Death of a teacher

Way back on Sunday, me and Richard were talking about the death of a teacher. Not that he's dead in the physical sense, but dead when it comes to teaching.
Jon Pedicino, the astronomy teacher of CR, used to be this really upbeat, funny teacher. When I undertook his astronomy class during the summer semester of 2002, I'd always look forward to his class. I'd spend time just thinking of physical possibilities, no matter how insane, to submit to him. He was a new teacher to CR, but seemed to be very comfortable in the environment he was in.
But, over time, he has changed. Maybe it's because of him having to teach and grade 6 classes of 90 students a day, 4 days a week. Maybe it's because he's been having children and making large purchases. I don't know. What I do know is that he has changed. When I took his meteorology class, he would spend large amounts of time either talking about global warming, or on some concept we had already covered a long time ago. It made the class rather difficult to stay awake in. What's more, he didn't make funny jokes anymore. I also would sit in on his astronomy class, just to listen to news or hear something interesting (I love astronomy enough to hear the same thing over and over for hours! Heh...). I noticed that his curriculum had changed. He didn't crack funny, insightful jokes anymore, and he repeated stuff taught many classes ago, just like in meteorology.
He's overdoing it.
I have always asked people I know who are taking his class to give a critique of him. I have friends who, this semester, are currently taking his astronomy class. I ask them what they think of it all, and the answers I have gotten show a downward trend in opinions of him.
That bothers me since he was the kind of guy who loves astronomy as much as I do (if not more).
Me and Richard were talking about teaching, and how the administration tries to screw teachers out of money. Richard told me that he makes $60/hr teaching, but is not in a full tenured position, so he really only makes about $240/week. He considers himself lucky, since most teachers get ripped off with pay of (I think it was) $20/hr. Not quite enough to live on if you teach a few classes, which is probably why we have a higher turnover of new teachers around this area. So, Jon is probably working hard to achieve higher pay, and Richard tells me it's probably paying off, but it's coming at a price of performance.
I guess it just goes to show that, no matter how passionate you are on your subject, there's factors that can suck you dry, leaving you an empty husk to blow away in the wind.
Personally, I still think he's a cool teacher and I hope that he rebounds one semester. When he cuts back on teaching some day...

Switching gears here:
The other day, me and Evan were arguing about Linux. Evan recently jumped off the M$ bandwagon to use linux only, and he had some gripes about it.
He argues that linux will never be truly popular because you need to know all about the commands to use and the terminology. He also argues that an OS should be like a car, whereby you don't need to know how it works in order to use it.
I argued that the power of linux comes from all of that. It's what makes linux better. Personally, I like to have control over all the commands and things, even if it takes time to learn. I applied the "You wouldn't want a car with its hood welded shut, do you?" attack, and then immediately switched over to black box functions in programming (functions that you don't know the code for when programming, but yield a result you want when you use it). We then argued about how knowing the innards of aforementioned function wouldn't be that important to know, wouldn't alter the usage of the function, and so on and so forth.
We both had good points, of which I summarize here.
There's too much to know. Personally, I think memorizing is largely (in a sense) a waste of time, since no one can ever know everything. But, whatever is memorized should act like a tool to you. Is it necessary to have 16 hammers of the same type in your "mental toolbox"? Probably not (unless you like to throw hammers, in which case you should get even more! But I digress). So, some things should not be necessary to memorize.
But, knowing the way something works can be important in using it in ways that are not normal, as well as understanding other things related to said object. For example: a long, long time ago, I researched the iostream header file for programming. I don't remember that much anymore (like i said, it was a long, long time ago), but I remember how it would call to other devices through other header files. Hence, I learned of the existence and possibility of usage of other header files.

BUT!

Did I ever use those header files? No. Would my code have been sound if I had used them? Maybe not. What's for sure, most programmers may not know what was going on, since it would not be a normal practice.
So,
Maybe having to know linux commands and how it all works is useful to an IT operator, but not to average Joe. For me and Evan, windows should prevail, with linux being a mere novelty used primarily for fun.
That won't stop me though!
*gets out the trumpets and trombone players to play something gangster-ey*
Yes, I plan on getting a big hard drive soon!
!!!
I want to have it formatted primarily for linux (though it'll have have some FAT partitions for my large volumes *cough* of media, of which I'm running out of space for on the 80 GB drive and am tired of creating burned DVDs).
linux is fun to play around with. Windows is a pain.
I also want to get an upgraded MoBo and CPU, though i'll probably look back and say, "Well, I don't really play video games. Why did I buy that? So what if my graphics card is an 8x AGP and I only got 4x???" blah blah blah
I want today, I want tomorrow!
ten thousand tons of Ice Cream!
I think I will screeeEEEEEEAAAAAMMM!M!M!M!!M!!M!!M!!M!!!
Dagnabit and sassafras. I think blogged too much. *blinks out of the cyberdimension*

I had no shoes and I pitied myself. Then I met a man who had no feet, so I took his shoes. -- Dave Barry