Take Smallville as an example. Once upon a time, at the genesis of the show, it followed a strict monster-of-the-week format. Clark arrives, something has been transformed by kryptonite(”meteor rocks”) , Clark hits it a bit and emerges victorious. I can see why people disapproved of this format, and indeed, why it would have been unsustainable in the long run (although Buffy seemed to manage well enough for six years),  the system they worked out in the later few series where Clark has to stop Lex findingout something for an entire series, whilst things get in his way, I found to be much preferable to the current approach. Nowadays, gritty and unhappy characters march onto our screens, demand some kind of resolution to their problems, and then run around in circles until the episode ends. This season, for example, they’ve been trying to track down and catch Davies Bloome, i.e. Doomsday, however every time that they catch him, he either runs away, or is saved by Chloe. This week we were in formed that [spoiler] he has dug himself up from a grave into which he was placed last week, and is on the rampage AGAIN.[/spoiler] If it were not for the fact that something similar to this, involving the same characters, has happened in EVERY episode this season, that would be a good storyline.  I much preferred it in it’s happy days, when everything was more brightly coloured, and there was more “plot advancement” every week (as in, things happened during the episodes).

I will admit that Smallville is particularly bad for this change, most of the other shows started off with mildly overarching storylines (bar Scrubs and, of course, The Simpsons), however I think some of them have managed to change their storytelling perspectives better than others. Grey’s Anatomy has gone for a strange and eclectic system in which scenes from random characters are fired at you through the episodes in the hope that you will somehow piece it all together and manage to keep up with the story as a whole. LOST started off that way, although they too seem to have been favouring the “throw random bits of story at the audience and hope that they stick” method, which has improved in later episodes, but is still nowhere near as good as it was previously.

Scrubs is just a sorry corpse, sadly held animated by Bill Lawrence and dancing worryingly as you see limbs fall off from age. Whilst they are obviously trying to keep the show going by going back to its roots, it’s just been on for too long now, and all of the character’s eccentricities, which were the main reasons that the show was funny in the first place, have been played out to their full, so that now, we really just wait until JD and Elliot get married and we learn that the Janitor’s name really IS Jan Itor.

What I’m really saying is that all of these (apart from Harper’s Island obviously) have just got too old. They can’t conform to the new and gritty television standards that we expect nowadays, and that, rather than continuing on forever, the writers/producers should really have seen this coming and ended their shows gracefully, rather than continuing until they die, shedding actors and quality until all that they leave us with are poor imitations of their former brilliant selves.

Happy Saturday!

I’m not entirely sure what it is about public holidays that I so detest. I realise that part of my dislike of Valentines day (or, as the Catholic Church now tells us, St. Raphael’s Day) is merely the fact that I am not part of the hoards of lovey-dovey couples for whom Valentines day is a time to go out to a restaurant/cinema/club and say just how much they wuv each other. Were this the only public holiday that irritated me, I think that this would probably suffice, but that’s not the case.

All holidays basically share one thing in common, people look to them to be a time when they feel happy about something, whether that be relationships, family, chocolate or whatever that holiday happens to represent, and it can generally be counted on that most of the the time surrounding said holiday, or quite often, during the holiday itself, one finds that they are the least happy about said celebration. Holidays create a form of expectation of greatness, Valentines day can often bring expectations of grand romantic gestures, with these exprectations reciprocated bya great range of expressions of love, from simple flowers and chocolates, to a strange and insatiable need to go to the heart shaped island their partner just discovered on Google maps (would that I were joking). People seem to expect a great deal from one special day, and I’m sure that they really enjoy it if everything goes to plan, however, were but one thing to go wrong, all hell may break loose. You have ruined Valentines day and obviously don’t love him/her as much as they love you. 

This, as I said before is not a trait true only for Valentines day. All large holidays suffer from a period of expectation that can usually never be fulfilled in one simple day. Christmas is probably the best example of a holiday overblown to galactic proportions. Everyone has a tale of a ruined Christmas, or how terrible Christmasses always are, how uncle Ted always gets drunk, and how Grandpa always tells rather embarassing and innapproptiate stories to the small children, and yet we continue to hype up this strange festival of presents and sparkly things as if it were a period that we actually enjoy every year. Why would you continue to meet up with these people and exchange gifts they don’t really want or need when you don’t really want to?

The problem again is the fact that, in our media driven culture, we are driven to expect things from these festivals. The television becomes filled with over-joyous people celebrating whatever season in special “holiday” episodes, the newspapers write special articles telling us how to have perfect festivities, and condemn those who have publicly spoken out against them as grumpy kill-joys. All of this fervour merely adds to our expectations of the holiday, creating a bigger let-down when the day actually arrives. 

It’s not that I don’t believe that the things that these holidays represent aren’t important or nice, it’s just that I feel that consigning them to a single day has robbed each thing of its specialness. Why should you be resigned to showing affection for your partner on Valentines day, surely any other day of the year is equally important for informing them of your feelings, why must we gather together at Christmas, when so many people do not believe or care about the reasons, and why must we eat chocolate at Easter, when new life springs around us for most of the year, were we not too closed-minded to see it. People should celebrate these things, but the requirements of each individual day has created expectations far beyond those that anyone could fulfil, and has robbed the sanctity of those emotions. I really wish that people could see that these days aren’t important, and show their feelings of joy whenever they appear, rather than funnelling them all into the media-fueled frenzy of these arbitrary days.

Education aims to teach us two things, facts, and the ability to use those facts in productive ways, and great debate rages on which of the two things should have more emphasis. Maths suffers from this dilemma in a particularly irritating way. The subject lives in a small and isolated segment of the education sector where you are theoretically teaching no facts and just technique (it is true that this claim could also be held by art and music subjects, but somehow they seem to slip more into the familiar “history of…” doctrines than maths).  The problem that comes from this is that standard exam technique is not really sufficient to test this kind of learning.

Your standard maths exam contains last years problems with different questions, and can usually be marked by someone with little or no knowledge of the subject. They ask for a student to got through the machinations that they have been through before to solve similar problems, and therefore test only the learning of the method, rather than any actual ability to think through the problems. 

It can be argued that the actual practical value of any mathematics qualification is more the ability to think logically through a set of steps rather than to think laterally around a problem, but would such a qualificaion be much use. 

Though it would make assessing each student much harder, would it not be better to see how they cope with a series of more complex problems that they have never seen before than a set of problems which they are supposed to tackle merely by rote?

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On a lighter note, I recently got a new netbook, a Samsung NC10, and it’s AWESOME! The early netbooks suffered from some real problems, runing extremely slowly, and seeming as if their size had completely nerfed their functionality. For me, this is the first netbook I’ve really seen that actually seems to be useful, despite its tiny size.  It has a reasonably decent battery life (4-8 hours depending on the use), and runs XP SP3 without any discernable problems. It’s basically the equivalent of a laptop just a couple of years ago, but much smaller and extremely light. I’m very pleased with the purchase, and highly recommend it!