There is a movie I've heard about, I think it's called Waiting for Superman, that lays out just how shitty our education system is. How the hell is it that we spend 2-3 times more on one child's education than most developed countries do, yet we are far from being the most intelligent? That makes no sense to me. We get shit teachers that a pissed because they aren't paid enough or whatever crappy reason they have. We have teachers who like to beat down your self esteem, thus creating less than adequate students. We're taught material in 4th grade we should have learned in 2nd grade because many people think we can't handle a quicker paced classroom. Basically, we're taught very young that we just aren't capable of doing some things. My 3rd grade teacher is a prime example of this. She was a bitch, to put it nicely. I think I was about 8? years old and I had serious problems with my hearing loss when it came to academics. I wasn't stupid. I could read just fine and caught on the most concepts rather quickly. I just always would miss important details and thus my grades were in the C, D, F range. My parents had no problem with this, so neither did I. I think this is kind of like my parents telling me, 'we understand, it's ok that you're stupid'. Anyway, back to my third grade teacher... Ms. Selph was her name. I liked her at first. She was really pretty and nice. But then when it was established that my hearing problem would affect the way she taught, she sort of had a bitch fit. She would have to start carrying around an FM system, which was a big chunky thing that hung around her neck that had a microphone, so whenever she spoke, I could hear her as if she were talking right into my ear. It really helped me, even though I had to have chunky attachments to the end of my hearing aids for a bit. Ms. Selph hated me for it. She would yell at me for the dumbest things in the world. She yelled at me 'for yawning too loud' (wtf?). I remember this one bit fairly well because this moment kind of altered how I felt about my self worth. This boy in my class, Brad Ross, had read and gotten a perfect score on the AR test on a book called Peter Pan. She made a big deal about it too, telling the whole class and giving him an award. I was a bit jealous of course. Because Ms. Selph had told us we couldn't check out books that weren't on our grade level (I think Peter Pan was like.. 4th grade?) and I wondered, well how did he get to read that book if we can't even check those out? I wanna read it too! So I went to the library and checked out Peter Pan all happy that I might be able to get a perfect score on it as well, and impress Ms. Selph, even. I walked back to class with pride, book in hand. I sat at my desk and opened up the first page, soaking up the words with such intensity. It hadn't been 2 minutes and Ms. Selph was peering over my shoulder and she immediately pitched a fit when she saw what I was reading. 'I THOUGHT I TOLD YOU NOT TO CHECK OUT BOOKS THAT AREN'T IN YOUR GRADE LEVEL!' 'But but... you let Brad read it!' 'I don't care, you take that book back right now!' She might as well have told me I'm not smart enough to read Peter Pan. So I gathered my beloved book, fighting tears, and returned the book back to the library. She'd made a scene about it so of course everyone was looking at me and I was extremely embarrassed. She always hated me, I believe. She even had a sit down with the principal AND my parents to tell them all that I rolled my eyes at her whenever I got back a paper with a bad mark on it. :| Let me just say that I was never a child with an attitude. I was wayyy too nice for that so obviously she was lying. And what's horrible is there are many many teachers out there that are just like Ms. Selph, if not worse.
I genuinely feel that with every new generation, we get dumber and dumber (see what I mean I couldn't even think of a better way to say that). I think that back in the 50s, 60s, they taught more in the schools then than they do now. I find Little Women a more than easy read and I'm in the 12th grade whereas my AP Language teacher said she'd read that in 3rd grade, no problem. Not only that, on a worldwide scale, Americans are rather stupid. Asian kids know math concepts in 8th grade that we don't learn till, in some cases, college. UK, France, and other European students may very well be fluent in 2 languages while most graduate college in America only knowing the basics of a second language. On the SAT, I didn't know 3/4 of the math concepts, most of which I learned when I was in 6th or 7th grade but couldn't remember.
Also, education levels vary. If you live in the ghetto where students in schools are more likely to join gangs than to graduate, fact is, the education you get at that school is probably shit. Whereas students from a higher class are bound to get better educations than 80% of the entire country. Is this fair? Is this any better than when we sent black kids to shit log cabin schools whereas while kids went to huge brick walled schools? Whereas we somewhat have equality in race in education, we still suffer from inequality of social class. We need to create an equilibrium in education where everyone can learn the same things at the same pace and more efficiently.
I could even talk about separating the 'dumb' students from the 'gifted' students with 'general' classes or 'honor' classes. Is this fair? I mean I can see how it makes sense to separate students in this way but is it right? Does it further lower the self esteem of the 'general' students and make them feel as though they'll never be good enough for higher education?
So what I'm saying is, America needs a complete reform in the education system. I don't know what we can do, but it certainly needs to be something better than this. We need to develop a way to spend less on the education system and at the same time change the way we teach students in a way that will be more effective and produce better results.
DON'T ASK ME WHY BUT I THOUGHT OF FREEDOM WRITERS AND THIS SONG WHEN I FINISHED THIS POST SO SHUT UP...
posted by loreal @ 9:35 AM