Out With the Old
In ninth grade you expect an entirely new experience. Something that’ll be harder and more interesting all at once. But you don’t expect outdated textbooks that declare the USSR still exists. You don’t expect copies of Fahrenheit 451 to be missing pages thirty-six to forty-one. Most though, you don’t even fathom the idea that you’ll be learning from a science book that is more then fifty-two years old.
I was never good at history. There were too many dates and events to remember. Then as quickly as you remembered them, you were told to forget them and learn the new ones. It was far too difficult and tedious for me. I needed all the help I could get, but I was shocked when I opened a book and found that the USSR still exists. My only real knowledge of the USSR came in the form of The Beatles song “Back in the USSR.” I had some faint concept that it had fallen and was now the skeleton of a democracy, but no actual fact. Then in class my teacher casually said that we should ignore chapters eleven through thirteen. “They are outdated and are no longer fact” was the way he put it. My history book was outdated by ten years. The information that I was reading was about President Bush, the first. It made little sense to me.
The best part of my day was English--a topic I could wrap my brain around. There wasn’t the adding of numbers and letters. No remembering of dates as they pertained to action. Just books. My whole class was given three books, Slaughterhouse V, Fahrenheit 451, and Moby Dick. Casually flipping through each I began to notice that in some of them there were entire chapters missing. Mrs. Jones, my English teacher, made an announcement to “mark down the pages your books were missing, give them to (her) and (she) would make copies of the missing pages for us.” I still remember the pages that I was missing. Slaughterhouse V needed 71 to 84, Fahrenheit 451 36 to 41, and the largest chunk missing Moby Dick, page 131 to 187. I was just given a “better book,” this one only had ten pages missing.
Perhaps the most difficult part of my day was biology. Memorizing muscles and random chemicals in your body always struck me as boring and useless. I can name the muscles in the shoulder, but how often am I ever supposed to do that? Then my teacher did the ever present throat clear. “As you’ll notice these books are a little old.” A little I thought to myself. The cover had an American family sitting on them with horn rimmed glasses and high and tight crew cuts. “I will be making handouts to talk to you guys about DNA and RNA, because they have hardly any information about those in the book.” In fact, there wasn’t even a mention of electrons throughout the book.
Florida’s educational system is perhaps the worst for a state that makes so much money. One would think that with the lottery and all the tourism that a little money given back to the school. Just recently I was sent an article by my grandfather, who still lives in Florida, that forty-seven percent of high school seniors were not prepared for life in college. The author said that we needed to reflect back on the teachers. I am flabbergasted by this remark. Teachers, how about you look at the text books I was given and told to learn from. The teachers spend so much time trying to explain what’s wrong with the book that they can’t teach what is right.
I hate outdated text books. What happened to all the money that the lottery had been raising since the late eighties? I simply say, spend the money where it should be spent, so not every outgoing senior thinks that they can go back to the USSR.
I was never good at history. There were too many dates and events to remember. Then as quickly as you remembered them, you were told to forget them and learn the new ones. It was far too difficult and tedious for me. I needed all the help I could get, but I was shocked when I opened a book and found that the USSR still exists. My only real knowledge of the USSR came in the form of The Beatles song “Back in the USSR.” I had some faint concept that it had fallen and was now the skeleton of a democracy, but no actual fact. Then in class my teacher casually said that we should ignore chapters eleven through thirteen. “They are outdated and are no longer fact” was the way he put it. My history book was outdated by ten years. The information that I was reading was about President Bush, the first. It made little sense to me.
The best part of my day was English--a topic I could wrap my brain around. There wasn’t the adding of numbers and letters. No remembering of dates as they pertained to action. Just books. My whole class was given three books, Slaughterhouse V, Fahrenheit 451, and Moby Dick. Casually flipping through each I began to notice that in some of them there were entire chapters missing. Mrs. Jones, my English teacher, made an announcement to “mark down the pages your books were missing, give them to (her) and (she) would make copies of the missing pages for us.” I still remember the pages that I was missing. Slaughterhouse V needed 71 to 84, Fahrenheit 451 36 to 41, and the largest chunk missing Moby Dick, page 131 to 187. I was just given a “better book,” this one only had ten pages missing.
Perhaps the most difficult part of my day was biology. Memorizing muscles and random chemicals in your body always struck me as boring and useless. I can name the muscles in the shoulder, but how often am I ever supposed to do that? Then my teacher did the ever present throat clear. “As you’ll notice these books are a little old.” A little I thought to myself. The cover had an American family sitting on them with horn rimmed glasses and high and tight crew cuts. “I will be making handouts to talk to you guys about DNA and RNA, because they have hardly any information about those in the book.” In fact, there wasn’t even a mention of electrons throughout the book.
Florida’s educational system is perhaps the worst for a state that makes so much money. One would think that with the lottery and all the tourism that a little money given back to the school. Just recently I was sent an article by my grandfather, who still lives in Florida, that forty-seven percent of high school seniors were not prepared for life in college. The author said that we needed to reflect back on the teachers. I am flabbergasted by this remark. Teachers, how about you look at the text books I was given and told to learn from. The teachers spend so much time trying to explain what’s wrong with the book that they can’t teach what is right.
I hate outdated text books. What happened to all the money that the lottery had been raising since the late eighties? I simply say, spend the money where it should be spent, so not every outgoing senior thinks that they can go back to the USSR.
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