Plato's Views On Education

Page 193-194 is where Plato really begins to discuss education in detail. His main point on page 193 is that we must work in order to be a succesful scholar. He also points out that work is not easy “... Or do you expect anyone ever to sufficiently love something if he does what he does in pain and with difficulty accomplishes nothing? No...” What I think Plato is trying to say here is that if we really stick with something and not do a half-hearted job we will reap the benefits of our hard work. At the beginning of page 194 he begins to talk about how we should treat memorization. Plato agrees that memorization is vital to our education and our general knowledge but he also thinks that too much of memorization can lead to a bad thing. This only being the case because if we have memorized a whole bunch of useless information it would be more difficult to remember the important facts. A more condensed form of all of this would be memorization is good but not in excess.
A couple pages later in the book the philosophers Adeimantus and Socrates are back on the subject of education. This time Socrates is trying to convey the belief that education and philosophy must be more of a side hobby rather than a full time profession.
He believes that the only time we should fully devote our lives to philosophical studies is when we are to old and unable to serve in a military or political services. That, or when we are young and still having a malleable mind. But if we follow his method we will always pay attention to our physical fitness before our mental fitness. Therefore it will take longer for us to become not fit for military or political service. However a large majority of the philosophers there do not agree with Socrates.
On page 213 is where the philosophers really start getting into the more advance topics regarding education. One of the first things the discuss on page is how people normally pursue one of two things (at least in greek culture). Either intelligence or strength and if one person chooses one of those two they tend to ignore the other one.
But, if you go by what Socrates teaches we must balance the two of these. This is a major theme in education that is repeated multiple times in Book IV of The Republic. Another thing they talk about in this section of Book IV is about how not only should we be vitreous but we should also understand all the virtues that we are upholding or at least trying to.
There are also some very very basic teachings of education closer to the beginning of The Republic. What I would equate the teachings in pages 70-78 is probably what the Greeks learned in their version of elementary school. Of course to us, in our modern time this is considered more around the middle school level of teaching. This includes topics such as always telling the truth because we are nothing without our word. It kind of makes me sad to think that even though these people were not nearly as advanced as we are they still had much greater knowledge than a large majority of us. But, then again that's probably why we're studying the teachings of Plato thousands of years later.

Homework

The amount of homework in today's world is just getting worse and worse. Students in today's world are being bombarded by constant amounts of homework. I think this is mainly due to the fact of every teacher thinking that their class is the most important or the only one that matters. I think that this is part of the reason that so many children do not have a desire to learn. Teachers now-a-days have for the most part given up on making their classes fun, exciting, or interesting. Now, don't get me wrong I am not thinking that the only reason we should go to school is to have fun. But, some teachers don't even seem to care about whether or not we actually get interested in the field of study that they're teaching us. However, this is not the case with all teachers some genuinely try to make the subject they're teaching fun and interactive. And these are normally the classes that everyone excels in because they don't feel stressed out while in class so when they're doing their homework they feel the same warm feelings about that class. But the downfall of this is sometimes the teachers that try to make their classes fun and interesting are sometimes considered push overs by the students and they end up taking advantage of them. This could be part of the reason why teachers don't want to be the fun type of teacher. Of course, I could be completely wrong but this is just my opinion on the subject.

Computer

Sometime in the near future I will be upgrading my computer's internals. Right now my machine is pretty awful with only 2 gigs of RAM, a 160gig hard drive, a 1.6 Ghz CPU, and a terrible Nividia 6100 graphics card. I have always had a passion for the hardware of computers the problem is I've never had the funds but with the job at McDonalds I'm hoping to get maybe this idea will actually work. First I will be getting a new hard drive. It will have 1 terabyte of hard drive space in it that's nearly ten times more than the one i have right now. Next I will probably get a new Biostar TA790GX motherboard with a AMD Phenom II X4 940 3.0GHz Black Edition Quad Core Retail Processor. I will probably get a little bit more RAM for more processing power but that might come a little bit later. I'll probably get the RAM after i get my brand new Diamond Radeon HD 4770 Video Card. Also, alot longer down the road I'll probably get a better power supply but I think the one I have right now won't give me much problems other than being a little bit loud. One thing I am not to worried about is the internal cooling. This is because my new graphics card will be coming with a huge fan on it so that wont be much of a problem. At least I hope not... Only time will tell I guess.

A Day In The Life of Noah

This morning, i woke up for yet another day of school. It took me a while to wake up because I had to stay up a little later the night before in order to finish some homeworok (typical). I took a rather longer than normal shower because i accidentally fell asleep in the shower, this however is not part of my usual routine. After getting yelled at for taking so long to get out of the shower I was ready to head to school. But before that I had to take the garbage to the top of the drive way due to the fact that it is garbage day. After a fairly expedient car ride I arrived at Village Christian Acadamey. I did not immediately go to the gym, instead, I went to get a chicken biscuit from the cafeteria. After I got to the gym I realized that I had gotten a sasuage biscuit on accident. This was quite upsetting but it alled worked out in the end because Nick Martin ended up not wanting his biscuit and gave it to me. It only seemed like I was in the gym for about 10 minutes when the teacher who was on duty (i can't remeber who) told us to go to class. So there i was sitting in spanish class when all of the sudden Mrs. Alejandro tells us we have a test today. I was completly unaware but I ended up doing fine on the test anyway. Next, I went to Biology where i took an open note quiz which was as easy if not easier as pie. Then we headed to chapel where Mr. Privette spoke for the second time. After that I took yet another World History test that was the third one for those of you keeping score at home. After that I went to lunch which was pretty uneventful which was nice for a change. After that I got to go to principles of business and turn in all the missing work I had missing in that class which made me happy. Last, but certainly not least, i went to Journalism where we were required to write a 250 word editorial.

Noah Toomey