Questions:
1. Why does a certain amount of students have to fail a class despite acts like No Child Left Behind that do the opposite?
2. What makes one class more important than another in regards to the budget?
3. Why is school seen as such a boring and torturous experience through the eyes of the student?
Ideas:
1. School breeds us to be interchangeable by eliminating creative programs from most schools in favor of keeping math and science.
2. School is like a study of humanity, you can see a select group and observe and get information from them.
3. School will never be perfect for everybody, even if they took all the courses they wanted because there will always be something they can nitpick at to ruin it and cast it in a negative light.
Experiences:
1. I had my internship at an elementary school and in all honesty, things are not always perfect. However this is in many ways not a reflection of the students but rather the parents, because kids will often come into class with problems that are pre-existing and teachers will be unable to solve them but instead have to wait them out and hope for the best.
2. The problem with school is often not the subject but actually the people in the class. Like for instance, last year I would say that history was my favorite class and I thought that there was a great dynamic with everybody in the room and things went swimmingly. This year though the class has not been as enjoyable and this is in no part because of the curriculum, because if anything it has been more interesting and relevant in many ways. The problem is that the people in the class prevent productivity and prevent the rest of the class from living up to its full potential.
3. I took art classes over the summer at the Art Institute of Chicago in their college prep class. This was the first time I had taken an art class with kids my age since 10th grade. This was the first time I had taken an art class with people who actually cared since I was born. Why is this? Well, the schools I went to had art, but it was mandatory, formulaic, slow, and nobody took it seriously. This wasn't all the teachers fault, but rather it was the school boards fault because they made it mandatory and therefore half of the class wasn't interested. I remember this class fondly though, but not for the great pieces I made. No, I remember it for all of the free time I had because the class would take 3 weeks to work on a single drawing I finished already. This level of commitment from my classmates made it boring and uninteresting unless you had something else to do, and that's the way school art is.
Part B
A good student sits down for class, back straight, eyes to the board, notebook out. The teacher has notes already up and the good student takes them down. Scribble scribble scribble, a new batch of knowledge being absorbed. Teacher has down their job well. Except there is a problem. The good student took the notes and learned a lot. But next to the good student is the texter. Next to the texter is the talker. Next to the talker is the sleeper. Next to the sleeper is the joker. In the chain of students that all have the good student as a role model of what to do, all of them will fail. All of them will yell at the teacher and say that the job wasn't done right since they failed. The teacher will grow frustrated and try again next year or worse yet, quit. The cycle will begin again.
This basically describes 75% of the classes I have taken in high school. Everybody complains and finds a million flaws in the way the teacher tries to get them to learn. Now, this is fine in some ways because different people learn in different ways and even the most studious student can't always get a good grade if the teacher is teaching in a way they don't understand. But if the student makes no effort and texts in class or sleeps or talks, then they can't learn. This is one of the most frustrating things that high school brings. Distractions. Students grow up and find things less and less relevant and get more things to distract them from phones to ipods to each other and then they can't learn.
I know there is the old saying, "There are no bad students, only bad teachers" and I used to agree with that and I still do. There is the potential in every teacher to be so captivating that everybody loves the class and passes. The thing is, the saying doesn't account for people that simply don't want to learn. I feel like this is the average high school student. I think this largely comes from people just finding things useless. I myself have found that most math has been useless for me since 11th grade. I don't even consider myself one of the students that finds school irrelevant. I like school and have my entire life. So if I am one of the students that likes school and even I cannot remain interested in school, what does this say for the majority of students? I mean, I know this is largely rambling and has little point, but I feel like that in itself provides further context to school. I just don't care the way I once did and this impacts my school performance. And this is the way the majority of high schoolers are. So they text and talk and joke and draw to distract themselves from school and boredom. That's the modern high school and it needs to be changed.
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