=P I'm currently enrolled at CSUN, not UC Davis, if anyone was wondering.

RE: (SEMI) Professional Pursuits - Demo Progress

Oh hay hai. I'm swamped with requests right now, so I won't be accepting any new roles until I finish recording for the ones I already have. Capische?

For the curious who've never heard me before and don't feel like digging through links, here's my obligatory voice-sample-stuffs~

Obligatory sampler-thingy.

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Art Hunt

Lalalalalaa~

RE: Protest Against Budget Cuts on Higher Education

For those who've actually read my last post/comment regarding the protest and my strong thoughts towards how educational funding is handled, I will say that I took the trouble to figure out how to solve the problem beyond just rallying. Since I don't want to be lump-summed with the sheeple, I actually decided to "edumakate" myself and figure out what else can I do. Sure, holding my vote for ransom is "nice", but problems can only be solved if they're articulated clearly enough to the representatives I'm bugging.

(My plan was to vote for AB 656, which taxes oil and gives that funding to higher education since CA is the only state extracting oil without a tax.)

See, my good ol' lawyer friend is much more politically minded and level headed than I am. So the moment he saw me getting worked up at how much my education has been screwed over for almost my entire life, he pulled up the proposed budget summary for the coming year in California. In a nutshell, around 40% of the state's budget goes into public education... Which is A LOT! Even more than most other states! And it got us thinking...

What budget cuts? Trust me, we ARE feeling the hurt--Universities are being affected by the economy... Tuition was up 17% this semester and it's going to rise 32% this fall. Lots of teachers have been laid off. Me and my siblings have been taught more by substitute teachers than teachers in some of our K-12 years, especially my little brother now (he claims a sub knows more about algebra than his real algebra teacher; I was once taught American history by a basketball coach teaching by the textbook--don't even mention HUGE class sizes). Art, Music, and PE classes are being cut too. If a LOT of money is already going into education (and even a bit more will be added down the road), why does California have the 7th to last WORST education in the US? And why do we have to pay more for less? It just doesn't add up.

My lawyer friend brought up the possibility of there being too many students in schools. Possible, but not a nice thought. It got me wondering why the gov't bothered to mention that CA's prisons were overflowing to the point that they needed to ship prisoners to other states, but not say a thing about our schools if that was the case. There was only a few other possibilities... Like how the money is being spent. On the two college campuses I've learned on, I've been seeing lots of construction on new buildings. Okay, so at least there'll be more classrooms, but there's been more smartboards and other fancy things showing up on campuses while teachers are getting pink slips. Hmm...

Something to consider: Conveniences being mistaken for effectives means of education. It's like saying "I have a fancy mic, therefore I'm a GREAT VOIZ AKTERS" or "I have a Cintiq, therefore I'm a GR8 ANIMATORZ". A n00b will still be a n00b, even if they have the fanciest tools, if they don't know how to use 'em.

Ultimately, protesting does send a powerful message about what problems there are to deal with, but "throw money at it" isn't going to solve our problems. The REAL way to solve this educational funding problem is having the folks in charge of the cash USE IT MORE DIFFERENTLY/INTELLIGENTLY. That's the solution in the broadest sense, anyways.

Can we start with money being spent on training smarter, better teachers or something? No Child Left Behind (cut funding from underperforming schools) was handled pretty stupidly in spite of the good intent (which was to standardize a certain amount of knowledge).