HW 39 - First School Assignment

Questions

• I am wondering, why are we spending most of our youth sitting down listening to a person talk in school instead "living our youth" out there?

• Since when did I start feeling/believing that I belonged in school now and in the next 10 years?

• How is school shaping me to fit into society's ideas and expectations?

Research: Why was the idea of school originated in Germany so appealing for neighbor countries and then the world? Was it seen as a great method to keep control?

Ideas

• I think that school suppresses our freedom and self expression by teaching us what is right and wrong, what is success and failure.

• Indeed there is a lot of material taught in school that will be not used in our futures, however, it is taught with the purpose of teaching us how to think through or solve situations we may encounter in the future.

• Perhaps school is helping us become someone needed in society (a hero), and people do not fight against the school system because we all want to be needed.

Experiences

• During my school life, I have experienced joy, pride, sadness, disappointment, and stress. The friends I made in school are the ones responsible for the good times I had, and the grades are the ones that bring everything else I have felt.

• In elementary school I had very bad grades, so I was often sad because my parents did not approve it. I had to take private math lessons in 2nd grade but it was not that bad because my favorite teacher was the one that gave the lessons.

• Receiving awards and a great report card feels great. Although I pretend not to care about I am proud I achieved something like that. In middle school, when I brought good grades things were well at home. Now in high school, if I have good grades or not it does not matter.

My experiences in school have led me to think that grades are the most crucial aspect in school. Personally when I think of school, I think of how well or how bad I am doing. I do not think about friends, or teachers, but the work that must be accomplished in order to have a good grade. I consider this as utterly awful and depressing. This is because grades do not make me happy at all. I am often stressed and worried about getting a good grades, and I feel like these emotions are eating me alive. When I get good grades I feel proud of myself and I can continue my daily routine well, but when I get bad grades I get disappointed and angry at myself causing me to be unable to do anything else well. I am aware that this is my strongest personal issue, and if I do not do something about my ego it will distant me from other people.

I think that this sad attachment to good grades has originated since my last year of elementary school when I transferred to a new school and separated from my friends. In this new school I was not able to make friends as well as before so I gave up on that and only focused on school work. When I saw the extreme positive change at home for bringing good grades, I began to believe that that was the right thing to do. I simply wanted to be well at home because I did not feel well at school. A year later in middle school I was able to make good friends but I did not stop on getting good grades. I thought that I had found a balance between my personal life and school, but what I did not realize back then was that grades were my personal life. Until now all that mentality has been developing through the years I've wasted in school. I do not know who I am trying to make proud anymore, because personally I am starting not to care about school anymore.

(Unless they are going home or on a trip, I do not understand why the children are smiling on this illustrated picture...)

Recently I have been feeling extremely unmotivated and pressured when it comes to school. I cannot remember what motivated me so much before. I used to think that good grades=good future because of college, but now I do not even think college can make a person have a good future. However, I cannot bring myself to feel happy for having bad grades.

I do not consider the school system as an evil phenomenon that wants to suck the life out of all human beings. It is just a designed system to make things work, including ourselves. Indeed people could go against it but I do not think that they would succeed on terminating the school system. We are being taught to learn about the world we live in, so we can fit in and even improve it. This does not suggest that I find the school system as a positive thing. I do think that it should be changed to give the students more freedom on what they want to learn about. And by doing this perhaps there will be student who may actually want to study math or science over anything else, and this is because they were not FORCED to study it, but because they chose it out of interest. This would also help determine one's personality much earlier than what it is common. Although I have not experienced this myself (seems like a dream) I do want future generation to be able to choose what they want to study.