Alright Swatties, and all my other elitist friends from around the world, take a look at this 8th grade final exam from 1895 and tell me how you would have done. In fact, how would you do now even with a partial college education?

That’s what I thought 😀

OK, so it’s not really fair because we don’t learn the 3 R’s in the same rote-learning way that they did back then, and some of these questions do strike me as useless and arbitrary. For instance, “Give the epochs into which US History is divided”? You can divide US History up any way you please, I’m sure modern history teachers do it differently from those of 1895. Knowing how your teacher divides up history doesn’t give you any useful information for use in the real world. It’s also interesting that we no longer have to have in-depth knowledge of battles in history… they specifically said in US History AP that we wouldn’t have to know the details of how battles went, just what their results and effects were. I liked that, since I’m a Quaker, and having to have in-depth knowledge of military technology and strategy in order to pass 8th grade would annoy me, but I’m not actually certain whether such knowledge is important or not. Knowing about guerilla warfare, for instance, is useful for understanding the current situation in Iraq. Understanding “principles” of history rather than arcane details is more useful (as the AP testers tell us). You’re going to forget the arcane details anyway.

Well, heck, learning how language “ought” to be written isn’t necessarily useful, since language evolves, and language that is effective for communicating meaning is well-crafted language, no matter whether it agrees with the grammar book. There is, of course, a good argument for standardizing language so that, no matter who you try to speak English with, you can always communicate. But one reason why English is a great language is that, unlike the French, we don’t have an official body that decides what words are in our language. Our dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive, that is they report how we speak instead of telling us how we ought to speak. The language evolves on its own to fit our needs, and is often useful and efficient in a way that a language imposed from above could never be.

Well, the moment of truth has finally arrived! Yesterday was the last day of classes, and now we get “reading week”, which at Swarthmore is actually only a “reading two days”, because we’re just that masochistic. Good grief, I’m screwed.

I’ve been riding my bike around campus despite the ice and snow, because I need to get wherever I’m going stat! This is a dumb idea, because my bike has these smooth shiny road tires, which do a lousy job of gripping on ice, not that any tires do a fantastic job. So I’ve taken to riding around with my feet out to the sides, so that when the bike falls over, I just land on my feet instead of on my butt. Surprisingly, I’ve only sustained one minor injury, where the gears on my bike tore a hole in my sock when I fell over. Hey, I’m a teenager, I’m invincible. Of course, this brings up the issue of what I’m going to say to myself when I turn 20…

Finally, in an exquisitely ironic turn of events, I left my last fork in the dining hall the other day, so now I can go back and steal one of theirs without remorse 🙂 The girls across the hall were nice enough to lend me one of theirs so that I could snack in my room and get some work done. A big thank you to Miriam, Jean, and Cynthia!