So why do they bother teaching people English? People know their own language, right? They know how to read, yes? I'm sure there are many answers of the patently obvious sort to respond to that, but one that I hadn't thought too much about till recently was that the English subject is partly about teaching critical thinking (the sad trick of it being that many English teachers don't seem inclined to teach that, apparently, which is what the new "AIMS-centered" class is ironically set for fixing). So, besides the patently obvious again, why bother with that skill? Because in order to have critical thinking, one needs to recognize one's own perspective as only one upon many perspectives - sometimes simply in different registers, sometimes in a hierarchy - but that's why English also teaches rhetoric and argument. But, the value of that baseline skill of critical thinking is, hopefully, patently obvious.

Battlestar Galactica, (of which I saw my first couple of episodes today) seems to be very mature and promising show. They bill it as an 'adult show with adult themes,' which doesn't mean sex or gore in this case, but complicated characters and a pretty heavy storyline. I was hurting for backstory, however, but the show's website fixed that with a glance. Not bad for a remake of something from the seventies.