I think Thanksgiving makes a good day to present you with the other side of the coin. I want to let it be known that there are a few good things happening in school.
Despite of all the detriments of schooling, despite the system not helping at all, and despite of what I previously said, sometimes I enjoy attending school. Yes. Sometimes we actually learn in school! Can you believe that?
Every once in a while, we get lucky and there’s some knowledge spill over from the teachers stepping out of the torpid curriculum. Real knowledge is not only outside of the curriculum, but it is against it. We’re not supposed to learn about newer theories proposed in physics for example (as minutephysics on youtube commented). And we’re not supposed to learn the “real truth” of what the U.S. Government does either (as we sometimes learn in government class). Learning pure truth is forbidden in school, yet it spills over once in a while. For this, I thank those teachers. When you don’t care whether or not something is allowed, real learning will take place.
Just about everyday, I see my Pre-Calculus teacher and the other math teacher next door teaching with such fervor that it’s almost convincing that we’re really learning something useful (not saying that math isn’t useful, but the way we are taught). I have the best math teacher in the school. He is strict with us doing the work, but he still manages to make the class fun–ish. I feel grateful to have him as my teacher and I am glad to have teachers like him in my school.
Every time there’s a chance, some of my teachers play videos or movies that teach us something related to the class. Those videos (or movies) tell us WHY we need to learn what we’re being taught, and show us the different ways in which (HOW) we could apply the knowledge we were supposed to have recently acquired. This is something I -love-! I love when teachers do this. In Physics, for example, my teacher played the show Destroyed in Seconds from Discovery Channel. It was really interesting, and it was about what we had just learned about in class! I love being shown the very few connections school has with the real world. These and a few other things that I will tell you about on a future blog post give me hope in that change is still possible.
In conclusion, I do not totally detest everything that goes on in school, we do learn something occasionally, and I thank those teachers who actually teach something useful.
