Illness vs School

About two weeks ago I had a sore throat compounded by a stuffy nose, a cough and a headache. I had a sinus infection and I was thrilled. I’m not someone who enjoys feeling sick and I’m not someone who loves getting sympathy, so why was I happy about being sick?

I’m sure you already know why. I was happy to be sick because it meant I got to miss school!

We all know people who get excited to see there temperature rise above 100 degrees. We all know people who fake sick to get out of school. In fact, who hasn’t seen Ferris Bueller’s day off? The question is, why would kids rather suffer and lie than have to endure 6-7 hours at school?

The reality is that when someone hates something, they don’t want to do it! This is not rocket science. The other point that isn’t rocket science is that if people hate something, it should be changed. I know these conclusions are obvious, but people just shrug kids’ complaints off as laziness. Parents say “we went theough with it”, but in saying that they admit that school wasn’t something that they liked.

On another hand, school also causes sickness. Not just the depression and the mental sickness that comes with school but also the physical sickness that comes from keeping kids in seats instead of playing on the field. Or the stomach aches and headaches that go along with stress. In fact, it isn’t an understatement to say that school is a sick place.

Even with this knowledge, people still rationalize this version of school as necessary. Parents, teachers, even principals I urge you not to shrug off your child’s complaints. They aren’t being lazy. They are being humans. They are alive. Don’t stifle their living by forcing them to go to a place they hate. Don’t let their curiosity go to waste. Listen to their complaints. Learning can change, school doesn’t have to be this way.

A Global Classroom?

The title of my blog is “The World as a classroom”. One of the beliefs I hold most dear is that we are all connected. Whatever continent, religion, ethnicity, gender, we are all connected. On the mos basic of levels, like just breathing the same air, but also to all the complexities that make up our world and our spirit.

I’ve always been so curious about the world and people. The perspectives everyone has, their experiences, and how they see the world is an incredible thing to think about.What better way to understand, share, and think than to discuss, debate, and just plain interact with people around the world?

With the belief of learning from the world and the belief of fostering understanding of people, we will be starting a Global Classroom. It will develop into a place to discuss ideas, experiences, passions, issues and the world.

It will help to. . .

Foster understanding throughout the world starting during our most important years: childhood.

Develop our thinking through being exposed to new perspectives.

Introduce ourselves to new people and places

Come to an understanding that we are all connected .

There are so many possible things to get out of an interaction with people that limiting to a list like this is impossible.

Anything having to do with learning, connectedness, and an understanding of the complexity of our world, or just live and even more will be a possibility.

Guest Post by Brian Magid

My name is Brian Magid and I’m a student at Syosset High School. And this is a post about reading.

Last week I finished the first book I’ve read for pleasure in a very long time. The experience was cathartcic in a way, but in order to explain why I have to explain to you my relationship with reading.

I used to love to read. From the moment I got off picture books, I devoured everything I could get my hands on. At first, I liked it because it was a new skill I had just learned and it made me feel intelligent. The world seemed like it opened up to me. But as my taste developed, I started to like to read because of how it stimulated my imagination. The shallow prose of a book was a thin layer that shielded endless depths of imagery and fantasy that you could just get lost in. I loved it.

Reading in school at this that time was all about encouragement. I grew up during the formation of the digital age, and it seemed like kids were reading less and less. Teachers were all about convincing students that reading was fun and awesome, and all their energy and lessons about it were devoted to this ideal. Any reading was great, as long as you were reading.

So, this was great for me. I loved an activity and I was encouraged to get into it more and more. Reading meant pleasure, and that’s why I loved it.

Then, all of a sudden, all of that changed. Overnight, reading went from an endless chasm of imagination to a flat, boring myriad of over analysis and undermined opinions. And I’m pretty sure I know why.

By High School, reading stopped being encouraged and started being expected. This was a job now, a chore. And that seems fine when you just hear it, you’d think “yeah this is high school now, you have to start taking on some responsibility. You’re not going to love everything you read but that’s part of growing up.” And I’m fine with that. But it’s the attitude that bothers me.

All of a sudden, reading has become a much less general term. When they refer to reading in high school, they’re talking about “classic” literature. Blank and outdated text ripe for over analysis. Reading for pleasure now implies that you need to read books other than these “classic” novels, and these are scoffed at by English teachers for not being up to their standard. I once lost an entire letter grade on a book report because I did it on a graphic novel (Watchmen, which by the way is listed in Time Magazine’s 100 Best Novels of All Time). A woman who taught at an SAT course of mine repeatedly would put down students for whatever popular teen novel they were reading because they were apparently “pieces of fluff literature.” This kind of dissmissive attitude is what makes students resentful of reading, which should just be another medium of communication like film or television. Instead it gives people my age this negative stigma because they associate it with pedantic lessons on themes and diction. And teachers reinforce this.

Reading went overnight from a bottomless pit of imagination to a shallow layer of prose. It seems as though every layer of analysis added by a teacher just makes the work seem thinner and thinner. Reading just becomes about preparing for essays, and then why even read? Most students just use Sparknotes and get important quotes about the book from the internet. If they enjoyed reading, they wouldn’t do that. The essay is even worse. Students just spit their teachers’ opinions back on to the page, opinions they clearly dont agree with. You can just feel the apathy bleed through the page when you read an 11th grade thesis paper on themes and symbols in “The Scarlet Letter.”

This is why, for the past few years, I haven’t been able to read for pleasure. Because reading is now an ugly, pedantic, head-ache inducing activity. The layers upon layers underneath the prose were evaporated long ago.

Reading can be fun. It should be fun. And I want it to be fun again. If nothing else, I just wanna recapture what made me love it so much.

Fin.

 

Three Problems with School

Something I hear all too often is how only one or two quick solutions are needed to fix a broken system.  That is not how the world works. You know my big line, everything is complicated. The same is such with our broken system of learning. No one policy is going to create a perfect learning environment. A total change in how we think of school and learning is needed.

I was recently asked what my top three problems are with school. It is hard for me to answer that question because none of school’s problems stand alone. They are all of course interconnected so they must be treated as such. With that said, I will try to write down my three biggest problems with school. I cannot stress this enough. These problems are connected to everything we do in school. They do not stand alone in the system of education, nor do they stand without the problems of society. No quick fix can solve them. There aren’t two sides of a debate on how to fix all of these problems.

This is just me trying to cover the biggest problems with school in a list of three.

1. I believe one of learning’s main goals are to teach people differently and create new types of thinkers. But I feel we stress learning from the standpoint of getting a “good job” and getting into a “good college”. Needless to say, I think that needs to change. Instead of the point of school being to fill the already existing niches of society, school should have a broader goal of creating new, creative, idealist, pragmatic thinkers (the list of words isn’t limited to that). Our world isn’t what any of us want it to be. We have to start with our kids in order to change that. Keeping this same system we’ve had for years, unfortunately, won’t create new kinds of thinkers. Many of our greatest thinkers found formal education to be a waste. While I don’t think any education is a waste, I still believe formal education can change. Change from being “formal” and turn into something that creates a new world. The goal of education can’t be to fill the niches we already have, that is important, but education has to do more. Education’s goal has to be to create new thinkers. That isn’t how to make our world a better place.

2. The attitudes we have towards all things education is a big problem. These attitudes encompass everything, goal of school, role of teachers, the typical classroom, seeing education as a competition, everything. As I’ve already stated, we see education as a race for college and jobs. This of course puts stress on things like grades and tests. In addition to that I think our idea of what the role of a teacher is has to change. How we currently see role of teachers, I feel, isn’t how they should be seen. Teacher’s as of now are seen as the be all end all in learning a certain subject. I’ve heard kids say they hate a certain subject because of a certain teacher. On the other hand, I’ve heard of teachers changing kids lives for the better. Teachers should be the latter. Teachers can’t be the enforcers of a classroom, but a guide. Let us ask questions, let us learn what we want. Don’t relegate teachers to a role of testing technicians but don’t let teachers rule classrooms with an iron fists. The teacher student relationship must be one of learning on both sides. We must change our attitudes towards all aspects of education. Education is different for all kids and that has to be how we see it.

3. Lastly is that I feel like my interests and passions aren’t able to be followed in a place  as official and formal as school. Curriculums, state tests, even planned lessons (only sometimes), can be detrimental to me feeling in charge of my learning. Freedom is one of the biggest things I want in learning. I believe we are naturally curious, but even one our greatest thinker, Albert Einstein believes it is a miracle curiosity can survive formal education. Curiosity isn’t something that has to be built up. It is something we have. Look at baby’s and how they explore the world. I’m not a baby anymore, but I want to explore the world. Our world and our universe are wondrous and exciting, school, to put it plainly, isn’t. Let us follow our curiosity, that is how we will learn best.

As you can see it was hard for me to keep each of these problems confined to one point. They are all interconnected and seeing them as such will help us solve them. All of this takes a dramatic change in our thinking of school and learning.

Learning, along with love of each other, is perhaps the most important part of being alive. Learning is our instinct and our habit. School has become something that ruins that. Let us be curious, let us learn what we want to learn, let us follow our dreams and our passions. That is how we will make our world our own.

Hall Monitors and No Phones

I got released early from my class today. In order to get a head start on my way to my next class, I wanted to cut through the cafeteria which leads to the other side of my school. I thought I was golden, I would sit in the hallway, maybe do a little reading, catch up on the news, It is nice to get to class early. Equipped with my overweight backpack, and my plastic grocery bag containing my food for the day, I proceeded to make my way through the cafeteria. I get to the door leading to the other side of school and suddenly I hear “No leaving until the period is over”. I then plead with the “hall monitor”, “Oh, but I didn’t have lunch this period”, I say. “That doesn’t matter, wait until the period is over”.

Maybe this sounds like just another “annoyed about having to take the long way” stories, but honestly let’s think about the whole system of hall monitors and no cell phones in class.

Here are a few things I am going to draw from this story.

1. This “hall monitor” doesn’t trust me to walk around school without making a ruckus or causing damage, destruction, doing drugs, etc.

2. These overarching policies schools make regarding kids, there whereabouts, and there prohibitions don’t account for situations that differ from what they see as the “norm”.

3. By not allowing us to simply leave the cafeteria, I and many others, feel as if our school automatically labels us as “childish”.

4. Not allowing us a say in the matters of these policies makes the school seem cold, impersonal, and not our own.

I was in math class one day, I had finished the classwork, begun the homework, and had decided to pack my things, take out my phone, text my friend, and read the news. Immediately I am told to put away my phone on the grounds that I am not supposed to use it in class. Why not? Seriously, why can’t I use my phone during class?

I go to class, but feel as if something going on in the world outside of my school has more relevance to me. Why do schools seek to limit our freedoms and keep us from the outside world so much? No phones? No hallway without a pass? No youtube? Facebook? And an incredibly rude “You can’t do that”, when we try to do these things. We are people and we think. And I personally believe these policies speak volumes about what our school is and how much of a far cry it is from what it should be.

I am a person. Therefore do not talk to me like I am always subordinate to you. There is a time to listen to the people who are supposed to be in charge of you, but there is also a time to tell them to start treating us like we have a place in the world rather than merely exist to go about the day you tell us is important.

“You can’t use your cell phone in here” Yeah? Well maybe I have more important things to think about, maybe your class isn’t doing a good job of making the subject matter relevant and meaningful to me, allow me to connect to the world outside of these walls, that place matters more than anywhere.

“Don’t leave this cafeteria”, Why not? This is my school, I intend to make it my own and go where I want. The policy of prohibiting us from leaving the cafeteria feels meaningless and merely acts to make me feel trapped.

School, and places of learning exist for the students. Teachers, hall monitors, and other such people who feel it is necessary to enact these policies are merely making us feel as if school is not our own. The best way to our minds and our hearts isn’t by making us “sit down and shut up”, but by allowing us to feel as if our learning and our school is our own. DO NOT do that to us. We exist to follow our curiosities and explore. DO NOT take that away from us.

Am I a Legitimate Voice?

Who sees me as legitimate? I don’t have a job, so I’m not a taxpayer. I don’t have my PHD. I can’t claim to have read 1000 books on any subject nor have I seriously researched anything. Heck, you know. . . I haven’t even graduated high school. Yet I have opinions and reactions to the same things everyone has to deal with. No, I’m not a scholar looking back at my high school experience and pondering its effectiveness. I’m a student. A student who loves learning and loves exploring the world. But on the rung of who you’d listen to. . . I’m behind everyone.

That is a funny thing you know? Systems are systems, the world is what we make it, but think about who is creating the education system. The most educated of people are of course! That all makes sense right. Who better to create the schools, than the people who were the best student?

Oh yeah… I bet you’re thinking “he’s going to say that educated people are “brainwashed by the system”. No, that is not where I am going. Educated people should be valued, and all people should be educated.

What I am saying is that someone like me, who has a passion for learning, will never get to the standard of success in life needed to become a prominent voice in policy making. That is the reality. I don’t have good grades, I won’t go to Harvard, I won’t be secretary of education. And I’m damn okay with that. I just want things to change though. I just want other voices to be heard. It is ironic because it is more likely that the people succeeding in a faulty system will move on to bigger and better things while the people who fail in such a system will likely never have a chance or a say in changing it. This system needs to change and I don’t know how to say it in any other way. Maybe it is a hippy cliche to say “the system”. But I am fed up with school. Gosh, I can’t stand it. The worst part of my day is going to school. Hey I guess I’m lazy. But I have legitimate concerns about how I learn. I find problems with how we learn. And voicing these problems merely gets me the usual answer of “just play the game”. Dammit I’m sick and tired of playing this game we call school. It is time for a change and that won’t happen unless we listen to new voices.

I Must be Lazy

I only participate in one sport and club, neither of which I am the head of. I must be lazy.

I only take one AP class this year. I must be lazy.

After school I enjoy watching the news or reading a book, rather than studying or doing all of my homework. I must be lazy.

I often get lost during spanish, analyzing the globe that is strategically placed near my desk. I must be lazy.

I’ve never had an all night study session because I prefer to go to sleep, I must be lazy.

Last year I went to a concert the night before a test. I must be lazy.

I prefer to learn spanish by watching a movie or reading the news rather than complete worksheets and fill in vocabulary sheets. I must be lazy.

Math class bores me. I must be lazy.

I try to take as little time as possible to do homework. I must be lazy.

I make it a priority to think and analyze history rather than memorize it. I must be lazy.

During class I think about everything but class. I must be lazy.

I hate school. I must be lazy.

We must end the notion that people who don’t put their hearts and soul into school are lazy. Instead we must realize that for many people it is impossible to put their heart and soul into a system they feel doesn’t help them learn and doesn’t let them follow their passions.

The frustrated kids who realize that learning is more than what school makes it out to be. . . they aren’t lazy, they just have better things to do. Let their minds wander. School can be different.

Grades

We all stress ourselves out to memorize the formulas. We all have had that cram night before the final. We all BS homework at the last second so as not to “get a zero”. We all use Spark Notes. We all discuss answers post-test.

The extent we go to thinking and stressing over grades is honestly insane, but in the world we live in, it makes sense. Get the A, get into the brand name college, get the job, live in a gingerbread house with angels as children. That’s how it’s supposed to work. Of course, that’s not how it really works, but getting good grades certainly does give people advantages for getting into college, which is obviously a factor in our future.

I understand that in the world we live in, grades can make or break one’s life; I’m not going to dispute that. But I’m going to make an even bigger point. I’m here to say that the world we live in shouldn’t put stress on grades. Actually, I think grades are harmful.

Okay I know what your thinking now is “he is going to go on a rant about how grades are immoral and hurt kids feelings”. Well, to be honest, I think that has legitimacy, but I hope you’ll find the points I make a little deeper than that.

Grades have always been a big part of my life, as I’m sure they are yours, if you are a student. I prided myself on the 100s I would get on spelling tests, or the As I may have gotten in middle school and high school. Yes, when I got my first 79 it made me very upset. Yes, when I got a B in 8th grade math it killed me. And honestly, every kid who gets stressed over grades has every right to be stressed. College admissions, the need to compete with your classmates, and all the other attitudes our schools hammer into us scare the hell out of us. And you know what, the grades I’m getting now are fine, but it’s still scary that I don’t have Ivy League quality grades. In addition to the stress caused by grades, there are many problems that I believe having grades causes regarding education.

Plain and simple, I think grades simplify, complicate, and take away from the beautiful process that is learning. Does that sound like a bit of a contradiction? Let me explain. Grades put a number on education. If two people both get an A in social studies who would know that one person used to struggle? Who would know that the other person found some great insight into history? Who would know what they learned? And again, if a person got an F in math, let’s say, who would ever know if he really did understand the concepts he was taught? Maybe the kid really does think like a mathematician and just doesn’t like how math is taught in his class. The point is that learning is such complicated process which is merely hindered by grades.

Now, I also said that grades complicate learning. Grades put into education so many things that just shouldn’t be considered part of the learning process. Why should I have been thinking about college admissions in 5th grade? Why should teachers be forced to give a lower grade to a kid struggling in their class yet whom they can tell has intelligence? Why should parents feel their child is a failure because of tests and grades?

Grades and rote learning really go hand in hand. Memorizing, regurgitating the facts, and forgetting it the day after the test. I know a common argument I hear is that grades motivate people to work hard. And yes that is true. But when working hard means BSing homework at midnight or the period before, I think that causes more harm than good. Or when working hard means memorizing and regurgitating at the expense of having fun and enjoying one’s day, I think that’s a problem too. Honestly, grades cause kids to take shortcuts. Instead of understanding and thinking critically about a topic, kids memorize what they need to know for the test. That too, is not learning.

I think grades are part of a bigger problem with how we view learning. As I mentioned in an earlier post, learning shouldn’t be viewed as a competition, which it certainly is, regarding grades. But another problem is our attitudes that everything has to be measured, and that if it’s not measured its not important. The immeasurable aspects of one’s learning are the most important. That is how a kid interacts with information, people, and his own mind.

School is not a Competition

I promise to try my hardest to make this blog post not a rant about test scores and grades, but rather about attitudes. Plain and simple, I do not believe education and learning are about trying to outdo your classmate.

Education and competition are intertwined, yes, due to grades, test scores, and college admissions; I understand this. However, these things also create a culture and an attitude of caring more about the numbers and grades than about legitimate learning.

Competition is not all bad. In fact, one of my favorite activities in school is engaging in (and, of course, winning) a debate with my classmates. But viewing the schooling process as a means to outdo the rest of your class is severely detrimental to learning.

For instance, at the extreme end of this, countries like China and South Korea have cram schools where students do extra studying for things like college entrance exams. Cram schools are scary concepts. These places have such high stakes testing that the entire lives of students are literally spent preparing for those exams. The cram schools don’t foster learning, they encourage people to take shortcuts.

I’m not going to lecture you about how we are on a one way track to 6AM-10PM test prep, because I am trying to make a bigger point. Schooling in which the only point is to compete with your classmates hurts our society in two important ways. Firstly, it causes a culture of shortcuts in learning, like memorizing facts and equations, rather than understanding the material itself. Secondly, it discourages group work! One of the most important things people can learn is how to work together, but our “evaluations,” like tests and quizzes, aren’t meant to be done with the help of other people. That makes no sense! Students, we are each other’s most valuable resource.

Learning to work together isn’t some cliché that your kindergarten talks about, but rather it is much deeper. Cooperation and collaboration are two of the most important aspects of work at companies like Google and Facebook. These companies want employees to be able to work together to solve a problem or to come up with an idea. Collaboration is a beautiful thing, for these companies and for those of us who utilize their products. This is a very broad point, but let me relate it back to our culture of education as a competition. Collaboration and asking for help are important at companies, but school makes it seem like asking for help is not something “independent”, “real world people” do.

I know it sounds like I got off topic a lot there, but that just goes to show that all of this is related. Attitudes that use competition to foster “learning” don’t do that at all. They merely stress kids out, reduce collaboration, and encourage shortcuts, glossing over the real learning process. We need a schooling system that won’t encourage such competition between students. College admissions is what’s on everybody’s mind from the time they walk into school first period until they go to sleep at night. Not learning. That needs to change. Education has to be more than just getting a leg up on the rest. It should be about learning, and we should care about the rest of our classmates learning, and even help them learn and succeed. That is how school should work.

Doodling

I am one of those kids whose handwriting never got better between 4th grade and 11th grade. Some people are good with a pencil or a pen, but not me. Needless to say, I’m not a Picasso, or a Van Gogh, or any other artist. But when I get in the zone with my doodling, I’d like to think I’m a master artist (not really but its fun to say I am).

Alright yes, I have a history of being off task in school. But I think most of the things I do during class, rather than the regular listening and taking notes, honestly is better for my thinking. In 5th grade I was scolded nearly every day for reading during class. My mom’s famous line was “I don’t want to tell you to stop reading. . . but at least stop during class!”.

Today I do things more along the lines of reading the news on my phone, eating (I eat a lot), completing random tasks (yesterday I wrote out all 50 states on a piece of paper), lots and lots of desk drumming, and of course, doodling.

I love doodling. Fashioning a paper from blankness into something is one of the most fun things to do (of course blank white canvases are art in our world.). Doodling can help me focus on other things while I am in fact thinking about what I am supposed to be learning. Today during science class I found myself drawing arcs as we were learning about projectiles.

Some of the things I draw are squiggles, waves, infinite circles that get larger and larger, and my favorite, skylines. I like envisioning all of the things going on in between the buildings that I draw It blows my mind to think more detailed about the things I draw, like the infiniteness of the circles.

One day when I took out my books for homework my dad saw all my doodles. He realized, to our amazement, that he draws similar doodles to what I draw. When he is on the phone or something he can draw on a pad of paper and it helps him think. I believe me and him do this to exercise our minds.

Doodling honestly exercises my brain. I have fun doing it because it relaxes me, but it also makes me think. Sometimes though, I realize I am just doing it without even thinking. I really do love when that happens because it means I had random inspiration. Yes, it’s not the best thing to be off task during class. . . but it does play to a larger point that school should utilize the creativity of a doodler’s mind, but also make class work in a way that helps the doodler’s rather than hurts them. I get off task way too easily, and doodling fills my time. Rather than let me get off task. let my task be something I can be engaged by. Okay yes, this is incredibly broad, and I sound like I am stating the cliches, but here are a few ideas. 1. For a social studies class let the kids think about rapid urbanization during the industrial revolution by allowing them draw out  how they see the city’s plan in a complex, seemingly incoherent way. Let the sloppy drawers have some fun too! 2. In science, let kids visualize  motions by drawing a pictures of how they’d view it. 3. In a foreign language, let them play with the letters of the alphabet if it is something like Russian or Chinese.

Honestly, I think just giving kids a paper and a pencil and tell them do what they want with it will open a ton of doors to them in their thinking. I know I am not the most creative doodler, so that means that other people are also having the bursts of inspiration too. Let’s make use of these bursts!