Kit's Blog

Today was... to say the least... odd...

     So anyway, today was odd. Very much so. Why you ask? I'll tell you:
I was asked to drop a class in order to help fix the school network. Yeah... in chemistry, a guy came in and gave the teacher this note:

(Note: the signature is blocked because yes, I am just that paranoid)
     So, how many of you know Mrs. Baker? Anyone? Anyone? Didn't think so. Apparently it's some supervisor of some sort and really it was Dr. Goodwin calling me down to talk about leaving my programming class or comming in after school to help work on the school network. I kinda have to leave the exciting part of this story out, but that's for my own personal gain.
     Anyway, outside of that if I didn't already tell you (which I'm actually fairily certain I did), I'm applying for an independant study in my Java programming class. There several reasons I'm doing this. Mainly, it's because my teacher is kinda incompetant and because I'm learning more from the book than I am from her. But what really drew the line for me? We took a test in her class and there was an odd word on the test: instantiate. Now, I don't know about you, but instantiate is not a word in my vocabulary. So I called over Ms. Song and asked her what the word was. When she failed to describe it to me I asked her if it was meant to be initiate. And she responded the initiate and instantiate were the same thing.
     "...excuse me?"
     "Initiate and instantiate are the same thing."
     "Instantiate isn't a word Ms. Song."
     "Yes it is, it's the same as initiate." Then she walked away. See, I wouldn't mind if she would admit that she didn't know the difference, or that she had made a typo, but no. She had to rationalize it out to be a whole new fucking word. I wanted to scream out "WHAT THE HELL?! JUST ADMIT YOU WERE WRONG!" But I couldn't really do that, so instead I decided that I'd apply for an independant study. Yup.

--UPDATE--
in·stan·ti·ate ( P ) Pronunciation Key (n-stnsh-t)
tr.v. in·stan·ti·at·ed, in·stan·ti·at·ing, in·stan·ti·ates
To represent (an abstract concept) by a concrete or tangible example: “Two apples... both instantiate the single universal redness” (J. Holloway).

Okay, so it turns out that instantiate is indeed a word. And so, a lot of my argument for leaving the class is lost. But, in my defense, she did use it completly out of context so it didn't make any sence! So it technically should have been initiate, but she used a word that was in the book, which means something completly different.