tables of German verbs and as much as it was annoying and felt pointless then, you couldn't help but practice your memory every day, your stealth (because it's a long established tradition in Polish schools to prepare elaborate ways of cheating for class tests/exams) and as hard as you tried to pretend you just prepared for exams and forgot everything the next day - some of it sticks deep in your brain in a form of general knowledge sludge and it leads some people to win hundreds of thousands of local currency in these random tv shows and be brilliant in their careers because they just know things.
My impression of education in UK these days, based on going to different schools to interpret during parent's meetings and such, is, that it all tries so hard to be interesting and entertaining and group work oriented that it leads to chaos and confusion for everybody. There's a volcano model building one day and igloos the next but the average school child doesn't know where to go to see a volcano or where exactly Eskimos live. There's Vikings and personal development projects and cooking and learning about different cultures and some maths and it's all neither here nor there, shiny and superficial.
Then, the time comes for exams and panicky memorising all you can with an untrained memory and then you end your education and suddenly realise that you will not get two weeks off every month off any more, but rather - two weeks every year and that you are expected to know a lot of things without consulting uncle Google every five minutes and do a lot of things to somebody else's timetable instead of cute group projects in your own time. Quite a bit of mismatch there, between the idealistic changes in education, curriculum of excellence and personal development and then the boring, grinding reality of office/factory/shop work?
But hey, maybe these idealistic changes will spread. Maybe, soon, the fact that we have ready access to all human kind knowledge in our pockets will register. Maybe, in a generation or two, our civilisation will be that of tech idiot savants swimming in the cyberpunk-sque bright ocean of digital information, shiny and superficial, darting here and there and finding what they need at this particular moment, abandoning bits of knowledge as soon as they stop being relevant to their highly specialised tasks. And who can say if it's better or worse than being a monkey with an overdeveloped brain, crammed full of facts and figures you rarely use on top of primal fears and phobias.
Damn you, internet, it's all you fault as usual...
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