Brettia

As it turns out, I have less time than I thought. Here is the plan:

1. Buy house this weekend.
2. Sell house next week.
3. Move stuff out of house next weekend.
4. Take finals next Monday and Tuesday.
5. Drive to Missouri with cat, family, and necessary belongings.
6. Spend about two weeks in Missouri with family, do the Christmas thing.
7. Drive to Milwaukee with cat, family, and necessary belongings, move into house.
8. Start school.
9. Move everything else in when truck comes.
10. Cry.
11. Christmas!

I bet you saw some things in there that don’t make much sense. Here’s the full explanation:
I’m not moving to Boise. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s a good thing because it means that mom will work for a much more solid, faster-growing company (Kohl’s Department Stores). It’s also a good thing for mom because they have a HR department that doesn’t suck (unlike Albertsons’). And there’s some sort of a double-digit percentage pay raise thrown in too. It’s definitely good for her. For my dad, nothing really changes, though the job market for his field is probably better in Milwaukee (where Kohls is headquartered). My brother is ever indifferent, though he was somewhat sad because Wisconsin doesn’t have that many places to ride his dirtbike (a good example of where his priorities lie).

As for me…hmm. Schools are much better there than in Idaho or in Arizona (Wisconsin is ranked second in the nation), and there are several large universities (University of Wisconsin, Marquette, etc) with campuses there. I’ll be even farther from Arizona, but it’s not like that matters much with the Internet and airplanes and such. Whether I’m in Hawaii, Athens, or Glendale, Arizona, it’s all the same thing: a place that isn’t within Cave Creek Unified School District’s borders. I will be closer to home (as in Missouri), though, and I’ll be in an unexplored geographical region (my family has pretty much done the western U.S.). Chicago is only about 70 miles down the highway (or less), and Madison is an hour away, depending on which suburb you live in. Minneapolis is probably half-a-day’s drive away, as are St. Louis and Springfield, Illinois. Milwaukee and Springfield are almost exactly 500 miles apart as the crow flies, which is nothing compared to the 750 miles we drive each year to Colorado (or used to drive each year to Colorado, since going there will be out of the question except by plane). Also, highways from Wisconsin to Missouri are much more direct than those from Arizona to Colorado, so the drive is probably only about seven hours, maximum.

One of the drawbacks is that I won’t get to go to that neat technology high school in Boise, though I’d been hearing rumors that it wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, which could be the case (I wasn’t all that impressed with the tour when we were there). The high school that I will most likely be attending in Wisconsin is Oconomowoc High School (yes, Oconomowoc is a real word and a real place, and it really does have five vowels in it, all of which are o’s), which looks pretty good, at least after looking at it on the Internet. It offers many advanced courses and there is a good chance that it will become an IB-accredited school next year, which would be great. The only courses that it doesn’t offer are AP European History (which I am currently enrolled in) and web development. If I want to still get my AP Euro credit, I might be able to strike a deal with CSHS and Mrs. Cheeseman-Meyer so that I can independently distance-learn.

The lack of technology courses in any high school that I’ve looked at is startling. I’ve seen a lot of CAD, automotive technology, and graphic design offerings, but nothing in the web development or programming areas. Even worse, if I attend Oconomowoc, I probably won’t get to work on their website because they’re using some kind of Java-based (I think) professional site management solution that doesn’t really need any work except for maintenance. I’ve already gotten fed up with maintenance-type stuff at CSHS, so I most definitely do not want to get involved in something like that. It’s hard not to feel uneasy about moving to an area where it seems that your skills aren’t valued even though you can easily earn seven figures doing it fulltime (see SitePoint’s Web Design Services Blog).

So I dunno. I haven’t had much time for web design work in the past six months anyway, so I guess not having to work on a school site would free me up a bit. But if the state’s schools are second in the nation, I might be too utterly crushed under the load of work that I’ll be doing to have any time for anything else.

Tangent Time!

Having no free time absolutely sucks major balls. Yeah, that’s profane, but since CSHS is a “profanity-free school” (see pathetically incorrect sign at main entrance), I have to get it out sometime. I have not had a single weekend in the past three months (since Labor Day) in which I didn’t have one or more of the following to do: school project, school website maintenance, client website maintenance, debate research/casewriting, debate tournament, clean the house to prepare for sale, move stuff out of the house to make it look bigger, go to [insert unnecessary church function here], go on [insert “fun” family vacation here], or catch up on missed reading for [insert hard honors/AP subject here]. It’s not that I don’t like being busy and having things to do, it’s that sometimes it can be nice to go home on Friday afternoon and flop down face-first on the couch and remain in that position, looking dead, for the next two days. Also, sometimes it can be nice to be able to do things with friends on [insert school break between Labor Day and winter break here] rather than do [insert unfun activity here].

And sometimes it can be nice to do one last thing with your friends before moving 1500 miles away. But I can’t do that either. Jim, Dylan, and I had originally planned to have a supercool awesome gaming night on Wednesday and Thursday after getting out of school. But I’ll be driving to Missouri then, and every weekend before that is booked with either moving preparations or finals. The last social thing I’ll do until January will be the AP Euro movie night on Wednesday (of this coming week), which is coincidentally being held at my house (a house that might no longer be mine by then if it gets sold quickly). Now you see why being busy and having no extra time can really suck major balls.

Continuing the Story…

I’m also somewhat worried that I’ll get to Wisconsin and realize that I am no longer the smartest person (academically speaking) in my class anymore. Or maybe not even in the top ten. In middle school, I was the top dog for pretty much all three years. A few students came and went that were better than me in one subject, but I could always crush them utterly in the other ones. I had a perfect 4.0 GPA every year. I kicked major ass (remember, this blog is not a profanity-free zone). In high school, I was still up there, but other smart kids (this is probably the wrong term, but it’s how I’m going to refer to them) were so close to me in overall academic skill that the lines were blurring between first, second, third, and on down. This year, we are all number one. Everyone is better than everyone else at everything. On some days, I’ll pwn people in every class with a caffeine-fed, supercharged, lithium-ion-battery-powered brain. On others, I’ll just get pwned by everyone else. It’s a continuous cycle.

Unfortunately, all those middle school years of competition with other students over grades has made me very watchful toward others, gauging their performance compared to mine, wondering if I am doing enough. But I rarely act on my observations; I just continue on as I always have, plowing through assignment after assignment, dying many times and becoming a decorated hero of the homework war that is waged daily on computers and in bedrooms around the world. I dunno how I’ll react if I’m plunged into a new battlefield where everyone but me has some insane battle strength stimulant thing that makes them twice as powerful as me. Will I rise to the challenge? Or will I be shot and killed for the last time, after which I will turn in my uniform and try to live in the regular student’s world?

I think there are some serious and fundamental flaws in the American education system. It should not be like this. Students should work together for mutual academic benefit, not compete silently for stupid honors that never end up meaning anything. By honors, I mean grades. I think that there should be some kind of reward system for good performance, but students should never be graded. Or if they are graded, the systems should be invisible, never revealed to them. And people shouldn’t make such a big deal about it. Parents shouldn’t nag their kids about getting better grades, teachers shouldn’t send home floods of tree-killing progress reports, other students shouldn’t flaunt their marks while mocking others’ performance (I’m guilty of that, at least once, I’m sure [sorry]).

The school system should be organized like this: there are thirty levels of achievement for every subject (literature, creative writing, mathematics, social studies, science, art, technology, music, government/law/psychology, etc). These could be divided further (science->physics, chemistry, biology, earth science) as well. Pretending that there were ten different subjects (one more than is listed here), a student would be able to get as much as 300 points during their academic career. To reward them for their work, they can take certain subjects and gain certain numbers of points in order to gain privileges, such as the right to vote, a driver’s license/permit, ability to smoke/drink, etc. Let’s follow little Bimmy (a.k.a. Brett) as he goes through this system:
Age 1-5: Does nothing.
Age 6-7: Takes literature, mathematics, social studies, art, and music. Gains 4 pts in each (ahead of average student who would have about 3). [Total: L4, M4, SS4, A4, MU4; 20]
Age 8: Takes literature, creative writing, mathematics, social studies, science, art, and music. Gains 1 pt in each. [Total: L5, CW1, M5, SS5, S1, A5, MU5; 28]
Age 9: Takes same classes. Gains 2pts in each. [Total: L7, CW3, M7, SS7, S3, A7, MU7; 38]
Age 10: Takes L, CW, M, SS, S, A, MU, T (technology). We’re starting to see Bimmy break out in some subjects now. [Total: L9, CW10, M9, SS10, S4, A8, MU8, T4; 58]
Age 11: Takes same classes. [Total: L11, CW13, M10, SS13, S6, A9, MU9, T8; 78]
Age 12: Takes same classes. [Total: L14, CW17, M12, SS19, S7, A10, MU11, T14; 104]
Age 13: Takes same classes. [Total: L18, CW23, M15, SS22, S9, A11, MU12, T20; 128] (Can get driving permit at 125)
Age 14: Takes two more classes (government, foreign language). [Total: L21, CW27, M17, SS24, S11, A13, MU13, T24, G5, FL6; 161] (Can drive at 150)
Age 15: Takes same classes. [Total: L24, CW30, M19, SS26, S13, A14, MU14, T28, G10, FL13; 191]
Age 16: Takes same classes. [Total: L28, CW30, M24, SS30, S17, A17, MU15, T30, G15, FL18; 224] (Can vote at 200)
Age 17: Takes same classes. [Total: L30, CW30, M28, SS30, S20, A20, MU18, T30, G21, FL24; 251] (Can drink at 250)
Age 18: Takes same classes. [Total: L30, CW30, M30, SS30, S24, A24, MU22, T30, G25, FL29; 274]
(Math could be wrong, but it’s just an example.)

Classes become progressively harder and more rigorous as you go, but you want to keep going because of the new privileges you get for continuing onward. I dunno…I’ll write more later, but for now I’m tired. The next entry will probably come in 2005.

Update: Note About Christmas Thing

You probably noticed that Christmas was listed at the beginning of this entry as coming after we move in January. This is true; we have already decided not to have a normal family Christmas this year but rather have a shopping day for each family member in January in which we go out and buy what we want for Christmas. Everything will be cheaper then, anyway (after Christmas sales).

Update: WhatPulse

I am the proud founder of the SpreadFirefox team on WhatPulse. Join it, I command you! And, by the way, I just hit four million keystrokes while typing this entry. While that is a major milestone, the leading member is nearing ten times that many, so I’ll wait to celebrate until ten million.

Update: Statistics

Also, I should note that this blog now contains over 100,000 words in about 100 entries, making up 270 book pages. Take that Anne Frank!

Update: Typos

tHerree our ay lott uV tie-poes en thizz. sRry.