Opposition
I had a good experience teaching last week. These are rare jewels in the usual torment of teaching at Holy Rosary so, I suppose, out of fairness I should describe it to you.
I was talking about using proxy servers as part of a network firewall. Proxy servers are computers that stand between, say, your web server and your browser. To your browser they look like the server itself, your browser gets **all** its pages from the proxy server — no matter what site you are trying to browse. To the server they work like someone browsing: downloading pages and making requests. We have one here at HRC and it is used to store local copies of pages and images being downloaded so it can serve them faster when other people visit the same sites, and it is also used to control who can visit what sites and what time, and what sort of things they can download.
I asked why anyone would want to use such a thing. One student answered (already a good day for me) and said it would be faster. I explained that in order to use the proxy your browser makes its connection indirectly via the proxy server not directly to the web server and wouldnt it be faster to go direct?
“I have a question”, the student said.
“Good”, I replied, indicating she should share it.
“But…”, she started. I laughed:
“Questions don’t start with ‘But’”
“OK”, she said, “I’m going to oppose you!”
Imagine how happy that made me. I think I must have started to glow!
“GOOD!” I said.
She explained very well why it would be faster for users to get their pages from the proxy rather than going all the way to the server for them.
I asked the other students if they had heard (my oponent was sitting at the front). They had not. I moved to the back of the class and asked her to stand and tell me again why it would be faster to use a proxy. she did and then I got the others to take sides with either me or the student based on our explanations.
I got some siding with me and some with her. Then I told them we were both __technically__ correct but that the student was right, proxies are often used to improve overall performance though, for an individual user making the first download from a particular site it would be __slightly__ slower to go via a proxy.
Things like this don’t happen every day at HRC. When I told Sister P. she said:
“Something like that can give you ennergy to teach for another three hours”, and she’s right.
Maybe I can bottle it. Hopefully it will help that I have put it up on this blog.
lydia Says:
Fantastic. It just takes one student responding well to make teaching the best job in the world. (It also takes just one responding very badly to make it feel like the worst!).
November 2nd, 2004 at 11:33 amtyg Says:
yay for piggie!!!
I "taught" my first lindy class last night. Tom usually does it with me as support. But last night he couldn’t make it so Daniel came to help me - I taught and he was support … Its hard work (but great fun anyways)! I think I prefer the supporting role - I’m more relaxed and can spot things and don’t have to worry about anything really but getting the best out of the students …. dunno how you manage it all on your own on a daily basis …
well done you …
November 2nd, 2004 at 1:14 pmhugs,
Tyg
natty Says:
God help us, the US is voting today.
I have two predictions: One, america’s youth is going to rock the vote. Two, lawsuits are going to drag this thing out for weeks.
Toby and I voted.
November 2nd, 2004 at 8:52 pmCheers,
Nat
Mark Says:
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that teaching here is the best job in the world. I declined two VSO placements before I chose this one because I Wanted to teach. Now I’m teaching and I hate it. That incident was good, but if you’d seen this morning’s lab….
I had a visitor, one of the other Volunteers, last week and she came to my class. Afterwards she said she couldn’t imagine how I had the patience to put up with the class.
Right now I have a Unix lab timetabled for stage IV. But the syllabus is over for Unix. There is another subject (Javascript) for which we are behind. I have invited them to come for a Javascript lab now but nobody has come. They were concerned that two students take Java in stead of Unix and those are not free during this period. And, seemingly, this excuse has been enough for all the students to sit in the classroom looking glum rather than come for a Javascript lab for those who __are__ free. Maybe it would be unfair but it doesn’t seem like kenyans to turn down the chance of getting an unfair advantage. And besides which the two students who do Java rather than Unix have the advantage in Javascript for obvious reasons.
I despair.
November 3rd, 2004 at 11:24 amMark Says:
Yeah I listened to the Radio this morning. Still no concrete results. They had visited the restaurant where they are serving special Kerry and Bush dishes. Everyone’s biting their nails. Katie is in the cybercafe now looking at some election result web site that says Bush is ahead due to the Electoral College system, it has nice blue and red states to look at. The red ones are largely in the middle and the blue ones neared the edge. I wonder what that means. The heat of the interior has driven them mental, perhaps?
The Kenyans I’ve spoken to this morning cannot understand why Americans would vote for Bush again. But some of them also asked me who **I** voted for, so not all of them, clearly, have a grip on who is voting for whom.
Natty, how are the youth going to rock it?
love you
Mark
November 3rd, 2004 at 11:27 amnatty Says:
Fucking fucking fucking fucking fucking stupid evangelical American morons. Unless a miracle happens with provisional ballots and absentee ballots in Florida or Ohio, Kerry’s lost. Fuckity fuck fuck fuck.
Ok, the electoral college system. Back when the constitution was being written, there were two issues (among many) that were debated and decided on that lead to this. First was representation: bigger states wanted representation based on population, more population needed more representation and more power. smaller states wanted equal representation. So they did both: the house of representatives has a set number of seats (400 something) that change according to population. California has 53, Louisiana has 7, Rhode Island has 1, etc. The senate has two each, for a total of 100 seats.
The second part of this was when they were setting up election procedure. The exquisitely educated constitutional convention members decided they weren’t sure they trusted the mostly uneducated farmers and laborers that made up the American population to choose the president/vice president effectively (it took a while for president and vice president to run together as a ticket. The first several times, the first place runner was president, and the second place runner was vice president). So they came up with the electoral system. Each state tallies the votes. Whoever wins the state vote wins their electoral votes, which are the number of senators plus representatives. So California has 55, Louisiana has 9, Rhode Island has 3. If Bush wins California, then his set of 55 republican electors casts votes in congress for him, and they officially elect him. If Kerry wins, then HIS set of 55 democrat electors cast votes for him. Though some states now have laws forcing electors to place their vote for who their state votes for, what’s fun is when the electors do random things like cast an electoral vote for John McCain, John Wayne, Mickey Mouse, etc. It happens. We’re still stuck with this antiquated safeguard. What’s also lovely is what happened in the last election: Gore won the national popular vote but lost the electoral vote. This is why so much importance was placed on Florida last time. This time they’re scrutinizing Ohio. I think it’s over anyway, too much of a gap to overcome for Kerry in Ohio.
So when you look at the current electoral map, it looks scarily in favor of Bush (red states). He’s pretty much swept everything except the west coast, new england (top right corner), and midwest (top middle section around the great lakes). But Kerry took the west coast, new england and midwest, and those have huge densities of people. So Bush won South Carolina (8 electoral votes), Georgia (15), Alabama (9), Mississippi (6), Louisiana (9; sorry guys, we here in liberal New Orleans tried very hard but we couldn’t overcome the swampland yokel vote) and Kentucky (8); but Kerry won California (55), so they’re even. Then Bush won Idaho (4), Montana (3), Wyoming (3), North Dakota (3), South Dakota (3), Nebraska (5), Kansas (6) and Alaska (3); but Kerry won New York (31), so he’s still one vote ahead. And so on and so forth.
There was a lot of fuss made about the youth vote this time around. People aged 18-24 have notoriously wretched voting turnout. They don’t know, they don’t care, they don’t vote. Young voters tend to be pretty liberal, and a lot of people thought they’d be pissed off and out in force this year. There were a lot more young voters out and about this year, but not like some of us hoped. Some people on Fark.com are lamenting how their roommates couldn’t put down the playstation controllers long enough to go out to vote. We made our bed and now we’re lying in it.
What is really, really, really frightening is that this election just put all three legislative branches into the hands of the neocon republicans. The house has been narrowly republican for 12 years, they just extended their lead. The senate was a one vote democrat lead, now it’s swung republican. And probably most importantly, four of the nine supreme court justices will step down this term and they’re nominated for LIFE. We thought two would go last term, as they’re all getting very old, four are in their eighties, but the two were liberal and held on to see if Bush would go. Four are too old now, including the chief justice, William Rehnquist, who came out as having super serious cancer last week. Right now it’s a 4-4 voting bloc, with Sandra Day O’Connor swinging moderate between to make decisions. But it’s going to be bad if George wins and puts four very conservative judges up there for decades. We’re talking blurring church and state, we’re talking reversal on gay rights, and we may even be talking about reversal of Roe vs. Wade: abortion rights. Bush has been on this bizarre anti-abortion/anti-sex/abstinence/anti-sex education/anti-birth control crusade. Planned Parenthood, which is a federally funded program, gives affordable reproductive health care to women. Since I’m the typical college educated young person, I do not currently have a job or health insurance. Planned Parenthood is the only place I can afford to get check ups and birth control at the moment. Bush has slashed funding and is expected to cut it entirely, because Planned Parenthood includes abortion as an option in their counseling (though most centers don’t perform it, they just list it as an option), and because they give free advice and medical care to teenage girls, hand out free condoms, etc.
God help us. This country is about to go backwards. Toby and I may have to get married sooner rather than later to get me health insurance.
November 3rd, 2004 at 6:32 pmnatty Says:
Fuck it. It’s over. Kerry conceded.
November 3rd, 2004 at 8:05 pm