101 postings, creativity, and boneheaded geniuses

I hit a milestone in my last posting and didn't even realize it. November 11 was my 100th blog entry. I knew it was coming up soon, but I kind of thought that my computer screen would flash and vibrate, and a thundering voice would say, "Congratulations, you've posted one hundred times," or something similar, but no, the momentous event went unnoticed. You, my esteemed readers didn't even clue in, I'll wager. Not that I expected anyone but Blogger.com to count, but some kind of celebration would have been nice. . . a digital surprise party, a virtual cake, a photo of my laptop on the cover of People magazine. . . okay, give it up Beebewitz, it's only a hundred entries for crying out loud.

An interesting piece of trivia: I've been blogging since mid-April, roughly 7 months. That works out to 14.2857 postings per month. The significance of that is . . . um, I don't know what the significance of that is.

I read this article the other day about how schools unwittingly stifle creativity by the "exile of the arts, "arid approaches, and "an obsessive culture of standardized testing," among other things. For once in my life, I'm going to agree with someone. Here's why.

By necessity, most schools take a cookie-cutter approach . . . everyone must act a certain way, look a certain way, learn a certain way . . . a genuine Henry Ford-style educational assembly line. The result is an assembly line mind set: let's get this done and get out of here. By default, a large number of kids (especially the creative ones) are bored out of their mischievious, rascally craniums. I'm about as expert in child psycology as I am in meteorology, but even my dough-brained, bushwhacker mind wonders if a lot of behavioural problems stem from kids' minds being cramped by conventional learning.

Another piece of interesting (albeit unproven) fire service trivia. Did you know that ADHD might be three times more common among firefighters than among the general populace? No wonder I had such a hard time with Bloom's Taxonomy and Maslow's Hierarchy and all that other university level instructor text book gibberish. You can read an abridged version of my thoughts on Bloom and his peers in my profile, or the original blog entry that it came from here. If you are really ambitious (and not ADHD) you can read this article about ADHD in the fire service.

Speaking of creativity, the Google geniuses have invented Google Wave, and the geeks of earth are lining up in droves to subscribe to it. I look at Google Wave the same as the majority of Canada looks at H1N1 - what's all the hype about, and will I die if I catch it?

Here's the problem with Google Wave: I don't understand it, and I'm too lazy to figure it out. It looks like you'd be able to read my thoughts as I'm writing them . . . but I don't want you to read my thoughts as I'm writing them, because they look like this:

100 postings ---- where's the @#%&* party?!! --- school is boring --- bratty kids are smart -- be different! --- half my crew is adhd --- maslow who? --- google geniuses and the google wave -- boneheads that imagine i want people to read my thoughts while i'm thinking them --- why don't people want the h1n1 vaccine? ---- AM I ADHD?

You get my drift.