Yeah, it's been unactive here recently. Not much has been going on. Few LANs here and there, i'm tryin to get myself ready before I leave for AmeriCorps on october 3rd. A lot of people have been asking me why I decided to join AmeriCorps. I'll give everyone the background leading up to my decision. This is kind of a flashback to my junior year rants but it will give people some insight.
When Junior year came around, we finaly got into our majors to learn what we came to Benson to learn. For me, it was Computer Programming. I wanted to learn how to make the big games like Half-Life 1 and 2, the Quake series, Starcraft, all the genres. When we finaly got into programming, it was fun, alright. I liked some of it, but my teacher was a complete fucking idiot and didn't really teach us much of anything useful. I know you have to start off from the small things and work your way up but this was different. The way he taught was completly the wrong way to teach programming. Instead of making us do examples for the class, showing us visual examples of coding an actual program, He just did this for 3 months straight:
Come into class 15-45 minutes late "I'm not joking"
Take his seat and take roll
Go back to his office which is 3 rooms down from where we were
Come back after 10-15 minutes "Second period has now started"
FINALY start lecturing.....
Oh wait, he lectures?
His version of a lecture is the following. Instead of looking at the class, he looks at his monitor, types what he's currently saying, and makes you copy the notes from his hard drive and use that for the basis of your studies.
Now I understand this is the basic priniciple for learning in some college courses, but personally, I can't learn a subject like C Programming just by notes, I have to have visual examples presented to me, have homework assignments that he checks and goes over your mistakes with you personally. But when we do homework, he expects us to completly know the material inside and out. Yes that's a teachers job, but it doesn't help when after doing all of my homework, getting probably a 75-80% on it, he doesn't even give me councel, he just says "Maybe you should try harder and focus more". I would if you FUCKING HELPED ME. So in the end, I passed both semesters with a C+ by learning on my own with no help at all from my teacher. He didn't help me at all when he obviously knew I was struggling, and to top it all off, he just didn't like me period.
When senior year came, when I first got into the class, I was taken outside and my teacher talked to me...
"For those that don't know, I made a netsend bat file near the end of junior year just because it was fun, I only ran it for like 2 seconds to see if it would seriously spam our workgroup. It did, so I immediatly shut it down so everyone could continue to work, Ironicly, on that same day, the schools internet went down, not just our school, the whole school districts internet, just about 30 minutes after the netsend incident"
He said that he had found a, and I quote, a "Virus" on my computer which he belived that I wrote. Now seriously. If your a programming teacher, and you believe that a netsend is a virus...... Wow.... He then said that I would not get to have a computer for the first 2 weeks of class, then when the 2 weeks were up, while everyone else had 500mhz p3's, I would get a 486 for the rest of the year, even though I appologized, for something that has no capicity for bringing down the INTERNET. I seriously explained to him what the netsend did, how it does not have the abillity to cast itself over the internet, anything. I wanted to say "Fuck you, fuck you and your teachings and fuck this schooL" right to his face, but instead I just said "Guess that means 2 period study hall for me".
I had to get the hell out of that class
Few weeks later, I heard that there was an opening in the MCT class, which is basic hardware troubleshooting. I figured it wouldn't hurt to take the course, I still needed to learn the basics of windows anyways, seeing as how I had only owned my first pc Freshman year and have built onto it ever since. Mr Davis came out and talked to me and explained what would happen. I would be transfered into the Junior year class, but i'd still get to graduate "I could have not even decided to transfer into another major and still graduated, but that would look bad".
I explained to him my situation in my old programming class. "Now here's the funny part". I told him about how my little net send program made him believe that I wrote a virus. He said to me "What? How can that bring down a network? It's not a virus." This and 3 other members of the faculity knew that I was not responsible for the network outage. Why didn't I fight to get back into my old programming class? I just did not care for my old teacher at all and he could kiss my ass for all I cared. So after my Senior year was over, I had completed MCT and left programming behind.
It was at this point that I had lost my entire interest in programming. I now had no Idea what I wanted to do. MCT was fun, but all the troubleshooting jobs were not in high demand, seeing as how there are way too many people in the tech troubleshooting field. My future was uncertain and to this day is still uncertain. Now that graduation has passed, I have to figure out what I want to do with my life.
I wanted to take a few years off to decide what to do, but at the same time, gain some sort of experience in the real world. Enlisting in the Air Force was an idea, I still think about doing that from time to time, but my parents were scared to see me in the Military, "Oh our poor baby!!". So I had to think of an alternative.
Then all of a sudden, the idea hit me. During middleschool, we had a bunch of AmeriCorps workers around our school helping us out. They were cool to talk to and were always ready to help you with whatever you needed. Kind of like what a tutor is, except they weren't really tutors, but more of a general helper. I thought that by joining AmeriCorps in the fall, I could help out kids with whatever they needed help with, maybe by giving back to the community that helped me out as a young teenager. Plus for the first term, you get $5000 towards college at the end of the program, if you decide to do another term, you can get another $5000! "That's $10,000 for those that can't do math". So I figured that this would give me more then enough time to figure out my future. I called Ryder and told him my decision, after about 2 months of paperwork. He thought that it might be cool for him to join the program with me as well. A month later, he was all ready to go into the program with me, and we both leave october 3rd.
So here I am, writing this entry because the damn 5 cans of Mountain Dew I had is keeping me up. Maybe this will give people the reason why I decided to do AmeriCorps, so I don't have to keep repeating it to every person who asks.
