Jarold kuhn nov. 24/08 engl110
Rough draft Op-ed
I am choosing to write my op-ed over the total lack of initiative in the class room. Not from the students, but from the teachers. The testing system in our country any more is nothing more than a joke. We wonder why other countries are doing so much better than we are, and it’s the education. The student body as a whole knows not much more academically the day the graduate than when they were in kindergarten. Why? The testing system going on in our schools now.
In polls taken across the country by nine through twelfth graders, the level of retention in the classroom is next to zero. Students do not study to learn, they study for the tests. These standard tests that are given out to everyone are what teachers teach for. After a student passes through their own state’s individual testing system, the work load decreases. In ohio, this test is taken in the tenth grade. The tenth grade! Why the hell are you taking a graduation test as a sophomore? That’s what everyone studies for, that’s what the teachers teach for.
This process of thinking is what has taken America down to the bottom of the education systems across the world. That is why Americans are losing their jobs to those who are more intelligent somewhere in another country. They work cheaper and with more efficiency than that of an American worker. They are more educated in their field so they have more of an idea as to what is going on around them.
What does this guy think should be done about it? I think the testing system should done away with and teachers should regulate grading based on random “pop-quizzes” over the entirety of the course they have taken up to that point. Either that, or find ways that what they have learned in the classrooms can immediately be used and applied in the real world. This way, a student would be forced to elearn what they have been given, or fail. They wouldn’t memorize and regurgitate as they do now. Actual learning would occur.
Why would the actual learning occur here? Many students have seemed to do better in a “sink-or-swim” kind of system as opposed to the memorize, test, forget system. My mother is a teacher at the highschool that I attended, and the way she taught was that of the “learn and immediately apply” system. Granted, she’s a band director. Still, what she teaches in class, most students who I have seen come through her class, have come back years and years later, still knowing how to play their respective instrument or sing a song or whatever they did for her. She teaches you something and then IMMEDIATELY applies it what is needed. This way she teaches students to learn. She doesn’t teach just to pass and get out of her class, make you someone else’s problem. I still know everything I learned in her classes, and I doubt I will forget them any time soon, because I had to apply them, I had to KNOW how to do what it is she wanted me to do.
Another great teacher I had was my English teacher. With this man, you had to know, because you never knew when the test was coming. At one point, we had a test, thirty-seven days in a row, all over different material. Then again, same class, went four weeks without a single grade. No exams, no papers due. NOTHING. This forced us to learn because we didn’t know when we would or would not need it. This man did not teach for the OGT, he taught us so we would know how conduct our English papers and be able to deal with English classes at the college level. He was a great teacher.
These two ways of teaching have shown me how much of a joke other classes who teach to pass really are. It is a growing problem in our society, but because of a lack of care from political leaders, there’s isn’t really a way to change it, outside of individual classes
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