Grades vs. Education
The video above should be taken to heart by anyone and everyone. Receiving a high school diploma from the North Carolina education system has only strengthened my opinions on why grades have become too relevant and learning too irrelevant.
I began kindergarten at Black Mountain Primary School at the ripe age of 5 in 2002. I was classmates with my best friend and neighbor Matt Begley. We spent every second of our time together whether that be in school or out of school. We would play football, baseball, hockey, basketball, video games, go hiking, and pretty much anything that five year old boys would do, together. During this time, we competed our butts off. Both of us always wanted to be the better player, better gamer, faster hiker, stronger hitter, and better shooter. This competitive spirit carried over to school.
During Kindergarten, our teacher gave us a set of words to learn. After we could successfully say all of the words in the set, we would receive another, more advanced, set. Just as soon as one of us finished a set of words, the other would finish the same set the next day. This competitiveness held tight between the two of us until middle school when we no longer had the same exact classes. From grades Kindergarten to 5th grade, our school lives were all about competing and learning. Yes, we cared if we got good grades, but what we really cared about was learning and becoming more educated than the other.
I began middle school in 2008, which was also the year I noticed my education starting to change. Teachers began teaching to a test. Students were all about getting the A, moving on, and having fun. This was an extreme opposite of what I was used to in elementary school where teachers taught to teach, to teach for fun, and most students tried to soak up as much knowledge as they could.
This trend continued as I went through high school. Students competed to be in the top of their class. A higher GPA and test scores meant a higher chance of getting into a prestigious university. Teachers pushed to get test scores up so that they could keep their jobs. Teachers were evaluated on how high their students performed on just one test. Administrators made sure teachers were teaching what they were supposed to be so that their school would pass their annual school report card given to them from the state. Every single minority and majority group of students needed to score a high average test score. All of these goals that the students, teachers, and administrators had had one thing in common. All needed good grades and good test scores. Nowhere in the goals of the three was the goal of learning and soaking up as much knowledge as they could.
My dad just so happens to be a middle school teacher. He is the AIG teacher, which stands for "Academically and Intellectually Gifted". He was the teacher that the really smart kids came to for extra, more difficult instruction. He loves his job because he gets to teach what he wants to, he doesn't have to teach to a test, and he doesn't have to teach what the state tells him to. He has seen the shift from learning being the main focus, to high grades and test scores being the main focus. It was not an overnight transition, but a relatively quick transition. He has gotten in trouble for teaching 6th graders the Pythagorean Theorem because the Pythagorean Theorem wasn't supposed to be taught until 8th grade. The state didn't have it in the curriculum until 8th grade. He has also seen things become very standardized. Everyone now has to "learn" the same thing no matter if you already know the material, or are still trying to "learn" the material that was supposed to be "taught" in the previous grade. It feels like teachers could be replaced by robots. Teachers have books that tell them what to do each and every day. They tell you what to say and when to say it. Even better, the book tells a teacher what to say to potential questions that a student might have. The fun has been taken out of teaching. No wonder students don't want to learn anymore. Learning isn't fun anymore, and the creative spirit has been stripped from amazing and very intellectual teachers.
I believe this picture sums up our education system perfectly.
No comments:
Post a Comment