Richard Camacho
Final Draft
Chris never really cared for the the college lifestyle, all he really cared about was getting to Alaska and being one with nature. Education never really crossed his mind since he was already a smart kid but, he was too arrogant for his own good, which ultimately got him killed. In the novel “Into The Wild” Chris McCandless leaves his school,family and all of his worldly possessions behind to go hitchhike to Alaska and become self reliant, just him and nature. It doesn't take long before he soon becomes good friends with almost everybody he comes in contact with. His arrogance is what got in the way of achieving his goal of surviving. He lacked the knowledge to cure meat, or when the river would rise, or even much of the surrounding areas . He kind of just went for it and hoped for the best. Many students wish they could live out their passion so carelessly but, they simply can't just abandon their families, some of us struggle just to get by and work our asses off to stay in school. In the movie The Passion Project, a group of Chabot students are interviewed what it’s like to be a student here. Each answer are similar but, each is also unique. They share their stories of horrible teachers, struggles with subjects and their fears.They share their opinions about education and what should change.
In this paper I have created a discussion that addresses the current state that our nations educational system is in. While writing on this topic I have come up with the following related topics, where I go into detail about them. What purpose does college really serve? I share my personal experience with public school. Are public schools challenging students the way they should or are they purposely dumbing down schools as a way to get better test score? What are some advantages of public school? What are some noticeable differences between high school and public colleges?
I share my methods I have come up with over the years to avoid dropping out of college completely. What are the hidden dangers of college? I will go into detail about education's role in our society. Finally I will discuss education in other countries , what they're doing right, why are they a higher rank in education than us and how can we benefit by adapting their techniques into our education system.
Each year it feels like the kids are getting dumber and less people are caring. It’s easy to forget what's important when your life is cluttered with distractions, whether it be what's happening in other countries like Egypt or Syria or what's happening on TMZ with your favorite celebrity. Escaping reality has become easy as clicking a mouse or tapping on the screen of your Iphone, it becomes effortless to forget about the issues that are in our own backyard. Technology has become metaphorical blinders to us, our nations schools are slowly falling down the ranks in education and it feels like no one cares anymore.“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.”-Walter Cronkite. We were once the envy of the world and now we are struggling just to keep up, education is the foundation of a civilization and it starting to get harder for us to keep building a society on a deteriorating foundation.
All our life we’ve been preparing ourselves for college, as children our parents would tell us that college is the key that would make all of our dreams come true, on television and movies people would talk about going to college and the character portrayed on tv would have a mental break down when they received the news that they didn’t get accepted in the school of their choice, as if they just received the new that they have just been diagnosed with cancer.What purpose does college really serve? All our lives we have been inching closer and closer to it but, we never really knew why. This idea that if you go to a good school and do all the work and get good grades, you'll have a job waiting for you when you get out has been fed to us from all angles. Its been embedded in our DNA but, in the way public school is set up nowadays it feels like the schools have abandon the idea of ever getting you prepared for college and just want you to leave with the bare minimum of knowledge and just pass the state required exams and test.When a public school gets the reputation of being a "good" school it soon becomes barricaded with restricting areas, weeding out the bad apples that might spoil the school. If a child wants to attended the school they won't look at he grades or test scores but his/her zip code.
My view on public school education is that the school system is in a rut, in more ways than one. Each year schools are cutting more and more classes, after school activities, art and music programs, sports, etc. Instead of nurturing these students creativity and imagination they have stripped the school to the bare bone. I think some kids don't want to go to school, hate the idea of being in classrooms all day or have just been in shitty class after shitty class for so many years to the point where they've become too far gone to save.
My personal experience with public school was pretty normal but, at the time I didn't notice what state public education was until I was looking from the outside in.What schools need are good teachers but, what makes a good teacher? It’s harder than you think to come up with what qualities make a good instructor. I was one of the lucky ones, I finished high school just before the school started to change but, me and my fellow students were already noticing change. Fewer classes were becoming available, more and more teachers started teaching around what's expected on the Exit Exam and it felt like I was in more and more classes where the teacher either had no idea what they were doing or just didn't care about teaching. Every student has just as much responsibility as the teacher but has much more to lose, the teacher has less motivation for a child to understand the material, they get paid either way. What qualities make a good teacher? “ A great teacher is always like a student because they’re always learning new and better ways to do something.”-Ray, Passion Project. One that quality that should come first is someone that takes their job seriously and understand how important their job is. Not every student is the same, each child is an individual that may or may not learn like the rest. These are the future of America and the people they learn to be in school are the kind of people They are going to grow up to be.A good teacher needs to put in more time than they thought they would have to. Students are at a vulnerable stage in their lives and don't want to look dumb in front of their peers so don't ask questions during class, students feel more comfortable talking to the teacher after class because of it's more casual setting. “We are definitely scared to make mistakes in the classroom because it is embarrassing.”-Ray, Passion Project.One thing that most of my teachers throughout high school lacked was passion, the students could tell they didn't care for their job and only wanted the salary, maybe they once cared about teaching but one to many bad classes cause the passion to burn out, maybe good teacher aren't permanent. “Do I think a teacher should go into the classroom with a vocabulary of passion? absolutely, YES... there is a lack of that raw passion because and there is a lack of wanting to explore each child’s mind”-Samira, Passion Project. I joke you not, I once had an English teacher that gave up on reading a book half way through and for the rest of the year just had the tv on while he slept at his desk, students would bring their Nintendo Wii and play super smash bros or watch cops during the whole class and he passed all his students. I later found out he knew he was going to get fired because of budget cuts so I guess he just said fuck it and decided to just lay back and rake in those final paychecks.
Does public school fail to challenge students anymore? It seems that it has lost that excitement of pushing students to do more and pass expectations. Public schools are no longer challenging students, and are dumbing themselves down in a desperate attempt to get the rates of graduating students up, but by doing its leaves long term effects on the students. This generation is a paradox, it’s the smartest generation that has ever lived and the dumbest at the same time. Technology has also had a hand in this as well, the English language has been completely rewritten by young teens to be as short as possible and you no longer have to know how to spell because everything autocorrects and spell checks for you. How can we get more funding for public schools without having to strip schools of everything except math and English, or lowering the standards of what qualifies as passing. Ever since the whole "No Child Left Behind Act" students no longer have that fear of falling behind a grade. I think students need that, a little fear is the fuel that keeps our passion burning, if they know they're going to get bumped up to the next grade regardless then what’s the point of working hard. The teachers that don't care whether or not the students learn anything, sometimes have this idea of "well they'll just learn it the next grade." Most of the people in my graduating class never thought college was even a possibility, students thought college was reserved only for the rich, and I was in senior in 2008/2009 when the economy went to shit so everybody thought the whole country was going to shit, our parents could barely fill up a full tank of gas how would they be able to pay for college. In the poorer school districts they assumed the majority of students would either drop out or finish and go straight into the workforce, so I was never approached by anybody about colleges or preparing for college, the only people that wouldn't stop bothering me my last year of high school was the military. To be honest high school was not hard to finish at all, I barely did the work, skipped class and my senior year only went to 1 class a day and still graduated with 60 extra credits then what was required to graduate. When I showed to graduation students were surprise to see me, saying ”hey I thought you dropped out?” One of my classmates even said “ I thought you were dead.”
Public school isn't all bad, it teaches things that can't be taught through the Internet or by reading books. Schools have positive advantages. School is a place to develop much needed social skills that is needed in life, it shows you have to deal with both good situations and social problem. Even though you don't notice it, you are building character, confidence and problem solving skills. High school is a time to explore the kind of person you want to be and lets you have to room to experiment with different phases in your life, there are different cliques in school and it gives you options of who you choose to associate with, not many options are available to those who are home schooled. Children need social interaction with others in their own age group, it teaches them to see eye to eye and children feel more comfortable opening up emotionally with someone their own age because of the sense of equality. After school activities have become part of the traditional American teen lifestyle, when picturing a normal high school students life it involves football games, after school clubs and dances. That’s all any teenager wants is to just be normal, and public schools can offer the tools to let students become normal adults. The value that high school served for me was more social than educational. “During that final year in Atlanta , Chris had lived off campus in a monkish room furnished with little more than a thin mattress on the floor, milk creates and table. He kept it as orderly and spotless as a military barrack, And he didn't have a phone, so Walt and Billie had no way of calling him.”(pg.30) I feel that’s the number one fear for parents thinking of homeschooling their children is that they will grow up to be socially awkward and won’t know how to talk to people and lack the basic social skills to function in the real world that is picked up by being around the flood of different cultures, sub cultures, sexes, races and religion that’s in public schools. They're scared that their kid might end up like Chris started to act in his last years in school.
When arriving to Chabot and taking the classes for the first time, right away I noticed an extreme difference in the way the school functioned. The teachers actually cared about what they were talking about, the teachers chose to teach those subjects and didn't really give a fuck whether or not the state liked their teaching methods. The students were treated as equals and not talked down to as children, as quite a few students were full grown adults going back to school. That was not the case all the time, I have gotten some teachers that just didn't care and most of the class picked up on it, that kind of teaching would make the student feel like they're wasting their time. School doesn't have to be an intimidating place but, a place for students to thrive and make their passions a career. Being in a class where the teacher is bored with his/her own lecture is the worst. It's hard to take it seriously if the teacher can't get excited about his own lecture. I think all students attending Chabot have had at least one class where they thought to themselves "What's the point of this class?” “Why do I need to take this class?” “What will I get from being here besides credits?” “Students have to feel like they’re at home so if they wanna be comfortable they gotta get comfortable with the teacher.We kinda have to know about the teacher and we gotta feel like the teacher is real, like he really or she or she really truly wants to help us.”-Ray, Passion Project.
When arriving at college, it becomes clear that you have to adapt fast to the lifestyle, you have to be on top of everything that needs to be done or you’ll end up dropping out. What are some techniques people use to keep themselves from dropping out? The teachers didn't really push you to do the work as in high school, if you didn't do an assignment there was no one else to blame but yourself. That idea of there’s no one left to blame anymore really pushed me into a more adult mindset, if was going to survive here I would have to become more independent, become more organized and take advantage of what the school has to offer. Things like the library, I never really used the library in high school but, at Chabot it soon became a weekly place for me to use, either to meet up with fellow classmates to study or go over notes or just to share our take home test with one another. The majority of the time it was just a quiet place to escape the distractions of home and just study.The way I've kept myself from dropping out is to not overwhelm yourself, I've made the mistake of taking 5 classes while also working 30+ hours a week, it was not fun at all. Find a place without distractions, your room might be a quite place for you to be but, it's full of distractions like TV, radio, phone calls, text messages and Internet, which when you have work to do, becomes the most interesting thing on earth. Places like the library, public parks, hospital parking garages are quite and no distractions. I also have found many ways of managing my time with set sleeping schedule, knowing what the bare minimum of sleep I need to be functional,when I will and will not be able to study/ do homework throughout the week and have deadlines written down on a white board along with other important dates and reminders but, at any moment anything can happen to change all this and throw of the whole system out of whack. Things out of my control like a loved one passing away, my house burning down or I could become sick and bedridden but, until that happens I'll still be here til I'm done with what I came here to do. One value of school that I found at Chabot was the actual knowledge itself, I've learned from the psychology classes I've taken is that the brain is a fascinating thing that we will most likely never fully understand in my life span but, I remember going over with the teacher the fact that once something is embedded in your long term memory it will likely stay in your memory forever, it can be anything from a idea to a simply locker combination. The facts and ideas we leave these classes we will carry with us for the rest of our lives, what we choose to use the for is completely up to us.
Each year it feels like schools are raising the bar higher and higher, making it tougher to get into schools. If it’s not raising the amount of credits it takes to transfer in or requirements then it’s the amount of money. The estimated cost for someone to attend Cal State East Bay is over $24,000 a year. It’s safe to say most of the students have a job that they go to before, after or in between classes. There are so many challenges that face the modern student today it almost feels like the whole world has plotted against you, constantly teetering you back and forth between dropping out and academically succeeding.I to feel this way, sometimes I feel like it was destiny for everything to fall apart so close together and on top of that I had an assignment due for a class. What some people find reasons to drop out I use as motivation to move forward and it makes me want to finish school faster. Things like working a dead end job and having bills to pay is what keeps me in college because when I'm done with school it will open more doors for me.
Sometimes the unexpected is what makes you drop out, it could be anything from a death in the family may force you to drop everything and get a job to pay for these unseen expenses, especially if your parents were the one pay for your schooling. You may be on the right track but then you might knock somebody up you barely know and have to flee the state, or have to take on the role of main breadwinner to this new family, sometimes it's something more complicated than that. The most common case I've seen here at Chabot is just that the student has gotten sick and was out for a couple of weeks and just missed too much to catch up and was the only option was to drop out and try again next year but usually when students take long breaks like that they don't come back. A lot can change in the years enrolled in Chabot and thinking you're going to come out the same person just isn't realistic. You're lucky if you go through here without one incident in your life that causes you to miss couple of days of class but, their are many factors that have to be taken into consideration when a student stops showing up. Life happens, life can be so inconvenient for your plans.
What most people going off to college seem to not know is that college is one giant distraction. There are hidden dangers it college that people don't know about. College isn't just lectures and papers, there’s a gritty underworld that parents don’t really care to acknowledge when they talk about schools but, some of these colleges are notorious for being highly ranked party schools. Aside from staying on top of your studies, students also have to worry about their social life. These college parties get crazier and more intense each time you attend one and it’s not all fun in games. Alcohol and college go together like America and apple pie. Recent studies show that each year over 2000 students die from alcohol related deaths each year. One in four female college student report being a victim of a rape/ sexual assault. The peer pressure to take part in the drug scene, that is spreading to every campus across the world, is sometimes too hard to ignore. The thing about the drugs and alcohol is that it’s so easy to get drugs and alcohol it’s not even a joke. A friend and I recently took a trip down to Cal State Berkeley to go visit a friend, we decided to take a walk around the campus and to be part of the student life and see what the school was like. For about 2 hours we walked around while we waited for our friend to get off work and meet us. We started to notice people would just start randomly come up to us and ask if we needed any drugs. We soon turned it into a game, by the time we left the campus we have been offered drugs 6 times. 6 times in 2 hours, 4 of those times were for Marijuana and one was for Ecstasy and one for pain killers, it seems a little ridiculous how easy of an access we had to get narcotics. Alcohols is just as easy, it’s not hard to make friends with someone of legal age and simply ask them to buy you beer or find a homeless person and ask them to buy you some in exchange for some cash. It’s easy to lose track of what's important when you're having fun like this. College is a great place to learn but if you’re not careful you may also leave with some unwanted habits.
Education is the foundation for our society, it’s what has helped us move forward as a civilization, some of our greatest minds of the past twenty years dropped out of college to start and run their own business but without a high school education and some teachers that cared out their students it would have never happened. Education has a giant role in society,it helps people achieve their life goals and live out their passions whatever they may be, perhaps it’s helping people even if you don't have a lot to offer.”Chris drove to over to Hathaway’s house and announced they were going downtown....Chris parked down on 14th st., which was a real bad part of town... he spend 10 bucks on burgers and we drove around handing them out to smelly guys sleeping on creates.”(pg.157) Those who live out their passion may inspire others to pursue their passion and so on into a chain reaction. That’s why I feel its so a impotent that we start pushing back up to number one or as close to number one in the the world like we use to be, education should be our country's highest priority instead of funding wars. Not just the math and science majors but the actors and poets should have just as much of a change at honing and excelling their skills also, not everybody is going to be academically successful, no matter how much money your throw at them, the artist are ones that seem to be the first to suffer when the budget cuts go in effect. Everybody must be accounted for when we talk about schools. Education will always be major part of our society because these children are soon going to be the ones in charge, they will be the doctors lawyers, the principals and teachers, the musicians and artist have to all start out as students. The children are the ones that will inherit the earth, and if we have smart children they will grow up into smart adults that make smart decisions about solving problems that face our society.
America was once ranked as one of the top countries in education, countries envied us, wanted to be us. Now we have dropped down to number 17 on a list of 50 country with Finland and South Korea taking the number one and two spot on the list. What are they doing to get so far ahead than us? How are other countries approaching education differently than us and how can we learn from their methods and adapt it to our schools here in the states? For the last 3 decades we have figured out one thing, that high spending does not equal high achievement. We pay our teachers based on experience and how much training and education they have and not based on how well their students do in the class. We need to stop spending money on state of the art building designs for our schools and more on quality teachers. America is slowly move forward and improving each year but, so is the rest of the world, other countries aren't going to sit and wait for us to catch up. Asian countries have intertwined their society with family involvement, family comes first and everything must first be run by the elders. Education is no exception, families are much more involved in the schools and have attached a high value to performance and want to see that their children are getting the best teachers. Parents in America are one of the busiest people in the world, working a full time job, sometimes 2 jobs, running a household and also being on top of their children's schooling and maybe even an after school activity or two and on top of that American adults are most likely to suffer from depression and anxiety and have to take medication for that. You can't tell me that those water polo moms don't have the best drugs. ”In math, Singapore’s schools teach fewer subjects in greater depth before students are able to move on. culturally, there is no shortage of the so-called “Tiger mothers,” who saddle kids with extra math tutorials and drive them to succeed. Of course, Singapore’s small size — there are only 522,000 students and 360 schools – means revamping its school system was more like turning around a kayak rather than a battleship,”- Washington Post. It sounds like the reason these countries are doing so good is because of the culture and the higher standards. Doing all this can't be the only way of teaching and producing results, the European countries are doing almost the exact opposite of the Asian countries. Schools in Finland encourage to assign less homework and more creative play, there’s no standardize testing and focus on treating their students like equal instead of making them compete against each other like we do here. Teaching is a higher ranked profession, and is respected in the community the same as a doctor or lawyer. Teachers in Finland are one of the highest paid teachers in the world but teaching also requires a master’s degree. I feel that the country need stop and look and what others are doing. We need to stop being scared to ask for help, we're always the ones give it but never like to be the ones to receive it. When I think of the kids in the school system today not getting the best education in one of the top first world countries in the world, it pisses me off. I don't have kids but, if a did I would probably sent them to private school so they could get a upper hand in education. I might go bankrupt doing so but, the parent always should want their child to do better than they did even if the parent did pretty damn good.
In conclusion, education isn't just the foundation of our society but individually molds each and
every student into adults. It gives us guidelines that we follow well into adulthood, it teaches us more than just academic but social life skill. No one can argue that there are flaws in our academic system that should be fixed as soon as possible, each year we wait to fix the problem, the more children will have sit in a class with the feeling of inadequacy, wondering why she/he isn't understanding the material that the teacher is giving out, the feeling of embarrassment because they think they’re dumb and are to scared to ask questions because they can sense that the teacher himself doesn't want to be there. I hope that one day in my lifetime, we will no longer see higher education as a luxury but, as a birthright, where no child will no longer have to be scared to dream big and have to compromise their passion because it’s not a good financial decision or an ideal career path. Someday when my kids finally leave the house and go off to college I will remember the problems with education I have written down in this paper, and I hope by then, these problem would have become irrelevant.
I DON'T KNOW WHY THE LAST PARAGRAPH LOOKS WEIRD LIKE THIS, I TRIED FIXING IT BUT IT'S NOT WORKING BUT IT LOOKS FINE IN A WORD DOC.
