The Purpose of College

So I guess I must have completely missed when the purpose of college changed from educating people to whatever it is now. When you go to a college class shouldn't you do the work? Study for the tests? Show up to class? I'm not saying that I've never skipped because I have. I've skipped one of my classes twice so far this semester. I'm talking about the people who go to college just so they can party. Or go to college just so they can play a sport and then complain about the work they have to do in class.

I was in my health class. It's a one credit class that I'm taking so that I can have enough credits to be considered a full time student. It isn't a class I want to take but I go to it and I do the work. In this class the teacher has made us a packet of notes with about a page worth of notes for each chapter in the book we're supposed to be learning out of. In these notes are all the information we need so that we don't have to go out and buy the book. So she took time out of her life to make us feel a little less of the pain in our wallets that textbooks usually bring about. Everyday she goes over the notes from one to two of these chapters. The class is only 55 minutes long. So today she passed out a review sheet with a list of the topics that would be on the test next week. First there were exclamations about not knowing we had a test. (It was on the syllabus that she handed out the first day of class...) Then there were exclamations of how they couldn't believe how much information was going to be on the test. (The review was 2 pages long...) Then there were complaints because the test was going to be 25 questions long made up of True and False, fill-in, and 3 short answer. (Really?) And finally there was gasps of shock and awe when the teacher said there would be no word bank for the fill ins. (I give up.)

So I have a group of jocks who sits to the right of me and does nothing all class except talk about how wasted they were the night before. They started telling each other how unfair it was and how they should just get up and leave. I had a girl in front of me complaining about how now she had to spend all her time studying. Okay people this is COLLEGE. Not only is it college but this teacher is letting us off EASY. I'm going to study for this test for literally an hour and be prepared and it's not due to me being smarter it has to do with them being lazier.

The purpose of college should be learning but it's just not anymore. So much emphasis is placed on the athletics and the arts. Yes these things have their place but do you think an Art degree is actually going to help the world at large? No. Do you think playing football is actually going to create a better society? No. I'm so sick of so much importance being placed on these two areas. Nobody is placing importance on intelligence anymore. Without intelligent people there would be no electricity. There would be no computers. I would literally not be typing this up at this very moment.

As far as the sports go very very very few of the people who play sports in college are going to become professionals. That's just how it is. Sports is a nice past time but the vast minority actually make it their career. And as far as art goes look at some of the most well known artists in history. Leonardo Da Vinci was also a scientist and inventor. Michelangelo was an architect and an engineer.

I've had it with lazy complaining college students who don't want to do the work to get the grade. Stop coming! Save your money (or the taxpayers money) and stop coming.

Education

As many of you know I am in school right now for early childhood education. I love kids and I love teaching and many of you also know I have always loved school. One of the reasons for this is my parents. We always had books, educational games, and support in my house when I was growing up. I was very lucky because I was taught that knowledge is important. My parents helped me with my homework and chaperoned field trips. The same can't be said for everyone.

Education has been in the news a lot lately and everytime I read it I'm always reading about how teachers need to be accountable and I agree. Teachers should strive to help all their children reach their potential. Teachers who don't care about the students and aren't teaching well should be fired. The thing that really irks me about all this talk about accountability is that it places, in my opinion, too much of the responsibilty of education on the teachers. If you have a student who is going to say Beechwood and another who is going to Cleveland, they can have the same teacher and would still turn out different results. The environment is a very important factor in a child's education.

As a teacher, you can work as hard as you can. You can try every teaching method in the book. You can extend the school year (very bad idea in my opinion). But, if those kids when they leave the school are going back to a home where mom is sitting in front of the tv with a bottle of rum and dad's not even in the picture, those kids are nine times out of ten not going to reach the same level as the kids who had the support system I had. Will there be that tenth kid that everyone will hold up as an example of rising above it? Of course. But the majority of the time the cycle of illiteracy and poverty will continue.

Reform shouldn't just be in the schools themselves. We need to try to reform America in general. More and more there are single parent families. And if you look at the statistics that makes the children more at risk for early pregnancy, drug use, even suicide. We need to be teaching our young people about responsibility and the consequences of their actions. Instead we just keep trying to come up with the easy way out of everything. There are boys getting multiple girls pregnant and not caring about a single one of the girls or the babies. If we can't try to fix the problem at it's core it will never be fixed.