The answer is very. How do I know? Well, friends, I have a project in one of my classes where I am meant to write an 8-10 page research paper on an issue regarding the teaching of reading at the middle school level and higher. I’ve only been at this college for 3 years and, to be honest, I have retained hardly any of the information that has been spewed at me over those years. So when I was assigned this paper I discovered that, while the topic of the paper is realistic and worthy of being written by many, I simply didn’t care about it. At all.
Currently I’m writing the proposal for the paper, which has been bullet-pointed out for us with questions that should be easy to answer like, “What is the purpose of your research project?” and “What do you expect to find out as a result of your study?” To most of these questions I found myself answering “I don’t know” with sass and disregard. We students aren’t in this class for our Master’s degree; we’re here on our way to get our Bachelor’s degree, and yet we’re assigned this research paper that is meant to be a Master’s thesis–a practice for it, if you will–and I simply don’t care about it.
It’s possible that I might not graduate this year before I move simply because some of my classes didn’t transfer over from my last school. I’ve been in college for 7 years now and it’s possible I might need to make it 8 just to get my Bachelor’s. So it is my firm belief that there is a great fundamental problem with the way that education is run in this country, especially since I’ve been in school so long and have pretty much nothing to show for it except getting myself roughly $23,000 in debt just for 3 years of part time schooling at the university level and the possibility of no degree because I’m missing one class or two that my counselor has yet to transfer over from 3 years ago at my previous school. Yes, that was a long and loaded sentence and I’m not meaning to make this into a big political statement.
Simply, I finally want my feelings about education to be known. I think it’s pretty fucked up the way that the system is run. I’ve been in school for most of my life and I can’t say that I haven’t learned anything because that would just not be true, but I can say that what I’ve learned has been far and few. There are less than a handful of teachers that I’ve encountered who have really impacted my life in a positive way, and not because they were involved in my life personally–because none of them were; it was more that their teaching methods inspired me to learn and interested me in whatever subject they were teaching me at the time. Whatever methods they used to teach made them appear to really care about their students and what becomes of them after their class. They can actually teach.
And here I am being forced to write a paper in a class where the teacher does nothing but lecture and act like she doesn’t, where she claims that communal class discussion trumps lectures any day yet interrupts every student trying to take place in that class discussion to correct them on an idea–and IDEA–that they thought up while reading the very boring texts assigned to us which all say pretty much the same thing: that there’s just not enough diversity in the classroom, in education.
Now, one of my dreams was originally to become a teacher and I can’t say that that dream is dead, but I can say that based on what I’ve experienced and learned at the university level tells me that the way the education system is now simply doesn’t work for me, as a student or as a prospective teacher. And yes, I am idyllic in my thoughts of how education should be, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I think it’s okay to dream of a better way to educate everyone. And while this class focuses on theories and methods of teaching reading, my teacher feels that it’s much more a class on the socioeconomic struggles and segregation within the education system and how we, as future teachers, should fix that problem and less a class on actual theories and methods of teaching reading.
Now, that issue she loves to lecture on is a real issue and I’m not saying that it’s not important, but I signed up for a class that I assumed would talk about theories and methods of teaching reading–as stated in the title–and instead got educated on socioeconomics of education with it rounding back to how it affects reading here and there. I paid God knows how much to take a class on one thing and got taught another, and this has been my experience throughout university. At my community college, you were taught what the title of the class said and then some, but at least you were taught what you signed up for. The “and then some” was a bonus.
So to wrap up this little rant, this fit of frustration at how betrayed I feel when it comes to higher-level education, how cheated I feel, I’m just going to say that for the moment I am so, so, sooooooo very much done with school, at least for the moment. I have every intention to return to school someday for that Master’s degree or maybe to minor in a couple of subjects to make myself into a well-rounded person in the eyes of the educational system, but for now I simply don’t care about the grade I get in either of my classes. It’s important to me to keep my great GPA, but if I get a B this semester instead of my usual A because I put in 1/3 of the effort I normally would, so be it. At this point, teaching myself this and that though I’m not an expert on anything seems a more genuine and beneficial education than that of the collegiate rank.
TL;DR: School sucks.
Bookends Review 