Stuff

Problems with school in general

A lot of problems are school-specific or even teacher-specific, but some occur at just about every school, like these:

Homework
This is the single worst part of school. Many teachers have a belief that their classes are more important than all of the other classes. They think that an hour and a half per day is not enough. No, they have to give us an extra 30 minutes after school. Add that up, 4 classes per day, 2 hours of homework per day. I get home at about 3:00, so I finish my homework at 5:00 (assuming I start right away, but I usually eat a snack or something), and have a whole 4½-5 hours of free time, depending on when I go to bed. It's not like that's not a lot of time, but it's not as much as we should have. Why should we have to come home from a long and probably hard day at school and have to do more work?

Not everyone is a social animal
Have you ever noticed that whenever a teacher tells people to get into groups for a group project, there's always a person or two who have to be manually assigned to a group? Have you ever thought about how it must feel for them? I'm usually one of those people, since I prefer to have a few good friends instead of being a really popular person, and it seems to be very rare for anyone I know to be in one of my classes. It's really embarassing. Teachers should just assign groups instead of having the class sort themselves. It's not that much work – just go down the class list and put every 3-4 people into a group.

Not everyone learns the same way
I've seen some people in school who aren't as bright as the rest of us. It's not their fault, they just are that way. It's fine to try to help those students learn, but in the process, teachers shouldn't start slowing the rest of us down. I cringe (figuratively of course, but you get the point) every time I hear a teacher say that we need a dictionary next to us when reading a certain textbook (Jenkins) or that we have to take notes and study to do well in a class. Not everyone learns well by taking notes. I personally do better when I don't have to take notes – taking time to write things down distracts me from actually learning the material. I haven't formally studied for a test since 4th grade, and I still do quite well on most tests. I have met several other people who are also like this.

Trying to get all students to use a certain type of notes is also bad in that it places more emphasis on learning the material in a certain way and less on just learning the material. Teachers should be there to teach students, not to try to make all students do things one way. There is no one style of learning that works for everyone.

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Problems with Mandarin High

Ah, I'm sure every Mandarin student has something to say about this. (Yes, I have a habit of thinking that people always mean to do bad things, but how many other explanations are there?)

Rules without (good) reasons
Transparent bookbags, tardies, and cell phone rules which are really just stupid. Where do I begin?

I've seen some stupid decisions. But the transparent bookbags are probably the stupidest decision I've ever seen. The administration claims that it's for security purposes, but how will see-through bookbags make anything safer? They actually make things less safe. People will see that you have an expensive cell phone or iPod or pile of $100 bills (What? You don't carry a pile of $100 bills in your bookbag?) and you will be an instant target for theft. It can also cause accidental theft – since most of the school-bought ones look the same, people could accidentally take the wrong bookbag. The plastic bags break more easily, and the mesh ones will let your books get wet when it rains. The school also got dangerously close to violating antitrust laws when they were planning to sell the bookbags for $50 each. Whatever the price is, violating your students' privacy is never a good thing. Want extra security? Get a metal detector or two. (Use some of that PTA membership money to help pay for them – does anyone actually know what that goes to?)

The school stepped over another line when they removed the tardy warning bell and replaced it with someone standing in the courtyard with a malfunctioning megaphone yelling at students to get to class. This is ineffective for students who aren't in the courtyard (walking to the portables, for instance), as well as for people who can't hear the megaphone over the babbling of a few thousand students in the courtyard.

Yet another bad decision by the Mandarin administration is that we are allowed to have our cell phones with us during the day, but not turned on. Sometimes I will try to turn my cell phone off, and it will pretend to turn off but actually stay on. Besides, any student who wants to carry a powered-on cell phone around the school has already done it or will when they want to. Aside from random searches (also a privacy violation, don't you have to have reasonable suspicion to search someone?) there are no easy ways to find cell phones.

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Problems with specific teachers

Not all of Mandarin's problems are the result of the administration's decisions. Some problems just come from the fact that Mandarin has quite a few bad teachers.

Mrs. Jenkins
Mrs. Jenkins is a good teacher, except for the fact that she doesn't teach anything, forces her students to take notes from reading, forces students to make said notes colorful to the point that they're completely unreadable without blinding one's eyes, and has threatened me.

As I said before in “Not everyone learns the same way”, ...well, not everyone learns the same way. I know of very few students, however, who learn better from going home and reading and taking notes for hours than they do from listening in class and reading, optionally taking their own notes. Many students have part-time jobs, or otherwise have something to do besides take 15 pages of notes on a chapter from an extremely dull textbook. As you can guess, this takes a long time. I have no problem with just reading the textbook and taking a quiz on each chapter. But not everyone writes fast. As a matter of fact, the average person writes at about 31 words per minute when writing memorized text, and 22 words per minute when copying text. Writing out 15 pages of notes is an extremely time-consuming task which won't help most students at all. If you want to know who read the chapter and who didn't, give a quiz on it. (Mrs. Jenkins does this, but also grades us on the quality of our notes, which is really subject to taste.)

Now, take those 15 pages, and go through them with a few highlighters. Highlight the people in one color, the places in another, the events in another, and the terms in yet another color. Now take a look at what you've done to all your hard work – you've made it extremely hard to read for anyone who isn't color-blind. But Mrs. Jenkins won't grade notes that aren't color-coded.

So what happens if you don't do those notes? You get a slightly scary (in more than one way) threat from the teacher. When I forgot to do my notes for chapter 7 last Wednesday, Mrs. Jenkins asked me if I like to breathe, came over to my desk, and started flexing her muscles. I'm not sure if there's a rule against doing things like that, but there should be. No matter how bad my memory is, neither I nor any other student should be threatened by a teacher.