(no subject)

Yawn.

Not a good night last night. Headachey and scratchy-eyed now. The tiredness is starting to creep up on me, I can tell. That, and just the periodic selfish wishing that serves no good purpose at all.

Anyway. Victorian CoC people! I'm going to have to cancel the game for Monday. I have a test on Tuesday, and I should probably at least attempt to study. So, no game. We'll try to pick it up again the Monday after next.

I'm going to cancel my Friday game for this week, too. I really just need some rest, and to not have to be in charge, or organize, or deal with thinking for a day or two. I also need someone to bring me a cup of hot chocolate, and have some nice cuddles while we do something relaxing and silly. But since that's not going to happen, I'll substitute curling up in bed and trying to sleep until I stop thinking.

[Alchemy] Base races

( Doshen )

( Gonn )

( Earthen )

(no subject)

A friend who reads this LJ actually brought a mug of hot chocolate to work for me.

Life is suddenly SO much better.

<3 <3 <3

[Alchemy] The Chimerical Races

( Chimerae )

( Humans )

Thoughts.

For some reason, when passing from about fifth grade to sixth grade, American children's interest in science and math plummets. I don't actually have any statistics on this, but it's true, and it matches my personal experiences. I wonder:

1. Is this true across cultural barriers? Do schools in Canada, Europe, and Asia find the same 'puberty dip', or is it for some reason isolated to America? If it's true for some and not others, are there commonalities to school structure or curriculum in those places? Do the places that don't have the dip (if there are any) also have commonalities?

2. Why is it? It could be the introduction algebra for the first time for many of the students. Moving into higher math can be a traumatic thing. It could be the emergence of puberty, and a sudden dearth of time that students /want/ so spend studying math and science, which tend to be the hardest subjects to BS, and thus they dislike them. It could be that the change of school (in America, you typically (but not always) go from elementary school in grades K-5, to middle school 6-8, and all the cliques and routines are shaken up. (A good way to check for this may be to look at schools that don't have this structure, and see if the dip happens the same.) Is it because adolescents are especially open to influence by a culture that increasingly views science, and intellectual pursuits, as elitest and hostile to traditional values? (A check for this might be to divide schools up by prevaling community views on science, education, and intellectual pursuits, and see if children from the most hostile communities do worse or not, and if they do worse than the national average, or just in line with it.) Is it a confluence of two or more of these factors?

3. How do we stop it? Increasingly, the world is becoming one that demands knowledge of science and math. Unskilled labor, and even skilled manual labor jobs are dying, and I predict that in the next three decades, they're going to keep dying as robotic technologies become more common and the trend of globalization continues. There's no use in complaining about the jobs going away, any more than the complaints of buggy whip makers stopped the rise of the car. This is not a century in which we want our children to become /less/ educated, /less/ technically minded, and /more/ fearful of science and math.

[Alchemy] Alchemy

( First Draft )