Letters to the Editor

Group Play

Am I the only one who thinks people are reading into this a little too much? I admit my experience with Conan is the two movies and the cartoon "Conan the Adventurer" but I still don't see why people are analyzing it so much.

Here's where I start talking about "lizard brains" again. Conan and so many other B-heroes are just ways for us to safely revel in boyish sex and violence fantasies. It doesn't matter how old and mature you get.

On some primitive level, it still resonates with you. And that's all right. Those shots of raw testosterone and adrenaline are better than all the drugs in the world in changing your mood. Every time I watch Fist of the North Star, I get that feeling every time I hear Kenshiro doing his iconic "ATATATATATA-WATAH!"

- General Ma Chao

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In response to "Idea Sex in the Classroom" from The Escapist Forum: As the article initially points out, the problem with learning has so much more to do with entertainment than anything else. If the learning material (or how that material is being taught) isn't entertaining, then of course its dreaded and loathed by reluctant students.

But that's not where it ends. Simply educating the educators does nothing. A teacher's attitude, beliefs, charisma, and commanding respect are all factors on how well a student learns. You can give someone all of the materials, and teach them how to use those materials, and they'll still fail. But what sticks out the most with bad teachers, more so than mean and horrible teachers, are when they don't have faith in what they teach, or when they don't have faith in who they teach. When either of those two are lacking, at least half of the class is bound for failure.

With the rise of bad parenting and weak family ties ever since the 60's (or was it earlier?), the TV, more or less, became a parenting tool, and children grew up with weak connections to their in-home role-models. Instead of having a reliable parent to look up to, they instead escaped to the sit-a-thon that is tv programming, and when they did look to their parents, received near to nothing, or an entirely wrong message. Teachers are really surrogate parents, and when they fail at that, the child fails, with no one to blame.

Sorry for the rant. For me, education and parenting are closely tied, as I imagine it is for a lot of people, and is something that I personally feel is poor.

- Darkpen