Education Reform

Like many Americans, I spent my Wednesday night watching the Republican Presidential Candidate Debate. One of the topics addressed, as it usually is, was education reform. Former Florida Governor Bush spoke about higher standards for schools and how he improved the Florida school system. Here’s my problem with education reform: how schools test what students are learning is by tests. The main problem with schools is tests. In some of my high school classes we had so many tests we didn’t have time to learn the material before we were supposed to be tested on it. The more tests teachers are required to give, the less they care. Teachers, the good ones, want to learn from their students. Not only that, but some of the best teachers I had were the ones who let us, or rather, encouraged us, to discuss current events. The teachers who taught to a curriculum and didn’t stray were boring, less invested, and didn’t give us, as students, a reason to want to learn the material. Students want to learn about things relevant to their lives. No one really enjoys high school calculus because everyone has the same problem with it – we’re unable to see how it’ll be useful in life. No one is going to go home and say "Hey mom, let me show you how to take the derivative of a number with a lot of variables," but they might go home and say "Mom, what's your opinion on [insert current event here]," and when she asks why, you'll respond, "my history teacher brought it up in class today and I think [insert opinion here]," and you could have a great discussion about what's going on in the world with your parents. With history, economics, and like subjects that can be related to the current world, the teachers who embrace the media are going to be the ones who are remembered and who teach the most. I can’t tell you what I learned in eighth grade, but I can tell you that my history teacher started every class with current events, and that when I got home from school and my mom asked what I learned at school that day, I would talk to her about that class. When Nelson Mandela passed away, we not only talked about it in my European history class, but were incentivized to learn more about his legacy by being offered extra points if we watched Invictus and wrote about what we took away from the movie. The summer before 11^th grade I went on a summer program that took me to the concentration camps in Poland. I came back to school educated and wanting to share what I had learned. Luckily I was taking American History II, which covered America from the Industrial Revolution through present day. I got to know my teacher by bringing up my travels and I ended up making a presentation to share with him and my class with pictures of things I had seen and stories I was told. He kept the presentation and is able to still use it today to show his classes what the camps look like now and give them different perspectives. This was possible because he liked to talk about current history in the making, not just what came out of our text books. School is not just about what’s in the book; it’s about challenging your mind, learning how to form opinions and informing yourself on the past and the future. The most life-changing, important class I ever took was broadcast journalism. Not because I learned how to write news or because I directed a music video, but because the teacher genuinely cared about all of his students. He taught us not to play the blame game and to be proactive with our work. He showed us what we were capable of, and always required we were well informed of what was going on in the community, as well as around the world. That’s not to say calculus and biology aren’t important, but for many teenagers high school is when you grow, form study habits,  and decide what kind of student will be. It’s the opportunity for teachers to get you interested in learning, to show you that the world is bigger than just high school, and to make you a more globally aware citizen, and that can’t be measured by standards.