From a Yahoo! News article
From a Yahoo! News article about the essay portion of the SATs to be unveiled next year:
The SAT essay…will be scored on a scale of 1 to 6. Those receiving a perfect score, according to the College Board, will demonstrate "outstanding critical thinking, using clearly appropriate examples, reasons, and other evidence to support" the student's argument.
In an article in the March edition of the Atlantic Monthly, the SAT's scoring system was applied to the work of Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and Theodore Kaczynski, the "Unabomber" who published an essay that led to his arrest in 1995.
Based on the writing, the magazine determined only Kaczynski would be admitted to an Ivy League school. Kaczysnski, serving a federal life term for using letter bombs to kill three and injure 23 over a 17-year period, is — in fact — a Harvard graduate.
Personally, I can’t wait for the essay portion of the SAT test to come into effect. It will only underscore what I’ve known ever since grading my first batch of high school essays—and what any teacher would gladly tell the world, if only it would listen: most folks can’t write for beans, and teenagers are by no means exempt.
Posted by patrick at 05:48 AM | Comments (0)
February 22, 2004
It's like blaming the infertile for child abuse...
Here's a gem from Herr Schwarzenegger in a recent NBC interview about why the gay marriages taking place in San Francisco are verbotin:
"In San Francisco it is license for marriage of same sex. Maybe the next thing is another city that hands out licenses for assault weapons and someone else hands out licenses for selling drugs, I mean you can't do that."
That's right, folks--not only is gay marriage a dire threat to the institution of marriage, but now it's helping your kids OD in the schoolyard and gunning down your grandmas on their way back from bingo. See, that just shows how wrong I can be sometimes. I was under the tragically misguided assumption that our country's 60% divorce rate was to be blamed on the heterosexuals, seeing as how they're the only folks allowed to dabble in it.
Hey, here's a thought. If the conservatives are really so worried about the sanctity of the martial institution, they should just outlaw heterosexual marriage. I mean, hey, we've buggered it up enough, right?
Posted by patrick at 09:58 AM | Comments (1)
February 08, 2004
Glass and chopsticks...
Los Angeles can be such a delightfully random place. I was at the Broadway Deli late last night with my girlfriend, her roommate, and the roommate’s boyfriend. Suddenly, quite out of the blue, some guy walking along the sidewalk slams his hands through one of the large windows that run all along two of the restaurant’s four sides and takes off.
What’s worse, there was a woman sitting in a booth directly adjacent to the window in question. She was showered with broken glass, and got a bad scare, but miraculously enough, there wasn’t a scratch on her. You can imagine the look on her friend’s face when he returned from the bathroom to find their table and booth looking like something out of an action film.
We were sitting more to the center of the dining area—the Broadway Deli is one big room, basically—but I still just about jumped out of my skin when I heard that window go.
What makes it all the weirder is that I’d spent about half an hour earlier in the day grappling with a scene in my screenplay in which a homeless veteran goes crazy and punches through a plate-glass window. It’s life imitating art, assuming my screenplay counts as the latter and moments in Los Angeles count as the former.
* * * * *
I frequent a sushi restaurant a few blocks away from my apartment. I’m no great fan of fish (cooked or raw), but their avocado rolls are very good. An order of those rolls and a bowl of miso soup make a great, inexpensive lunch on a winter afternoon—with strawberry mochi to top it off, if I’m in the mood and it’s not too chilly. If I’m really hungry, though, I’ll order a teriyaki chicken bowl: the obvious choice of meat, plus vegetables and rice. I still have my awkward moments with chopsticks, especially when I get to the bottom of the teriyaki chicken bowl and I’m dealing with stray grains of rice. On the whole, though, I’m no slouch. A few of the waitresses know me by sight. However, sometimes I’ll go in at an odd time and get a waitress who doesn’t know I’m something of a regular. When that happens, she’ll invariably bring me a fork with my meal. I don’t know why, but it bugs me. It’s like they’ve brought me a booster seat, or had the cook whip me up some star-shaped chicken nuggets, or any of the other patiently condescending concessions restaurants make for the very young. I could walk in there as the most westernized of Japanese-Americans, not knowing a shite from a Shiite, and not be given a fork. Why? Because I’d look like I knew how to use chopsticks. It’s a reasonable enough thing to assume—as is, I guess, the converse. All the same, I'm bothered by the assumption of ignorance based on looks.
Posted by patrick at 03:56 PM
| Comments (5)
I'm thinking of removing the karma points option from the blog, based on random negative karma points I've been receiving. I'm not bothered by the idea of people disagreeing with me. On the contrary, I want people to express their disagreement with what I have to say. However, people have been dinging me with negative karma points for entries where, quite frankly, there's been no opinion over which to disagree--entries like, "Hey, guys...I found some old writing and read a really good book," or "Gee, the Brawny Man got a makeover". Isn't the idea of negative karma points a little mean-spirited at that point, or am I off-base on this one?
Posted by patrick at 03:43 PM
| Comments (2)
Karma points...