So, I've flip-flopped again and decided to move my blog to theicy.net, where I can get free hosting and run WordPress myself. The new address is http://schoolfools.theicy.com.

So, I’ve just switched from Blogger to WordPress. The address might change again soon, if I figure out a way to host this for free. But for now, it’ll stay here. I still need to get the RSS feed and hit counter up and running, though.

Other than that, I’m currently on spring break, so not much is happening school-wise.

Today, I randomly stumbled across this enlightening essay, called Against School and written by John Taylor Gatto. Basically, this guy taught in public schools in New York City for thirty years, and as the result of his experiences, is now strongly against the way public schools are taught. Not just in the United States, but in the whole world. For a minute, I identified with his loathing of current teaching methods since that’s basically the subject of this whole blog. But as I read, I realized that our viewpoints are quite different.

This guy’s a radical. Of course, I’m a conservative, so a whole lot of viewpoints will seem really liberal or radical to me. And neither do I claim to have complete understanding of which viewpoints should be classified under which label. But basically, this guy thinks that public schooling is just wrong by principle. He thinks it’s unnecessary, and that all it does is prepare children to be servants to the government by making them dumb, conforming, and childish. At least, this was the gist of the essay as I interpreted it.

As I read the essay, I understood and appreciated the writer’s point of view until I reached one part. This part is describing the six goals of public education as Alexander Inglis (author of Principles of Secondary Education) and Gatto see them. They include the adjustive function, or accustoming children to respond to authority; integrating, to force them into conformity; diagnostic and directive, to direct them into their proper social roles; differentiating, training them only as much as required for that role; and propaedeutic, ensuring that a few kids are taught how to carry this on. But the one that really stopped me was the “selective” function. This is just ridiculous. To show how ridiculous it is, I will now quote that part of the essay:

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin’s theory of natural selection as applied to what he called “the favored races.” In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit – with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments – clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That’s what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

So basically, one of the functions of public schooling is to embarass the dumber kids so that the rest of us will not want to mate with them? Something seems out of whack here. Has it ever occured to the people who believe this that punishment in school is intended to show the child that they have done wrong? Besides which, I don’t see dumb people having any trouble reproducing. Personally, they often seem to have less trouble. As a matter of fact, the repressed burnouts in high school who are constantly being embarassed by their teachers seem more likely to go out and have underage sex, or to drop out of school altogether.

But that’s just my two cents.

school , essays, teachers

At Skyline High School, the administrators have now banned waving the American flag (or any flag, for that matter). Apparently, some students have been insulting Hispanic students by waving the flags at them “brazenly”.

The story’s actually longer than that (see the post on Michelle Malkin’s blog), but the point is clear. And I don’t think this was the right way to deal with it. Since they think that “brazenly” waving flags is considered insulting to other students, it should considered as such and the students should be punished accordingly. Not every flag waving incident is meant as an insult or otherwise rude action.

Say I bought a whole wardrobe of expensive clothes and started wearing them all to school. Then I would insult some girl who doesn’t wear expensive clothes like mine by pointing out my clothes in comparison to hers and laughing at her. Would the school ban wearing expensive clothes since they could offend someone else? Or say I belong to a religion that doesn’t allow girls to cut their hair. My friends of the same religion and I would taunt the other girls who do cut their hair. So then what would the school do?

Sure, those are extreme cases. But sometimes, I wish that principals would find more inclusive ways of solving behavioral problems at school.

Review basketball? Gimme a break. We all know our student teacher’s obsessed with basketball, but this is a little too much. Today we had a big test in history, so yesterday, of course, was the review game. Each person answered questions and then tried to throw a ball into a wastebasket from either of 7 spots, each giving a different amount of points if you made it in. Your team only scored points if you made it in, even if you already answered the question perfectly.

Yeah, it was fun. But it’s stupid for school. No way should one’s basketball skills affect whether they will receive extra credit on the test or not. My favorite part was when a girl spoke up and said, “What does this have to do with our World History skills?” I almost laughed out loud. Finally, someone else other than me and my friend share this viewpoint.

By the way, remember my English essay? My teacher loved it. She told me that she enjoyed reading it, and that she showed to her husband, she’ll show it to the director of the literature magazine at our school, and she’ll share it with her other classes. You know, if a teacher likes that kind of anti-current-education-methods kind of essay, perhaps my ideas aren’t that unpopular, after all.

school, history, sports, activities, English , essays, writing, teachers

So, when I saw the reference on the blackboard to this computer game that I happen to like, I was excited. But I soon realized that today’s history lesson had nothing to do with computer games. We’re studying the Industrial Revolution, right? Yes, we are. So for today’s assignment, we were supposed to take a piece of grid paper, we had a “budget” of $100,000 and we were supposed to plan a city. Then, we would give it a name and explain in a detailed paragraph why we designed it the way we did and – get this – why we picked the name.

And yet again, it is simply impossible to do this activity without, of course, coloring in all the zones and buildings on the grid paper. Why? WHY? What does this teach us? It’s not even fun. So the teacher cannot argue that she’s trying to make learning fun, because this isn’t. The real Sim City game is fun. This – no.

I guess it’s just busywork. What that means is that our teacher just couldn’t stand the thought of us going home tonight and not doing any homework from her class. No. We MUST do homework from this class tonight, or else our time will be mercilessly wasted. And the homework we do must be as totally pointless as possible, because after all, she’s not supposed to actually teach us anything. She’s supposed teach herself how to teach.

school, history, coloring, activities

In response to a comment someone left on here (thanks for commenting, by the way), no, I’m not a bookworm. Haven’t read nonfiction for years, actually. Just because I don’t want to grow up not knowing shit about the world around me doesn’t make me a bookworm. It makes me a teenager who’s a bit different from everyone else. Other than that, I’m very normal. NOT a nerd, geek, bookworm, loser, or any other nice high school terminology. I have lots of friends, go to parties, get up at 6 to do my hair and makeup, and love shopping. That all is not very bookwormy behavior right there.

The reason why I didn’t reveal what I really thought was because, don’t forget, I’m stuck in this school until graduation. There’s no reason for me to encourage people to call me a bookworm. If you’ve ever been in high school, you know to avoid confrontation. It’s how people like me, who’re not exactly like everyone else, survive without having their high school years made miserable. If you want to flaunt how different you are and how much contempt you have for average people, you’re going to pay. Tough.

History class was a JOKE yesterday, and I’m not kidding (no pun intended). It now hurts to roll my eyes.

Our incompetent student teacher happens to be obsessed with basketball. Also, she has absolutely no control over the class. None whatsoever. So it was not difficult for the class to persuade her to let them watch a basketball game in class instead of learn.

So she wrote notes on the board really fast, read them out loud with almost no explanation, and turned the game back on. She kept saying that if she sees our regular teacher coming down the hall, she would turn it off really quick and pretend to be lecturing. Which means that this isn’t allowed.

Now, look here. This woman (or girl, rather) is in charge of a large chunk of my high school history education. It’s a good thing I’m responsible enough to learn on my own. But half the class isn’t. Knowledge needs to be forced down their throats, or else they’ll grow up stupid. This here teacher is not doing her fair share of the work.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t about to complain. Actually, I pretended to the class and all of my friends that this class period was the best thing since summer vacation was invented. Only one kid in the class complained, but that was only because she liked to dissent from popular opinion. I dissent from popular opinion without shoving it in the faces of people who really couldn’t care less about my dissent from any opinion whatsoever.

In short, it was the most pathetic waste of a class period since…yesterday? For me, there can never be a day of school without at least some pathetic wasting of class periods.

school, history, teachers

For some reason, French class has really been getting on my nerves lately. The teacher in that class must have, like, missed the lesson on how not to alienate the whole class against her.

Today, I had finished the homework in class and, believing that I had learned this chapter’s content exceptionally well (ha), I took out a copy of the school newspaper and began reading. I hadn’t even gotten through half of the essay about academic dishonesty before my teacher addressed me and said, “Tu devrais etudier le vocabulaire!” (“You’re supposed to be studying vocabulary!”) I sighed and glanced at the clock. 2 or 3 minutes of class left. Rolling my eyes, I turned to my friend and said, “What’s the point of etudier-ing le vocabulaire if we’re getting out of here in, like, a minute?” She passed me a look of acknowledgement, because such a scenario occurs even to the best of us at some point in our illustrious French education.

So I got out my folder and flipped pages around in it (glancing sparingly at the vocab sheet and not even reading it) until the bell blessfully rang. That seemed to satisfy my French teacher, since we all know how much more educational flipping pages around is than reading an essay about what is considered cheating and why you shouldn’t do it.

school, French, teachers

My French teacher’s newest French-revolution-style torture device is making the whole class sing some ridiculous kid song translated into French. Today, it was Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes. At which point the whole class had to stand up, sing this crap in French, and “do the motions”, so to speak.

Yeah, yeah. This makes us learn faster. Mind you, it JUST SO HAPPENS that I remember all the body parts except the ones we practiced with this song. Ok, so I remember “head” and “toes”, but not shoulders and knees. Therefore, I think we can safely conclude that singing this idiotic kid song does not contribute to the learning process. Or, at the very least, MY learning process. Now, my learning process happens to be faster than the learning processes of most of the other students in the room. Therefore, if I still can’t remember it, they probably can’t either. Especially since they don’t care about their education nearly as much as I do.

Not to mention that it was just embarassing. I hate leaning over so that everyone can see my arse. I wish teachers would remember their teenagerhoods when teaching teenagers. They would do well to remember our constant self-consciousness and at least ATTEMPT to teach without making us miserable and worried. Maybe, if you subtract the social pressures from this equation of learning, the end result will be a greater amount of learning. You know, just saying.

Once, we had to sing a song that was made up of the past participles of a bunch of verbs we were supposed to remember the past participles. Whether I memorized them because of the song or of my own accord, I can fairly say that I don’t remember. However, the stupid tune did get stuck in my head for extended periods of time. I mean, come on. French is 4th period for me. That means 3 more periods during which I’ll be annoying the crap out of my classmates by humming/singing/tapping it.

So, please. If you teach French, stick to French. I didn’t take choir for a reason.

school, French, activities, singing