Edukashun

It’s my senior year of high school. I have a big English paper due in two days. Some of my classmates started weeks ago on their papers and are still currently working to make it perfect. Other classmates still have no idea that we even had a paper and will turn it in two weeks late for 50% credit. Then, there’s the classmates like myself, who will go out tonight, go out tomorrow night, and then spend two hours throwing it together the night before it’s due date and still get at least a B+. I’m not going to lie; this is how I got through high school. In public high schools especially, education has become less of actually learning and more of merely throwing words on paper to get the grade.
Even through middle school, I was a procrastinator. I waited until the last minute to scribble down some answers on my homework, but I still got really good grades. What changed my view on education was attending Signature School my freshman and sophomore years. Signature School was not a school that would take a paper that clearly had no effort in it, or that would take homework that you obviously did the morning before class. Sig was all about education. It was a charter school, meaning you had to be accepted, but it would not cost you to go. They let you know before you join that they are a fast paced school, and that it would require a lot of work on the student’s part. They expected you to put effort into your schoolwork in order to earn your grade. I started doing my homework every night, and while it was hard and I didn’t necessarily enjoy it, I knew that I was earning my good grades, and that felt good. Teachers were hard on us. They weren’t afraid to correct or critique us. It almost made us afraid to turn in something that we knew we didn’t put much effort in.
Signature School was all about subjecting us to different cultures and religions. They have an amazing art program, and our teacher would let us experiment with different styles. Going to school with kids of different ethnicity helped us to learn about their lifestyles; it was really interesting. Every year, the school would take us to a music festival called Lotus Festival in Bloomington. The festival holds many different tents, all filled with different cultures and their music, fashion, and food. They always found a way for us to have fun and learn at the same time. We were required to do 25 hours of community service a year. Again, while it sucked at the time, we all knew they were doing it to teach us the importance of helping the communities around us. I felt very well rounded and educated at Sig.
My sophomore year, I was stupid and decided to move schools to be with my boyfriend at the time. I figured I would get just as good of an education at a public school that I would if I were to stay at Signature School. I was very wrong. You would occasionally find students that cared about their education and worked hard, but for the most part, I was surrounded by kids that were just trying to graduate so they could be done. Teachers didn’t like giving out bad grades; it made them look like bad teachers. “Completion grades” became the norm. If you did your homework, you got a good grade. I became very lazy with my schoolwork. If I could do my homework when it was assigned and get the same grade that I would if I were to do it ten minutes before class, why not put it off? I spent less time doing my homework and more time going out with friends and having fun.
I definitely agree with Britt’s theory that we are actually about to finish our first semester of high school. Even if you were a good student in high school, did your homework on time, and put effort into what you did, I just don’t think that the teachers expected enough. Teachers were always satisfied with what was “good enough”. Education in public school, in my opinion, has down graded. I understand there are going to be kids in school that just flat out don’t care, and that the teachers can’t do much about that. But we aren’t pushed. I feel like, at my public high school, I was never pushed to do well and learn as much as I could. Rather, I feel like I was pushed to just do what I could to get the pretty A+ to put on my transcript. In high school, we are at the age where we need to be pushed. You can say that it is our responsibility to learn more if that’s what we want, but I don’t feel like that’s the case. I feel like if it’s the teacher’s job to educate us, they need to make sure we are educated and not just “getting by” in school.
I feel like because I have attended a charter school as well as a public school, I understand how different education is now. While, sure, I learned some stuff at school, it was nothing compared to what I could have learned. If people are disappointed in what our society has become, they need to take a look at what we are learning in school and how we are learning it. If we are taught to discipline and push ourselves in school, then that is how we will act outside of school as well. It’s not just the stuff we are taught in school that is important, but also the values and ways that we go about learning.