School Rant

[NightThoughts]

My school has Accelerated Reader quizzes that we need to take-or else. Interestingly, these quizzes are supposed to give us a love of reading. We still have to answer questions about minutiae that didn't really affect the book and can't take extra quizzes in our leftover time. If you want to take another quiz you have to stay after and hope the teacher will let you in the computer lab. There's a deadline for when you have to take the quiz and now kids only read to get a good quiz grade. How are we supposed to love reading when we are forced to read books on their schedule? Not only that, there's only rarely free time and no books (beyond the curriculum-set literature books) to read for those who don't have a book with them. Which is almost everyone, since there's A) no time to grab a book, in the morning or between classes and B) no space in our lockers. Reading during class is punished even if you know the answers. Our ENGLISH teacher doesn't have books? We have spelling words like "no, now, its" to "review". It's all just easy review and no time to learn. I read Rudyard Kipling's "Rikki-tikki-tavi" in my free time and loved it, then got all that sucked out of me when we did inane amounts of work on it. We've been "learning" (forgive all the quotes) about nouns and pronouns. Then my English teacher assigned a theater review on plays we saw the day before Christmas vacation, AFTER the weeklong vacation. We also got seats in the very back, which was also high-up, by accident. Then she took points off for vagueness, titles she thought was too common, and apparently graded some parts of a rubric on the back of the assignment sheet. Hardly anyone noticed that back. The lady explained, "I took points off the title because I can." She has previously taken off points for being too sad, contradicted her own directions, and laughed at bad (for lack of a better word) occurrences. And that's just my thoughts on English. My Social Studies teacher is nice if prone to telling unhelpful stories and working out of the outdated book. In Math we have reviewed geometry, order of operations, properties such as distributive and commutative, and are working on negative numbers. All for the millionth time. And I entered this school system years later than most of my peers, so I don't even know if this was repeated previously. I make straight A's in Accelerated/Advanced classes, am taking the homework-intensive Latin and Mandarin Chinese, and am planning to try out for an honor band. I just won the spelling bee and came close last year. And yet I'm still expected to follow along with uninteresting curriculum? Why do I have to learn about chemistry when I want to learn about life science and genetics? Why do I have to scramble to write down basic (but intended to be complicated) vocabulary words and other possible test topics as I am distracted by bells, intended to indicate terms, that have changing meanings? I bet my teacher couldn't do that! I can give summaries of nearly anything I read with great accuracy, and analyze without useless, confusing methods like that. And why can't we learn new, interesting things and avoid all the time-stealing busy work that covers stupid topics? Is there any wonder I hate school? And yet my parents have ignored my pleas for homeschooling, despite many quotes I have found to back me up and proven that it's not expensive necessarily to homeschool. I'm at my wit's end and thinking of just not trying and devoting my time to actual learning.

[Dirtbikemike]

What school do you go to? We had the same exact "Accelerated Reader" thing at my middle school.

Edit: Also welcome to SS.

[McGee!]

Accelerated Reader sounds incredibly pointless. You could easily get lots of points just by choosing the highest book and asking for the questions becuse the book is so "hard". Passing a test doesn't prove you understood anything about a book, just that you can pass a mini-standardized test. And grammar review gets on my nerves, too. School House Rock taught about parts of speech, why would you need to be re-taught in Middle and High school?

btw, welcome to SS, where not trying and actual learning is pretty damn standard.

[The]

I have accelerated reader

[NightThoughts]

(01-25-2012 06:33 AM)dirtbikemike204 Wrote:  What school do you go to? We had the same exact "Accelerated Reader" thing at my middle school.

Edit: Also welcome to SS.

I go to middle school myself, where the guidance counselors have their own class and try to fix things with deep breathing. Did your school have "Advanced", "Standard", and "Reinforced" levels of supposed difficulty? Or something similar? Really, it's all a way to give us smart people more homework and be more critical when we go over the same stuff at a slow pace.