Saturday, February 24, 2007

Some Should Be Left Behind

Some Should Be Left Behind
Posted by Emmanuel
When I think back on school days past, I remember I had to earn my way to the next grade. Today children are given opportunities to go on to the next grade, even if they haven’t demonstrated a level of proficiency. I know that we all believe our children are great, smart, and capable of being anything in this world, but that is the lie that needs to stop being told.

Every child is not equal to the next where intelligence is involved. Some children are more suited for math and sciences, while others are more suited for English and the arts. This is the idea that got me through school. While I was always ahead of other classmates in reading, writing, and any of the history disciplines, I was not always the strongest math and science student. The difference for me, and any child in the school systems pre George W. Bush, was that we had to earn our way to every grade. Whether we were great at all of our subjects or not, that is what made me really appreciate the next grade: I earned my place in that grade.

That is what today’s schools lack: the ability to instill in children a sense of pride through accomplishment. I was never handed a grade I didn’t earn, nor was I ever promoted because the system was set up to allow me to do that. I lost classmates because they didn’t earn the grades to be promoted, but we all survived despite that. Now we keep promoting children because political polices say we have to, and not because they earned their way.

The problem is that if we keep practicing this policy, we’ll wind up with more George W’s. And by that statement I mean we’ll wind up with people in positions of power that have no business being there. It has often been said that George W. Bush gives hope to all “C” students that anything is possible. I say, stop saying that! This man makes all credibility for “C” students null and void. He proves the point for me, that if you don’t earn your way to the next level, it’s pointless to continue until you earn the right to be promoted.

That is why I’m finding myself in classes with people who seem to be oblivious to the notions of speaking with a vocabulary that occasionally uses the word “like” when talking and writing. These people have surely been privileged to the “No Child Left Behind” program. The problem is, they should have been left behind. I’m never thrilled about the idea of my leaders making decisions that affect the world if they aren’t qualified to do so. If we continue to give to children opportunities they don’t deserve, then we will assuredly turn out more generations of “Paris and Nicole,” instead of generations of “Hilary Clintons and Nancy Pelosis”.

Bullying Across America


Northampton County High School-East is a rural high school stuck in the middle of North Carolina's desert country. Most High Schools are located near a major highway or in an area of town that is easy to find. That doesn't hold true for my high school. I remember when we had a step show and the other schools participating had to find our school; the show started an hour late because a team that was about 45 minutes away became lost. During my four years in high school bullying became an increasing popular pastime among many students.

There were bullies at my school and they bullied people who weren't considered a part of the "cool" crowd. I was considered an outcast by some students because I was overweight and I loved to talk. They all were tired of listening to me. Now, all those people want to be my friend on facebook. I started not to add them but I figured they wanted to be my friend now because they regret all the things they did wrong in high school. I decided to give them a second chance.

Bullying has become a huge problem in America’s schools with an increase occurring in the 1990s. As a former victim of bullying I understand what it is like to go to school everyday and have people pick on you because of their weaknesses and stupidity. I believe that the American education system needs to do more about the problem than they have done in the past. Students who bully do so because of low self-esteem and they feel the need to pick on others to make themselves feel good. When I was in high school a teacher said to me one day “If people are talking about you, then apparently you are that important to them.” Statements like this helped me cope with some of the negativity. I believe that if victims of bullying remember statements like this it will make their high school experience more pleasurable.

Recently, within the last twenty years there has been a rise in bullying and hate crimes amongst high school students. A recent study performed by the Washington Education Association says that 6 out of 10 teens across America witness bullying at least once a day. Four months after the Columbine shooting in 1999, two of the most popular students at the school made remarks to a newspaper saying that they are enjoying excluding the people who don’t fit in. There has also been cases in which some students have committed suicide because they couldn’t take the pressure. I remember watching an episode on the Montel Williams show about a mother who was speaking out against school administrations because of the bullying problem. Her son committed suicide because of the mistreatment by his peers. She had proof of the bullying on video tape which was recorded by a school bus camera. Most recently a young teenage girl was beat up at a slumber party by her close friends who videotaped the scenes and aired them on myspace for the world to see. The parents of the suspects were at the home while it was taking place.

I believe students who bully should be separated from other students and monitored throughout the school day. If they separate them from the victims, the only ones they could bully would be each other. They would get a chance to see how it feels first hand. If a student continues to bully after being separated then they should be thrown out of school indefinitely. At that point they have jeopardized there own education by constantly making other’s lives miserable. I also believe that the students who bully and their victims should seek counseling. All schools across America should develop plans to target bullying in their schools before it becomes too late and we experience another Columbine.

The Lows of High School

One of the few certainties of a return home is that—sooner or later—I’ll pass Charlotte Catholic High School. Situated on a main thoroughfare and on the way to my house from just about anywhere in the city, CCHS looms over town with an ominous presence I’d sooner associate with an industrial factory. It is a sprawling mass of former office buildings now converted into a holy institution devoted to higher education—or so declares the school’s website. These days, I rarely think about how much I’ve changed since then, but sometimes when I drive by I’ll see current seniors enjoying lunch outdoors and wonder if they’ll be as shocked as I was when I finally got out.

It’s difficult to reflect upon the ongoing struggles between students and administrations without a dose of cynicism, which is not to say that all of the high school experience was a negative one; on the contrary, I find much of it unforgettable. I made lasting relationships, learned from wise and knowledgeable teachers and gained the experience to carry me through the darkest of hours. In that retrospect, high school remains a valuable period, but one I wouldn’t be eager to relive any time soon.

My high school experience was different from the average one. I never had to worry about what to wear because it always came down to four different colors of polo shirts and that mind-wracking choice between khaki or blue slacks. That never annoyed me—if anything, it made life a little simpler—but the complications came in other ways.

Led by the Dean of Students, Randy Belk, the administration created a biblically-inspired atmosphere where they were in heaven, and we were in hell. Girls could wear skirts no shorter than half a foot past the knee. Guys’ hair could not show behind the ears. Teachers couldn’t discuss things like contraception and drug education or promote anything that existed outside of Catholic teachings. I had several brilliant teachers, captivating men and women who knew how to instruct and listen equally but unfortunately couldn’t share all their wisdom.

When Mr. Belk caught one of my classmates selling weed to another student, the administration believed they had unmasked an underground subculture of drugs. But every high school has a drug culture; treating the students as lepers or the only teenagers involved in drugs only isolated us further. They enforced a random drug-test policy in order to silence discussion with fear. Because they thought we were completely protected by the religious affiliation of our school, they were also under the impression that we didn’t face the same issues as any other adolescents maturing in these high-speed times. Instead of educating, they punished relentlessly.

When I arrived at UNCW, the number of choices suddenly available to me felt like a just reward for enduring so long without many. I spent the summer before college neatly packing away 18 years worth of life and ideas, and here in Wilmington I was finally allowed to apply it to my daily decision-making. If my voice held any sway in the Catholic schools network, I would beg to allow the students more freedom and more exposure to the real world.


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 don't believe in high school

I didn’t learn much in high school, and I honestly don’t know if I was expected to. Maybe I am exaggerating, but I think education in America is horrible, and there is not much being done about it--specially in small towns, such as Lumberton, North Carolina, where I spent my days at school since the age of eleven.

The first sign that the education at my school was not up to par was the fact that I went from doing calculus at my school in Columbia, South Carolina, to multiplication tables in Lumberton. “Nicolette, what is 6 times 6?” Are you kidding me? I went to the principal and told him I needed to skip a grade, and when I did, I was still bored. I’m not a genius, and I wasn’t the only one. Another girl from out of town named Cameron skipped the grade along with me, and I wouldn’t consider her a genius either. For some reason, which I don’t know if I will ever be able to comprehend, the expectations for both students and teachers are very low.

I was once an ambitious kid, but when I reached the ninth grade, I was done for. I didn’t care! I slept in all of my classes. There was one teacher I liked, however, and whose class I actually stayed awake for. Mrs. Russell taught my first high school literature class, and she really pushed us. She even made us enter a writing competition, which I did, and eventually won for our school.

But that was an exception. Most of the other classes were taught by teachers who seemed to want to go to sleep as much we did. I was never punished for sleeping; the worst I got was a witty comment from the teacher, which might have made me blush but sent me back snoring.

Our school system was set up so that eighth and ninth grades were together, and then real high school started in tenth. Before I went to the real high school, I complained enough to my parents so that I could try a really real high school. For 20 grand a year, I was able to go to St. Mary’s, an all-girls Catholic boarding school in Raleigh. Despite having to go to church every Wednesday afternoon and not being allowed to leave the campus premises without signing out (and even then, only for two hours), I felt challenged by the school load there. In Spanish class the teacher actually spoke Spanish and we actually learned some of it. We were expected to read difficult books within a week rather than being given one for the entire semester.

Unfortunately, due to the distance from my family and friends and the lack of privileges, I lasted there only two months. I went back to Lumberton to finish my high school life in public school, where I slept my days away. I tried to graduate early, but they said it was impossible; instead they gave me an in-school job, which allowed me to leave before noon and go to my real job as a waitress. This means I spent my senior year in a restaurant, not in a classroom. There I learned "real life" skills, like how to make money.

I guess I shouldn’t be complaining, right? Wrong. I think it’s not right that most kids can only get a good education if their parents can afford to slap down 20 grand a year. This means that only a select few of children in our nation really get taught something in school, get accepted to great colleges, and go on to have great careers. That’s not to say that you can’t become what you want if you went to a public school or college. If it was, I wouldn’t be here. It’s just to say that that so-called ladder which anybody can climb with equal strength is a lie. I’m sure if I graduated from St. Mary’s and then went on to Duke or another top-rated and expensive school, my options a year from now would be much greater. But like I didn't care in high school, I don’t really care now. I'm just trying to get the best bang from my buck while I’m in college. I’m not sleeping my days away anymore, but I still think that the expectations demanded from us could be higher.

Friday, February 23, 2007

Peer Pressure

High school for me was the time when I grew the most in my life. I went to high school in Fairfax County, located in Northern Virginia. Our county is very well known for its academic excellence and its reputation probably played a large part in how I go into UNCW.

It is a large county holding more than one million residents with more than twenty high schools in the area. Its location is only ten miles out side of Washington D.C., so as you can imagine, the county is full of families with parents in power. For example, my father worked in the Pentagon under Clinton as the Assistant Secretary for the Navy and my best friend’s parents both worked for the CIA. As interesting as this sounds, growing up in an area like this made being a teenager pretty intense.There was a lot of pressure growing up in an area with so much money. When kids in my school got their drivers licenses, no one had to drive their mom¹s van; parents bought their kids BMWs, Mustangs and Audis.

As we got older, the money starting being spent on things less innocent like drugs and alcohol, not to mention about ninety percent of my friends smoked cigarettes.I realized after I left, that all the peer pressure in high school is one of the biggest challenges for a teenager to face. More importantly, it can be a huge factor in a student’s life including on their academic responsibilities and their health. One possible solution to would be to divide high school into two separate schools. One school designed for the ninth and tenth graders and the other for eleventh and twelfth graders. I think that the separation between students would create for a more balanced environment for students to learn in.

The difference between ninth grade and twelfth is very different. From starting to get to know yourself to finding out what you need to do to go off to college and be on your own for the first time. It doesn’t make sense to me that these groups of people would benefit from one another. It seems to be more of a distraction and a bad ground for setting expectations.

If there were two separate schools younger teens would not be exposed to some of the things that teenagers who are older might be into such as drugs and sex. Academically, this may be beneficial as well. The school for ninth and tenth graders could get better prepared for eleventh and twelfth grade and these students could get better prepared for college. I think the two schools would serve as a better way to move teens along through their high school careers so they can better receive what they need from classes without as much peer pressure.

Not The Same Assembly Line, Please

Writing about what needs to be changed in American high schools is a hard task for me—not only because I did not attend high school in United States, I have never attended a real high school.

Since high school was not compulsory in China, there was a national test given to middle-school students to determine who would continue onto high schools—a kind of “up or out” system: the students with the higher scores from that test would go onto high schools and the ones with lower scores would not.

My sister scored very high on the test and was accepted by Suzhou High School—the best high school in town, with a 90 percent college admission rate. Since my family could only support one college student, my parents recommended me to attend nursing school because nursing schools were free and provided a small stipend to their students. Given the fact that I was not sure if I was ready for college at the time, nursing school seemed an ideal alternative for me . So after graduating from middle-school at the age of fifteen, I packed up my belongings and went off to nursing school.

The nursing school I attended in Suzhou, like most small nursing schools in China during the 1980s, was much like a Catholic boarding school. All students lived on campus and in the same building: girls in the west wing and boys (they were mostly in pharmacy or radiology classes) in the east wing, each with separate entry. Students in the same class year lived on the same floor, so we were closer than most high school students—two of my best friends were my roommates in the nursing school.

The curriculum in the nursing school was filled with classes like human biology, physiology, pharmacology, Pathophysiology, numerous nursing classes including the “notorious” anatomy, and a collection of condensed high school courses. Classes started at eight in the morning and finished at three or four in the afternoon. Nightly self-study classes, started at six and lasted three hours, were intended for homeworks. Lights were out at ten o’clock for the entire dorm-room building (now you know why it was more like a Catholic school); however, we spent that time gossiping or reading books (I do not mean textbooks) under the flashlights. At the beginning of the second year, we started our clinical trainings at a nearby hospital.

Though rigid and highly structured, our nursing school came with a bonus—it was free, and with a job offer at the end of the three years. Today, I realized that, in addition to providing us with a professional skill and an employment, my nursing school integrated enough high school courses that I was able to quickly adapt into a college curriculum fifteen years later.

Through a new education experience fifteen years after my nursing school, I found the advantage of the American education system, or at least the education system in North Carolina—the community colleges. The community colleges provide the opportunities for students who pursue their educations a non-traditional way—they offer adult high school courses, junior college courses, or technical training courses for students who want to finish high school, obtain a junior college degree, acquire a technical certificate, or transfer to a four-year institution.

However, when talking with many students from Brunswick Community College (which I started my college) and at UNCW (where I am current enrolled), one message I heard often is that high schools do not prepare students for anything. Many students complained that the high school curriculum was not challenging enough to prepare them for college. On the other hand, many students from the technical programs in the community college said that, for financial reason or simply different personal interests, they were not interested in going to college; instead, they wanted to learn hands-on skills like welding, horticulture, cosmetology in high schools. However, they were told that these programs were not high school programs and they had to wait and take those classes at the community college. Not interested in the normal high-school work, these students often learn to release their boredoms through other activities such as drinking and smoking, bulling, fighting, or even using drugs.

To meet the different needs of their students, I think high schools can design two different curricula—one that prepares students who want to go to college, and one centers on technical trainings with a condensed high school curriculum. By teaching a vocational skill to the students who are not interested in going to college, high schools allow them to secure a job, so they can support themselves, upon graduation. At the same time, a condensed high school curriculum with the existing community college system, these students still have the opportunities to pursue a college degree a few years later if they desire.

Of course, such an approach will require more discipline in high schools because all students will encounter more challenges. The students who want to go to college will be required to take advanced courses that better-prepare them for a college career; the ones in the technical programs will learn a vocational skill of their real interests while still not missing much of the high school courses.

I certainly understand that there is a fine line between a curriculum that is challenging and one that is overwhelming. I also understand that there is, always, the possibility of discrimination when we put students in different groups or classes. However, when students said that they have different needs and expectations in schools, maybe we should listen to the “supposed” beneficiaries of the school system—its students, to find out what their needs and desires are from high school.

Through my own experiences, I have learned that not every student is ready to go to college as soon as he or she graduates from high school; in addition, not every family is able to support their children to go to college shortly after their high-school graduations. By teaching these students a vocational skill and keeping the opportunity to colleges open, many of them may attend college later as they grow and mature. Not making students go through the same educational assembly line might improve the chances for them to achieve success—each on their own pace.

Thursday, February 22, 2007

High School Changes

High school is a stressful time for adolescents. A more stressful time is finding in college that high school did not prepare you with the extensive education required to succeed. My biggest problem with high schools is that the same level of teaching is not implemented in schools across the state.

I graduated in the top in my class, with honors and great grades to accompany me in my advancement to college. It took a week for me to realize my high school was not in the same category as the other people I attend college with. On day two of calculus class I realized I had not learned the same amount of information and had no clue what the professor was talking about.

On several occasions I found myself staring blankly at the professor while he continued to explain the rest of the theory or the concepts of the next level of equations. I soon realized that the education I received in my high school was inadequate when compared to others who graduated in the same year.

High schools should stop focusing on the athletic department and place more emphasis on the education level being represented in the schools. My high school was lousy at sports but the athletic department always received the largest portion of funds.

Departments such as the science department, which needed new lab equipment, were forgotten in favor of ordering new weights and workout pads for the football players. The football players in question won no more than 20 games the entire time I attended high school.

I understand the need for athletics. Athletics keep team spirit alive and provide students with a sense of belonging. However, athletic pep rallies rarely help individuals once they have graduated from high school. I have yet to see the spot on a college application for pep rally participation. Many individuals who play sports in high school rarely make it in the college level, never mind anything higher than that.

I'm not saying that athletics and team spirit are not important because they are a central part of the high school experience. Consider that athletics will only benefit a few individuals after high school and good academics will benefit a greater majority.

Many of our academic departments were in need of major improvements such as new teachers, equipment, books or funds, and were often ignored in favor of athletics. Because of this favoritism energy that should have been focused toward instructing students was often wasted in meaningless activities, such as patrolling the football field, to make sure no one stepped on the grass.

So, if I could change the entire high school system (or at least the one located within my high school) I would make academics the focal point. There is nothing wrong with athletics, but when the outcome of the next football game interferes with hiring a highly qualified instructor to teach statistics there is definitely a problem.