Thoughts about Education

Often, I really love being in class and paying attention to what the teacher has to say, but other times, I rarely manage to stay awake or be incredibly bored in class. I believe that the instructor is the thing that really distinguishes a class where everyone is active and engaged and a class that shows little interest.

I've had my fair share of good and bad teachers in my time in school, who have made a form of mark on me in one way or another, before today. And looking back at that right now, I really admire the good teachers who stuck out for me. To me, a good teacher is someone who emanates passions through the art of teaching, is able to encourage or entertain each and every class, and is a person who is more than just a teacher to their students. These are the main attributes I see each of my favorite teachers having, I suppose.

I've had teachers in the past on the other spectrum, who have the complete reverse of these characteristics; unpassionate, find classes dull and appear to have little interest in their pupils. I agree it shouldn't only be luck to have good teachers, it should be a right for a student to teach them only with good teachers.

I assume the way we are educated by our school system is inadequate and obsolete. Since the age of the industrial revolution, when schools were mainly targeted at educating students to work in factories, to behave like robots, the way we educate students has not changed. You ought to be the complete reverse of this in the 21st century, to even be able to get a career, by trying to be imaginative, analytical and to be socially skilled.

And while education can educate us academically, I feel like school has never really attempted to teach us important lessons in the future that we need. I agree that how to pay the taxes, how to cope with refusal, how to build a development mentality are integral stuff that will surely help us down the path of life.

Standardized assessment is another major concern about education, and how it has become so common in measuring the knowledge of students. Standardized testing has changed the way in school we "learn." Teachers will teach us subjects on which we will copy notes and recall information and learn how to apply the understanding. Students would just have to recall what they have learned in order to pass the tests as exams come along, and after it is completed, students would only repeat the procedure again for the next subject while ignoring all the details they had already wanted to remember.

This method will continue throughout the year, and they will only really know 20 percent of what they were learned until a student graduates from that year. Students do not even learn properly at all to be blunt, but instead are simply taught how to recall and apply data under timed environments.

This are just some of the key challenges faced by me and many other students during their schooling lives, and, frankly, school is struggling to train students for the workforce and teach human society to students.