It's Friday, Friday, gotta get down...

I FRICKEN HATE THAT SONG!

Oh well. Hello everybody. I haven't posted for a while because of a few giant things that took up most of my time. Namely, School, School, School, and Ponies (Don't ask). Fortunately, the first three things are ending next week and that's why I finally remembered to post this. School was great this year, one of the only times I've been able to say that. High School turned out to be quite a pleasant experience that was totally unexpected. I was able to do Debate, get my Drivers Licence, have Mr. Melville for Chemistry (way good teacher) and make some new friends. Also what ended recently was Special Needs Mutual, one of the greatest things I've ever done. The spirit there every Thursday was enough to recharge from the hard week behind me. I loved it and now wouldn't have missed it for the world, even though I had my doubts from before. If I could say one thing about it, it would be that my perspective has changed. Instead of terms such as 'Handicaped', 'Slow', or the absolutely dreadful "Retarded', I came to know them by another characteristic. "Gifted". These people are so amazingly innocent and special in a way we could never understand. I sometimes feel as if I envy them.

Here's the Pony thing if you were still thinking about it.
This is Official Content from the creators of the show.

When I was young...

I talked with my mom recently about the education system, and she tole me that I need to put this down. All I said was what I thought was wrong. It started with her saying that she was wondering if I was going to love college or not. I told her that I wasn't specifically excited or looking forward to that. She asked why and that started a very interesting conversation that will be put down here. Basically we discussed what flaws were eminent it the education system of the day. We discussed mostly college to begin, saying that we agreed it's priorties have changed. Anyone that's gone to school currently or recently knows that it's more like a franchise earning money then launching them at the professors expecting them to get an education then. I big thing that was wrong with education is that the entire system was based on forcing everybody to be the same. The standardized testing and current curriculum forces all students to conform to the same standards. It's very true. If you don't manage to graduate, you're marked for life. It doesn't matter how 'well' you did according to your 'grades' (which can be very innacurate because of teaching style and human error) as long as your resume says you made it, it doesn't matter what you graduated in for most jobs they hire you anyway. The pretext is that you can't be a prductive member of society, a good worker, or much better than a bum if you don't get through college. Education has become so far blown out of proportion that most of it will never be used once aquired. I basic education I agree is mandatory, but we don't need most of what we learn during 12 years of 7 hours a day. My first solution was that the teachers make the curriculem. While this has many gaping flaws, I have an example of this working. The best teachers are the ones that like what they teach and enjoy teaching. They also need to understand what they're teaching. My Chemistry teacher currently is the best teacher I've ever had. Mostly, it's because of the way the science CRT is constructed. While the math and language arts are memorizing rules and regurgitating information, the Science one is mostly just knowing enough to decipher an answer out of a paragraph of given material. This gives my teacher the unique position of being able to teach mostly anything he wanted as long as he got those few basic points. He spent the entire year teaching us wonderful stuff that was straight from what he had learned and truely wanted to tell us. It was what I view as the perfect class, but most teachers are restricted to a standardized test that limits their abilities and time to what 'the State' expects them to teach. My second solution, was reform it to something related to the Boy Scout system. For consistancy, I will refer them straight to the Scout reference. There would be a set of required merit badges for the students to earn. The end of the school year would be the deadline, with a final test as the last signature for the award. Then the rest of their time would be for the earning of whatever merit badges or extra-curricular things availible. The less motivated students could do just the minimum if they so chose with the accelerated students doing whatever else pleased them. This could even reduce the school year by half or some-such achievement. Just enough structure to maintain the order expected but enought freedom to advance at all their own pace. I see this in a much better and desirible light then the current education system. Comment and tell me what you think. (Also I'm planning to write either a suspence novel or a book on phiolosophy. Tell me what you think there too.)