Standardized English

Like many other education majors, I’ve recently been doing my observations. Now, I’m a secondary education English major. Through the classes I’ve been taking, I’m supposed to be expecting to teach high school kids about writing, literature, and even how to think outside the box. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. Every school district I’ve been too has actual five day a week classes dedicated to the sole purpose of standardized testing. A lot of these teachers are English teachers. Even in the English classes, a good chunk of what these kids do is to prepare them for the PSSAs. So how can you teach anyone about literature and good writing if you have to teach based on a formula? The purpose of Language arts is not to think like a clone, but to branch out and be able to make your own connections. Not every classroom operates this way, but the number is definitely higher than it should be. Needless to say, it’s pretty disappointing to observe and realize that instead of teaching minds to open and embrace the abstract, I’m going to have to teach them to close in on small, logical points.

Fingerprint Funding

School districts without a lot of money to spare are not exactly a new gripe. Personally, I know my alma mater has trouble with simple things as computer paper. That’s not to say it’s under funded or anything- it’s still a decent school; it just has a few monetary issues every so often. So where does federal funding come in? Well I don’t feel like getting too deep into the No Child Left Behind, but my school (Tamaqua Area Senior High School), manages to perform relatively well on the standardized tests, so we have decent funding. The only problem is, instead of funding us for paper and toner, the feds think it’s much better to fund us for technologies that are, well, a waste of time.
Recently, in the past few months, the cafeteria has done away with currency in favor of paying for lunches electronically with a fingerprint system. Now in some ways it makes sense, being that going paperless is becoming a quick trend. But so far, this system has been a disaster. Parents put money in an account via credit card, and then the student presses his or her finger to a machine, and that’s the payment. Not only has this taken jobs away, but in two months time, the efficiency is slower than ever. The machine is not exactly fast, so the line moves slow, and if it malfunctions, well, forget lunch. But perhaps this is what irks me the most: money can only be placed in the account at certain times via certain ways. So if a parent/child forgets to put money in the account electronically then no lunch.
I’m not trying to say that this is an altogether bad thing, but it’s completely unnecessary. Why would the federal government rather fund semi-useless and partly functioning machines, when they don’t even really cover essentials like books, paper, and such? Shouldn’t they be more concerned with funding a solid education?