Anyways, this time it's school rage. Lately I've been researching The Homework Debate thing for a project (more on that later), and I've thought a lot about schools.
Basically, in my opinion, the idea of a school is awesome. Best thing ever thought up by man, maybe. Now the idea of school
by modern society is basically torture.
I'll explain myself.
School was made to teach young homo sapiens, so they may succeed in life.
However, right now, it's the opposite.
Let's just start with grades. Maybe at first they seemed like a good idea, but not so much anymore.
Why? Pressure. It kills student's motivations to learn. This is because, if a student is told he's bad at a class, he'll believe he's bad and mediocre (or even lower than mediocre) and shouldn't put effort into anything, 'cause he'll never achieve anything. Then, on the other end of the spectrum, we've got the people who did well a couple of times and are expected by everyone to be perfect from then on. Grades took school from "learning place" to "contest to death between children probably causing stress to most involved." Now people don't learn things out of their own volition, they are
forced to learn. Also, homework. Children started falling behind against other countries, so what do schools do? Give more of it, why!
Sincerely, that's like seeing someone unable to do 10 pushups and telling them they should make 40 without stopping so he can improve. He'll probably end off worse, not only physically, but his brain will also catalogue pushups as bad. Homework isn't "Oh, this lesson is so important I should take some of the children's time at home to make sure they learn it well; it'll help them in life" but "Meh. Let's have children do work every day after school on whatever we did today."
To quote an author I read:
About a year ago, Deborah Meier and I were having one of those dinners where we try to figure out the fundamental nature of the Tougher Standards movement before the check arrives. On that particular night we stumbled upon a very dark possibility, one that is perhaps best communicated in the form of a thought experiment. Suppose that next year almost all the students in your state met the standards and passed the tests. What do you suppose would be the reaction from the politicians, businesspeople, and newspaper editorialists? Would these folks shake their heads in frank admiration and say, “Damn, those teachers are good”? That possibility, of course, is improbable to the point of hilarity. Every time I’ve laid out this hypothetical scenario, audiences tell me that across-the-board student success would immediately be taken as evidence that the tests were too easy.
So what does that mean? The inescapable implication, as Meier points out, is that the phrase “high standards” by definition refers to standards that everyone won’t be able to meet. If everyone could meet them, that would be taken as prima facie proof that the standards were too low – and they would then be ratcheted upward – until failures were created. Despite its sugar-coated public-relations rhetoric, the whole standards-and-accountability movement is not about helping all children to become better learners. It is not committed to leaving no child behind. Just the opposite: it is an elaborate sorting device, separating wheat from chaff. And don’t ask what happens to the chaff.
In my opinion, a nail has never been hit more in the head.
Maybe I'm just mad because my school thinks "If 8th graders aren't doing at least 3 projects 50% of the time while still doing homework, what else could they ever be doing after school?"
And yeah. I had to do 2 of those three "group" projects mostly by myself. Even when I missed two days of a project, I still did 99% of it.
IMNSHO, I think the perfect world would be a place where children learn, grow up being understood and encouraged to talk, and live their life when they grow up. (By that I mean get dream job).
... I forgot something. Maybe I'll say it later.
Anyways, I'm probably having my opinions messed up by my sleepyness and current mood.
Morning-me is probably gonna no care about this so long as he can rest more, Perfectionist-me will probably tell me to shut up and perfect from now on, and Nihilist-me will say by posting this I'm going for a light but it's just the train. You're-Crying-Over-FirstWorld-Problems me will probably insult me and say there's people out there dying and here I am doing nothing.
Author
Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3773973 times)