How not to be a teacher

I've been attending schools of some kind for some fifteen years now, and in that time I've been able to pick up on some of the things teachers do wrong.  I thought I'd shine a spotlight on some of the stupidest and most easily fixed.

1. Don't discourage negative feedback.  This one goes first because it was only really a problem with one teacher, and I'm working my way from least to most stupid, roughly speaking.  If a few more had done it, it would be much lower on the list.

My Senior year of high school it was, in English class.  We gave two presentations during the year, one per semester, and the requirements for the audience were to write down the name of the presenter, their theme statement, the books or other works they cited, and a piece of positive feedback.  Only positive feedback.  We were not allowed to say anything bad about them, unless we cushioned it with about a dozen "Oh, but this part was so good so don't feel bad."  Bad enough, except that we, the presenters, did not even get to see what other people said, which defeats the point of feedback in the first place.

I've said it before: being a critic is simple, if not easy.  Find something you like, find something you don't like, explain why, and everything else is terminology.  If you don't discern between "good" and "bad" or otherwise analyze a work, then you're not reading a book or watching a presentation, you're watching someone jingle their keys in front of your face.

If I were to talk about all of the stupid things the students did with that relatively simple assignment, this would be an entirely different rant (I will say that I started doing mental shots every time someone referenced Gordon Gekko's "greed is good" speech), but for this particular bullet point I will just say that the entire point of doing a presentation in class is to get better at presenting and that's impossible if you don't know how to improve, or even worse (and what this teacher did) pretend there's nothing that needs improvement.

2. Don't teach a language like you're a phrasebook.  Teach grammar, not just words.  This one goes out more to those "You can learn X-language!" books than actual teachers, but people don't learn how to speak a language from phrases.  What they learn is how to parrot, which is not all that useful in the long run.  If even one of the words in each given sentence is changed, then everything they learned becomes useless, and considering how rarely those books update it's pretty much a guarantee the vernacular has changed since it was published.

But yes, there are teachers who teach like this.  In my French 1 class, we learned how to say "I am hungry" but we didn't learn the word for "food" until French 3, despite a couple of people straight-up asking the teacher "how do you say 'food'?"  Among other things.  Our school really, really did not have a good French program in general.

3. Don't grade essays based on your own extraneous guidelines.  Here are the guidelines for writing an essay: Make a point, then prove it.  That's it.  That's to what it all boils down.  Everything else is accessory to that goal.  Now, the point of things like MLA formatting and the intro/body/conclusion system are there because they make the essay clearer and they're a good way to organize your ideas, but that's it.  That means that if someone breaks from these molds, you should not grade them down if doing so makes their point clearer.

It gets even worse the younger you go.  In sixth grade, we were told we should never start two sentences in the same essay with the same word (or was it just the same paragraph?  I forget, since I've pretty much ignored it since then).  It's a decent rule of thumb to avoid getting repetitive, but it can also (very easily) be a good way to send clarity to hell.  But I had to do it anyway because I'd lose points if I didn't.

A recurring theme of this was being marked down for not including enough quotes.  If quotes are not conducive to an argument, then they should be omitted; they can be dead weight on your essay, particularly one based largely on induction.  Additionally, how can you use a single quote to wrap up an overarching theme from a large body unless said body outright states its point, which is downright bad writing on its part?  Paraphrasing the events of said passage and then extrapolating the point from it would be excellent form, but many teachers would tell students they should have used a quote instead.  Even worse, this can cause students to believe that just any quote will support their essay, since it will be graded all the same.  One of the student-made Animal Farm posters in my Freshman English class included four utterly inconsequential quotes from Snowball.  The teacher didn't care.  She deemed it not only worthy, but exemplary, and hung it on the wall.  This annoyed me from the very instant I first saw the poster, and told me that it wouldn't be a good year.

This can also go the other way: in the aforementioned presentations, we were required to have a visual aide.  For every single student except for myself and one other, the "visual aide" was a poster or collage of the movie posters or book covers of the works they cited.  This does not even vaguely help illustrate your point, particularly when your entire interaction with said visual aide is "For my visual aide, I used the cover of the book we all read and thus have all already seen the cover of, and the movie poster for Wall Street, which I cited."

4. Don't assign "fun" projects.  In that same Senior English class, we had to film a recreation of a scene from Hamlet.  Golly, that helped me learn about                     .

In fact, we weren't even allowed to make drastic changes, like when I suggested a science-fiction theme and was immediately shot down for being told it would be "too silly".  I'm going to put aside how that hurt my pride as a science-fiction fan, but it also illustrates how little this assignment had the potential to help us.  It would make sense if it was a film class--and in fact, I did do several similar things in my film class--but it isn't.  What practical English communication-related skills are we learning, except how much working with other people sucks?

I won't put scare quotes around "fun" if it is an activity which promotes learning which happens to be fun.  The problem is a lot of times "Oh, my students will enjoy this!" is not "How can I help them better understand the course material?  Oh, I've got it!  And it'll be enjoyable!"  I like watching ice water induce boiling, and it helped me understand how pressure affects phase changes.  That's fantastic.

Heck, even pointless showmanship is okay in moderation.  If you want to kick off a semester by showing off how awesome the course material is, you don't necessarily have to explain it.  As long as it slots into twenty minutes you couldn't have used otherwise.

If we could eliminate these "fun" projects that aren't all that fun anyway, then we could probably add another book to the curriculum or make the school year shorter.  I don't think many students would mind the change.

5. Don't penalize internet use.  One of the posters in my college's library says "Google can find you 10,000 answers. A  librarian can find you the right one."  Now, I've dealt with the BYU-H librarians, who are unable to find the correct answer to "Where is the fiction section?", but even ignoring that the quote (which, by the way, comes from a BYU-H faculty member since no one quoteworthy would actually say that) overlooks the fact that in the time it takes a librarian to find the correct answer you could have found nine or ten correct answers with Google.  I'd by the quote as accurate if he'd said Bing, but no one uses Bing anyway.

I'm still honestly surprised every time a teacher (like my 201 teacher, to whom I shall refer as Mr. Ludd) says "The internet is not reliable".  It's 2012.  Yes it is.  Are you unfamiliar with the massive list of citations at the end of every Wikipedia article?

To all the Mr. Ludds out there, yes, the internet is a fantastic resource.  I think you're just bitter that you didn't have it and you want to make your students work as hard as you did.  That's still possible, actually, but you're doing it the wrong way.  Instead, encourage them to use the internet, but then hold them to a much higher standard than you would have back in the olden days of yore since they have a much better resource.  It will lead them to make much better essays and research papers, which is a good thing, instead of forcing them to spend much more time to get an equal result, which is a bad thing.

6. Don't penalize reading ahead.  I haven't really had a problem with this one since elementary school, but it really, reaaaally got to me.  Because the class elected to read the book out loud, I had to sit and patiently wait for whoever was reading to get through any word more than one syllable.  And despite all his sputtering and vowel sounding and, he was not the one struggling.  But I dare not, oh, I don't know, read at my own pace, since when the teacher called my name and I had to backtrack six or seven pages, that counted as "being disruptive" and I was duly punished.  Great idea, teach.  That's how you get kids to enjoy reading, by making them stare at the same word for a good thirty seconds because little Billy, who is not me and whose reading ability is not mine and has no impact on mine can't figure out how to say "business".  Perhaps you could encourage better running speeds in PE by tying all the students together at the ankles.

How about instead, you give students power to opt out of group reading?  It would mean they get a better experience since they get to go at their own pace and it would mean the students who opted in get a better experience since they don't have to wait for the kid who got three chapters ahead to skip back to their level.  That's just one of the literally infinite better ideas than what they do.

7. Don't pretend you know things you don't.

Possible scenarios, from best to worst:

-Student asks question

-Teacher gives correct answer

-Student asks question

-Teacher does not know; looks up correct answer, gives student correct answer

-Student asks question

-Teacher does not know; tells student to look it up

-Student asks question

-Teacher does not know; instead, gives student over-simplified or otherwise wrong answer

-Student clings to this answer

It's okay not to know things.  It becomes a problem when you act on your ignorance.  If you're a teacher, then presumably you want your students to love to learn.  This begins with you being willing to do so yourself.

8. Don't grade homework.  Okay, this might not actually be the stupidest item on the list, but it's my list, and this is the one that has caused me the most grief at its sheer idiocy.

Homework is a good thing.  It's practice for the test.  The test evaluates how much a student has learned.  Learning is the point of the class.  How could we entirely subvert this whole system for the worse?

I've got it!  Let's grade homework.

Let's look at four very real and very common possibilities:

Like I said, homework is a good thing in theory.  But if a student does well on the tests, then it proves that she didn't need to do the homework, but if homework is graded, then she is getting penalized for not doing something she did not need to do.

For another example, let's examine the idea of grading rough drafts.  If someone does not do or turn in any rough drafts to a paper and turns in a great paper, that student should get an A.  They should not be marked down because they didn't bring in the paper three times prior so the teacher could tell them how to improve, because clearly the student figured it out on his or her own.  Again, they are being punished for being better than the teacher expected.

In addition, this means that students can often pass a class with little understanding of the subject or fail a class at which they have excellent comprehension.  I got a C in AP Biology; a class where I knew demonstrably more than the teacher, set the curve on all but two of the tests, and got a 5 on the AP test and 800 out of 800 on the SAT subject test.

I'd almost be willing to overlook this if it wasn't trickling up.  I sat in the dreary lectures I could have delivered myself and fantasized about when the grade would be determined 33% by the midterm and 67% by the final, but that hasn't been the case at all at my college.  Instead, they modeled it after high school classes.

To prove that class performance is not strongly correlated to understanding, I decided to compare AP scores and class grades here.  The resulting best-fit line has an a-score of .578 and an r² of .105, and for those of you don't speak Statistics that means "they're not related in any significant way".

If students are getting good grades on the homework and bad grades on the test, it means it's the teacher's responsibility to retool the homework and find something that works.

The interesting thing is, this one I can't really pin on teachers.  Studies on the subject show teachers don't like assigning homework any more than students like doing it.  The problem is actually a third element, the parents, who have an entrenched expectation that there be homework despite this.  This could probably best be overcome by an adamant teacher at Parent-Teacher night explaining the very simple reason why he or she chose not to grade homework in their class.

These are the big complaints I have, at least: the ones that deal with quality, not presentation.  Let me know if you can think of any solid justifications for the measures I questioned.

An Open Letter to Roger Ebert Regarding Video Games

Roger Ebert famously declared “Video games can never be art” in his article of the same name.  Since then, he has redacted this to restate “video games will not be art during any of our lifetimes.”  While this was enough to at least reduce the amount of flack he received from the gaming community, it was not enough to satiate me.  As an avid gamer, a dedicated critic of all things creative, and a lover of nitpicking, I take issue with this.  In the revised article, Mr. Ebert said that many of the rebuttals included specific recommendations of “play this game” or “play that game” which, obviously, are poorly suited to the argument.  Mr. Ebert is a film critic, and a good one at that, and he has proven his mettle as a film critic any time it has been questioned.  The man is an expert.  However, I can say bluntly that he does not know video games.  His established expertise is part of the reason this so badly perturbs me; Mr. Ebert is not the typical internet ignoramus nor a senile old man scared of change and pining for the bygone days that never existed, he is a genius of his craft whom I respect and admire and, as an amateur but devoted critic myself, someone to whom I often turn for research purposes.  I care what he thinks, and it is therefore annoying, to say the least, when he says something so drastically wrong.  Video games are already art; they have been for some time, and while the definition of art is quite subjective, it is hard to create a fair system of evaluation in which it does not qualify.
I have a great concern that Mr. Ebert is allowing himself to be controlled by a confirmation bias.  While he admitted he observed a compelling argument from video game designer Kellee Santiago, who cited several examples of artistically-inspired video games including Flower, the entire premise of which is built around the concept of nature versus industry, Ebert still claims “These three are just a small selection of games, she says, ‘that crossed that boundary into artistic expression.’ IMHO, that boundary remains resolutely uncrossed.”  However, he then cited Georges Melies’s A Voyage to the Moon as being more artistic than any of the games provided as examples.  A Voyage to the Moon was not made with artistic vision; Georges Melies was a magician, who was more interested in the effects of editing as a means of tricking the audience than in using film as a means of art, and he never pretended otherwise.  While A Voyage to the Moon was important in terms of future films, it is not, in and of itself, art, by most definitions.  He even goes so far to acknowledge he believes chess to be an art form, though doing so would almost certainly validate Tetris or the Professor Layton series the same way.
Firstly, we must address the issue of “what is art”.  The term is so subjective that it is difficult to say it has any true meaning, and my personal definition (a work within a medium which exemplifies its ideals) is a particularly loose one.  Internet-based comedian and art film critic Kyle Kallgren, specifically addressing the question “Are video games art?” in response to the opening of the Chicago Museum of Art’s new video games exhibit, says “Of course they are.  That’s not even a question.  They’re made by artists with a creative vision of an artificial world shaped by the author’s creativity and vision.  The medium has given us countless memorable characters, shaped our view of history, added to the cultural lexicon, and, like it or not, video games have touched every part of modern life.”  However, if I am to make a fair argument, I need to evaluate video games on Roger Ebert’s criteria.  Further, as I said, Mr. Ebert is not a gamer, he is a film critic.  If I’m to refute his argument, I’m going to need to level the playing field, so to speak, and approach everything in terms of film.  I present my argument in the terms of film, as far as I have learned them: of mise-en-scène, of cinematography and editing, of narrative, and of sound.
However, I would first like to point out that Mr. Ebert’s claim would be far stronger if he were not a critic of film.  Film is itself a very new medium, and one that is undoubtedly an art form, at least to the aforementioned Mr. Ebert.  The reason he eventually acknowledged he could not say video games will never be art was because “Perhaps it is foolish of me to say ‘never,’ because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time,” elaborating to state, “Let me just say that no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”  Rounding for ease of use, film has been around for roughly 112 years; video games have been around for forty.  Forty years, may I remind you, is also a long time.  A hypothetical critic of paintings or sculpture or theater could say that film would never be an art; however, were he to say this in 1940, it would mean ignoring the dozens of noteworthy films that had already come out and have since been vindicated by history, as well as proving said critic was only tangentially familiar with the medium.  Giving myself a life expectancy of 76 years, that would mean that video games will not develop into an art in ninety-eight years.  If this same criterion were applied to film, then Citizen Kane would be considered part of the “dark ages” of film creation, before it became art.  Video games, too, have been art for years, evident to those familiar with them.
The interesting thing about that hypothetical critic is that he’s unnecessary.  That hypothetical is extraneous, because this has already happened.  The exact same thing happened with the introduction of diegetic sound into film in the late twenties.  Critics of silent film stated that it was a fad, a gimmick; real artists filmed things silently.  Charlie Chaplin outright refused to use sound film for most of his career, only caving decades after the change had become nearly omnipresent in the industry.
In terms of mise-en-scène, video games represent a great amount of creativity and effort.  Video games are the only medium where science fiction and high fantasy are alive and well; as a result, many video games rely on intricately-designed and extremely creative settings, props, and characters of diversity rarely seen outside German Expressionism and its derivatives.  In games more founded in reality, such as L.A. Noir, mise-en-scene is still extremely important and even minute details are critical.  With the advent of cutscenes and improved graphical and mechanical engines, this has only become more pronounced in recent years.  I learned about composition not from watching movies, but from a particular animation in Final Fantasy IX.  One example of truly brilliant mise-en-scene comes from Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles; the game utilizes a “chalice” which must be carried by one of the players.  Though generally detested by the players of the game, it in fact served a very simple way of ensuring the four players could stay on the screen at the same time without crowding nor stretching.  Indeed, there are professional artists whose sole outlet of expression is in designing characters, settings, weaponry, and other elements of composition for video games and who indeed innovate and express artistic vision in their efforts of doing so.
While it is more difficult to point to use of cinematography or editing, as video games are of course made without cameras, there is no more of a difference in this respect than there is in an average animated film; to deny them on this standard would be to deny Spirited Away and Beauty and the Beast from being art in the same sentence.  However, many games such as Pokemon Black and White still play with the hypothetical camera angles, as seen in scenes such as in and near Castelia City.  In addition, codes of cinematic conduct such as the Rule of Thirds and the Axis of Action are both enforced and toyed with freely, the same as in a film, even with the added challenge of accounting for a dynamic environment.
Video games’ stories have developed greatly from the basic linear plots from the early games.  Starting around the time of the first Final Fantasy, video games have taken on increasingly complex stories, characters, themes, and motifs.  In fact, not being bound by the three-act structure common to most films, they are free to explore far larger stories.  A movie is considered “too long” if it takes more than a few hours; a game is considered “too short” if it takes less than a few dozen.  While action is enough to keep players playing, in order to keep them interested and invested in the characters an intricate storyline is necessary for most games with artistic vision.  Often it is not that a professional video game story writer was told, “Here’s a video game, give it a story” and more that someone created a story from passion and felt that a video game would be the best medium for expressing it.  Characters in good video games are no less potent and interesting than characters in good movies.  Their lives can be interesting, their deaths can be tragic.  Their dialogue and actions give them just as much depth as a Hollywood film.  Roger Ebert noted of Santiago, “She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.”  This is depending on the incorrect belief that video games cannot have clever or important dialogue, disproven many times over.  It is here that my concerns of a notable confirmation bias become more pronounced.  Like any form of art, video games are even open to experimentation and deviation from formula.  Very few works outside the medium offer such options as branched endings, which are quite common in video games.  Others, like the aforementioned Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, use methods such as gradually hinting at the backstory and relying on the protagonists to proactively seek it at their own pace.  There is no argument one could make against the story elements of video games that would not quash the idea that film can be an art as well.
Sound and the manipulation thereof is a major part of what sets video games apart.  While few non-musical movies have a truly spectacular soundtrack, this is a very common feature in video games.  ZUN, the one-man creative team behind the Touhou Project series of video games, has composed literally dozens of sonatas to act as character and level themes in his games.  The soundtrack for the video game Tempest 2000 was so well-composed it ended up outselling the game’s console port.  The mastery is not limited to non-diegetic sound, either.  Particularly in action-heavy games, a massive amount of sound engineering goes into ensuring that sounds seem to be coming from the right place, that they are realistic and not distracting yet distinct, etc.  To say this much hard work and creativity does not constitute “art” seems like an insult to these engineers, let alone the rest of the finished product.
While I said I would stick exclusively to the terms of art that apply to film, I do feel I should at least acknowledge that video games do have a dimension that film does not, the aspect normally referred to as gameplay.  This is what defines games such as Tetris as art, in their beautiful simplicity; like with any gauge of art, it can then range from the immaculately minimalist to the mesmerizingly complex.  Much how a book can not be judged for its art or a painting for its soundtrack, the gameplay aspect of video games is unique to the medium.  The creative effort that goes into ensuring games are diverse and enjoyable is what defines them and could be evaluated on its own multi-part scale.
I believe it is clear from the evidence that video games not only are art, but that they have been for some time.  Evaluation as you have posited it is not only unfair in its criteria but also demonstrably wrong by way of lack of research of the subject in question and its contents.  Roger Ebert claims several times that "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."  The only reason this is so is because of the negative stigma associated with video games, and an impartial analysis, as I believe and hope I have given, will clearly reveal them as such.  I’ve cited Tetris several times; I would also like to present games like Super Mario World, Final Fantasy VII, The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, and Doom, just to lay the groundwork.  They have established new boundaries of culture, they have become ingrained in the collective unconscious, and they have impacted other media as well.  Video games are art.

Selective Service

I'm overdue registering for the draft, and I've started receiving letters.  Well that's fantastic.  The draft is by far the stupidest, most outdated, least logical, most unethical government program currently active.  How can I say that?  Well, examine it, shall we?

THEN WHY DO YOU HAVE THE OPTION, YOU IDIOTS?

Problem number one: it's sexist.  This is part of to what I'm referring when I say it's outdated.  It is not something made with a modern mentality, it is something written decades ago and never revised.  Women are perfectly capable of serving in the military.  In fact, recently they were permitted to serve on the front lines, and I think it's pretty ridiculous that it took them until 2012 to do that.  Moving on, the problem persists in that only men are required to register for the selective service.

In fact, it's not made with a mentality fitting of a few decades ago, either.  It's made with ethics more fitting to the Roman Empire or an ancient Greek city-state.  It's acting as if there is no greater contribution one can make than to serve your country in combat.  While I do respect our soldiers, I politely disagree on the grounds that war is not good.  I might hazard to say it's a little bad.  Programs that encourage war would, by association, be less than optimal.

Frankly, it doesn't matter whether or not you agree, because I have my opinion.  If my opinion is that war is rarely if ever justified, and I am being forced to serve in the military, then my right to my opinion has been violated.

The military is an enticing package.  Scholarships, legs up in employment searches, decent pay (I said decent, not great, they're still underpaid for what they do).  Believe me, if there was anyone who would be "just okay" with joining the armed forces, if there was anyone with little enough reason to resist that they wouldn't mind a sudden mandate for them to do so, they would have already enlisted.  Just about everyone else would be doing so against their will.  Not everyone, of course, but I'm going to say at least a good-sized chunk of the people who are registered for the draft would have a problem with being drafted.

Then they have the gall to say "current law does not permit females to register".  Permit?  PERMIT?  Let us get one thing straight, this is not a privilege, this is a demand.  This is reducing our liberties.  That is just nauseating, that they would say "permit", as if this is some grand glorious right that we males are lucky enough to receive from our benevolent leaders.  I have received letters ordering me to register.  Golly gee, I hope they let me.

Oh yes, I'd hate for anyone not legitimately in America to take away my hard-earned right to unwillingly serve an entity I oppose.

Let me make another thing abundantly clear: I don't love this country.  Why should I?  Yes, it's better than a lot of places; I could have been born into far worse circumstances.  However, the United States is not the pinnacle of all that is good and right with the world, and it hasn't been for a very long time.  "The Land of Opportunity" and "The Home of the Free" are borne from a time when the US was the only developed country not run by a monarchy.  Nowadays, our monopoly on democracy is a bit less absolute.  Further, America is one of the worse democracies available.  What do we have that's so great?  A system of election that's broken almost beyond repair from political parties, the spoils system, and rigidness?  Citizens too stupid, stubborn, and/or apathetic to work towards fixing it?  Public school systems so bad they're an active detriment to their students half the time?  Corrupt businesses satisfied with making the American Dream a fairy tale?  You're lucky I'm not actively fighting against you!

I'm not trying to blame Obama or Bush or Clinton.  I do blame Bush Sr. and Reagan a little bit, but not really.  Nor am I trying to blame any of the presidents before them.  This was a gradual problem centuries in the making.  While "The Founding Fathers Wanted" is an idiotic argument, I do feel the need to point out that the Constitution was mutable for the very purpose that they recognized they weren't perfect, and they wanted the government to be able to change to fit the needs of the people or to be able to incorporate new ideas that would improve it.  We have not acted on that.

I'm actually a little more lenient with countries that have obligatory military service, like Israel.  In that case, you know it's coming, you're signed up for it.  I still think the government is spitting in the face of its citizens, but it's a little better than being given a packet of spittle and being told to hold onto it and apply to the eye when instructed.

June 25, 1993.  I'm eighteen, like everyone required to register.  This of course means I am seven years too young to be elected to the House of Representatives and twelve years too young to be elected to the Senate.  Wonderful.  This also means that everyone who might be able to argue on the topic will be entirely unaffected by it.  That will work, we've seen how quickly they passed women's suffrage.  At least it's better than the first several decades of the draft, when the average soldier in Vietnam was two years short of being able to vote.  But of course, that's a matter of maturity.  How can we count on someone so young to make important decisions, or be intelligent enough to study the important issues that rule political discussion?  Not to mention they're young, we don't want to put too much pressure on them.  Much better to give them a gun, ship them off somewhere they've never been, and order them to kill people they don't know.  Much better indeed.

See, the government actually bankrolled an argument against their own policies.

Yes, eighteen is quite young.  As I pointed out, they are twelve years too young to run for the Senate.  They are 60% of the age needed to run for the Senate.  They will not be able to drink for three more years, or rent a car for seven.  Many of them are still in high school.  Does no one else see anything wrong with this being our drawing pool?  "But it's still the best age available!" some may say, but if the "best age available" is still an absolutely horrible age at which to be drafting people, then it seems pretty obvious there is no age when drafting is appropriate.

Here's the complete form.  As you can see, there is no "conscientious objector" checkmark, no "opt out".  You're eighteen, you're a guy, sign the form.

Really, we could pay for a lot of our underfunded programs by cutting money from the military.  We have no real reason to be involved in so many international affairs, much less militarily so.  As we've seen over and over again, getting involved with other countries ends badly for us, and we go bankrupt in the process.  That's why the other countries are beating us.  That's why they have things like universal wi-fi, high-speed rail, and decent education systems.  They aren't wasting trillions of dollars screwing themselves over.

Honestly, I'm not even concerned about myself.  I'm not a healthy person; I'm sure I've got something or other that disqualifies me from serving.  I'm concerned about all those other men who are trapped in an unfair, outdated system.

I'm not registering.  Not only do my plans see me living outside the United States anyway, but I would rather serve five years in jail than support this program.