Chancy

["Andy Gough, x4-2906, pager 513, CH2-59" <AGOUGH%FAB6@sc.intel.com>]

>The book we were reading at the time was _Being There_, by Jerzy
>Kozinski (I may well be misspelling his name), which was also adapted
>into a great Peter Sellers movie.  First I read the book with the
>primary intention of enjoying it, and the secondary intention of
>keeping up with discussions of it in class, rather than the literature
>student's usual intention of interpreting a book.  Later I simply paged
>through it at random, and read from the point that I opened the book
>until I came across something that I could warp into either a reference
>to the Bible or Freud.  The main theme in my paper were that to Chance
>(the main character), television (the book's main theme) was God.  I
>forget what my main Freud theme was, but I had a lot of ``evidence''
>there too.  I just kept searching for stuff until I had the volume of
>material I needed to write a paper of the expected length.  My bogus
>evidence was voluminous enough that I almost convinced myself!

Well, there is _some_ biblical allusion in _Being_There_, anyhow.  At the
end, for example, when Chancy walks on water.

>I was proud of the good grades I got from that project.  I was proud
>also of figuring out what it took to get good grades in that class.  I
>was however somewhat disillusioned to find that honest opinions and my
>writing and interpretation ability didn't matter so much as my ability
>to write for the intended reader.  Looking back, I value that class
>quite highly.  Not because it taught me anything about literature, but
>because it taught me an important art in writing, the art of writing
>for a specific audience.  Depending on the context, that art can be
>either ``readability'' or ``bullshitting''.
>
>I also got a nice story to tell about school from that class.
>
>	Steve Schonberger	microsoft!stevesc@uunet.uu.net
>	"Working under pressure is the sugar that we crave"

You've highlighted the biggest problem in the U.S. education system today.
Grades are not based on your achievement of being able to think for yourself
and form your own opinions; rather, grades are rewarded for pleasing the
teacher by feeding back to him the opinions that he holds.  So students
quickly learn to figure out what the teacher thinks is correct and recite
it back to him.  Free thinking, creativity, and independence are not
rewarded but punished.  The school system is set up to force students to
conform to a set of rules and norms--creativity is stomped out of everyone
to do this.

-andy

"We've gotta fight back, Sam.
 We're all in it together, kid."
		-- Harry Tuttle
		   "Brazil"