Day Two

In continuing with the journaling challenge, I present the next two bits.

1. A song that reminds you of your most recent ex.
Hoo boy. It's hard to pick just one. I guess I could narrow it down to three, though.

-With or Without You, U2
Because I can't live with or without him. Which is exactly as pathetic as it sounds.

-Rearviewmirror, Pearl Jam
My liberation jam(haha, get it? Because jam, Pearl Jam... ha). Or at least it would be if I ever properly liberated myself.

-Have You Ever Seen the Rain, Creedence Clearwater Revival
Just one of his favorite songs. No deep meaning on this one.


2. Something you feel strongly about
Strap on your helmets kids, cause we're gonna talk about the educational system!

Back in the early 2000's, President Cowboy launched his infamous initiative "No Child Left Behind". The idea(or so I've been told) was to insure that every public school kid received a decent education. Which in itself was not a terrible goal, but the execution was lacking. The only way they tried to measure this increase in education was through standardized testing, which is never, ever a good measure of education. But enough about the details, let's get to the side effects!

The biggest problem with standardized testing is that it's not really asking you to apply the information you've been learning; it only asks you to answer a question. It's the equivalent of being able to bake a cake, or just being able to list the ingredients.

This system damaged kids on both ends of the spectrum. The ones that were on the lower end, the ones with trouble just memorizing facts, had a difficult time. The tests got simpler and simpler to try and accommodate that. Instead of teachers being able to teach properly, they were spending most of their time on repetition to get those kids up to the standardized test parameters. Most of the coursework of any given class turned into a smaller iteration of what was on the government issued tests.

Then you had the smart kids. There were a few kinds of smart kids in this instance. Kids that were good at repetition but not so much the application of knowledge did well on the tests and got good grades. The ones that were a little smarter than everyone else were able to breeze through the work and spent their spare time reading, or occasionally being put into slightly more challenging classes. Both of these groups went on to college and did reasonably well, but that's where a lot of remedial college classes come in; kids that didn't quite need to learn much more than a set of answers.

Some of the biggest losers of NCLB were the genius kids. And you may be asking "Why? They shouldn't have had any problem at all!" Well, that's the problem. The geniuses can be broken into two groups. There were the geniuses that did the work, got through school with a 4.5 GPA, and went on to any college they wanted. But once there, they ran into a wall; all of a sudden, school was hard. Had these kids been properly challenged at any point in their school careers, they would've kicked some serious ass. But the brain, much like a muscle, doesn't grow unless properly exercised. This first group of geniuses are the ones we see now, getting to college and having mental breakdowns because they've never had to use their intelligence before, they've never been challenged, they used to have confidence in their intellectual abilities but now they just aren't so sure because hey, didn't I used to be good at this?

The there's group two of the geniuses, those kids who could perceive the absolute futility of the educational system as a whole and did just enough to get by until graduation. They didn't see the point of college(crippling debt? No thanks!). I'm part of that group.


At the end of the day, we have a system that almost no one can truly flourish in, despite their level of ability.It's shitty, and I have to see the aftermath every day at my college.