For me, school was/is a humongous waste of time. That's why I now take classes that let me leave the building and go learn instead. My biggest problem is that you're required to take certain classes to a certain level. Example: I had to take 3 years of history. I now have that slot replaced with my internship, and I've already forgotten everything I learned (using that term lightly) in those 3 years.
I feel like those busy-work classes could have been better spent on courses worth taking. It was only by testing out that I was able to max out my music course levels. And even then, I didn't come close to taking everything I wanted to. Because I pissed away my time in my science and history courses (the two I dropped for my internship this year), I will never be able to take comp sci 4, unless I take it in college, which costs a fuckton more money.
If you think about it, it wouldn't be so bad to drop such requirements. If a student wants to learn history, there you go. If it weren't a requirement to have foreign language, I definitely would have done it anyway. To waste the time of both the students and the teacher is just plain stupid.
Now, aside from the whole forcing kids to "learn" shit they didn't ask to learn about, I only have one other complaint. I don't know about your schools, but for some reason, my school district has an awful lot of trouble with the idea that literature isn't what an English class should be. That should be, guess what, literature. English class is where the fuckheads who still can't speak their primary language correctly should go to not sound like morons. Some of you from out of the US may be thinking, "wait, but isn't that something they should already know?" Well, not here, evidently. Instead of learning how to compile sentences properly, we learn how to read books that all say the same message/have the same plot: One/a group of black people have some menial problem, and they fight with each other for about 200 pages while noting that white people are the root of it somehow. There really is nothing to be learned from any of it. You know what may have some educational value? A book not written with dialect that contradicts the language being studied. Look, I know American literature sucks (Excluding the Alphabet of Manliness), but surely there's something, SOMETHING other than this stupid plot that someone wrote?
I've hit a mental wall about here. If I think of a way to complete this thought, I will.
Bookmarks