School's memories

School was a real pain for me, one of my first memory of school was being beaten by 2 other kids and sand by forced into my mouth. I didn't really fit among other kids, was it because of my cheap outdated clothes or because I was not playing the same games.

What was I supposed to do in school anyway ? the idea of society to put kids in school, is probably a mix of putting them out of home in order to send the mothers back to work (or shopping) ; meanwhile the other function is somehow to teach some important stuffs to kids - but what happens most of the time, is the fear of being beaten, hurt or ridiculed, spoil the education part - because that's probably the experience all kids will get out of the school system.

Because of that most kids hates school, and I can understand them so well - being forced to listen to uninteresting topic given by unmotivated teachers, then being forced into another class, waiting for the day to end, for the misery to stop and bringing homeworks to do in the evening depriving the kid for some sleep ...


If the purpose was to teach, the most efficient way, would be to ask the kid what he would like to do when adult, and check his skills, then build a personalized education program for him, teaching him the basics, then tuning up later that program finding a balance between what the kid likes and what knowledges he still has to learn. And probably not to cram 40 kids into a room.

I mean if the undocumented goal is to create zombies, then it's a pretty good job the education system is doing.

Tale of one coffee

Modern unemployed life, it has his up and down, since this morning I've had many urges to rant and didn't ... Since 8am my wife has been getting a bit nervous, telling me that I'm acting like a lazy ass.

Okay, during the last weeks I've tried to go back to my programming experience because that would be a nice touch on my CV. When I was younger I really liked to program in Turbo Pascal and even if Pascal isn't very much in vogue,  I made up my mind to get some documentation on more modern language and choose python (?!) ... then the day after I found some old sources I had written back in 2003 in Java ... which reminded me, why I actually lost any interests in programming in the first place : too many options, arguments and counter arguments - and browsing on many forums I came to the same conclusion ... people are willing to learn to program, it's just that they don't want to invest their time in learning a language that will be obsolete soon, or is not really "in" ...

Thinking back in 2001 and earlier, I lost interest in programming, because after being pretty average in Pascal, there was a push from Borland to put object oriented theme in existing application - then there was a huge propaganda about C and C++ and then after managing more or less to code in C ... there was this new trend of putting everything for fancy windows, making any trivial "Hello World" program into a 60kb source code ....

Anyway, each time I'm really focused onto something, inevitably I kind of shut my ears a bit of the surrounding noises, because otherwise I can't concentrate ... and that makes my wife a bit tense, she was complaining that compared to her, I wasn't being active, which I counter argue simply by asking her to do less ... See yesterday she went shopping and came back with many heavy bags full of things we don't really need anyway ... and what triggered the whole situation and put her into such a bad mood, is that I wasn't fast enough to open the door when she rang (on top of that I have to say that I'm a bit ill these day from the common cold).

It's like she's doing everything and I (apparently) do nothing ; doesn't matter if I was in the middle of debugging or writing or designing something, for her I was doing nothing !

After lunch today, she came back to this silent ranting and told me (again) I had to be more active, and I really wanted to tell her she was annoying me ... but instead I went shopping (since she asked me earlier this morning to buy some mineral water bottles she didn't want to carry) - after I closed the door, I felt better, did the shopping I promised I would do, bought some nice flowers, brought back the mineral water ... and she had prepared coffee, which was nice and a good start ... but because the coffee was too hot, I thought I could also wash the dishes, and since then we're fine.

Being unemployed is hard, putting every family member into a difficult time, my wife think I'm inactive and lazy, I think she spends too much on things we don't need and put the family budget at risks - but it's also an opportunity to be nice with each other, and spend quality time, it's just one more challenge ...

I'll finish with an interesting post, that has some nice advices : Make Unemployment Work for You. Especially that first part about getting close with the family.