If someone asked me how I would improve student life at tallwood I would focus on our academics and changing them to focus less on the subjects the school district feels are important and more on student interest and a more generalized benefit of our future.
Many of us wonder how is something like geometry going to help us in life. Aside from that, I’m referring to the subjects that we are required to take in order to graduate, which gives us the thought that this information is something that is going to be used all throughout our lives or at the least bit important. But that isn’t the case for everybody. Majority of the things that are mandatory to learn in school aren’t really benefiting our own plans for ourselves if we have one. Say what we’re learning is actually relevant to what we plan to do in the future, how much would we actually remember? Certainly not enough to say that a class we took in highschool helped us.
With this kind of thinking, we tend to lose interest and lack engagement with what is being taught. This isn’t me saying that subjects that aren’t interesting to us provide no benefit. We can understand that just because something isn’t the most interesting thing in the world doesn’t mean it provides no benefit. A good example of this is math, basic math. Opinions vary but a lot of students, myself included are not a fan of math, but we know math is used everyday, the most common way being managing money.
Not only are some mandatory classes lacking benefits to everyone, but the times at which these classes are held makes our engagement so much worse. A lot of parents and teachers ask why we have such a difficult time paying attention and the most common answer is phones. Despite phones being a distraction, I feel as though phones are in response to the problem that some mandatory classes require a significant amount of brain power and are being held at as early as seven in the morning. We know that our age demographic doesn’t have the best sleep record either. So now we are in a class tired, uninterested and wondering how it will even help us. It make us wonder why is this worth our time and leaves our only motivation being our grade, which in my opinion doesn’t accurately show someones knowledge of a subject.
It also seems as though the priorities of whats important for our future and whats not is kind of out of order. Take economics, a class that teaches you things we will be using the rest of our lives, yet we only take this class once only once out of our four years in highschool. In comparison to math, we take four different math subjects in our four years in highschool. These math subjects include Algebra I and II, Geometry and Trigonometry. Which one do you think we will use more, math dedicated to specific careers or economics that will better our understanding of banking, financial stabiliity and investing. I am not saying the subjects like we have now have no benefits, they do, but only for specific people who have a clear goal of what they want to do in the future and that isn’t a lot of people.
That would be my suggestion, focus less on subjects that only align with specific paths in life and add a more generalized required curriculum that students will actually use on a nearly everyday basis. Highschool should be a place where we explore our interest more and subjects that are too tailored to specific careers and such can wait. A fair amount of us aren’t exactly thrilled about being in school anyway, and making us take classes that may not benefit us is only going to have us less engaged.
