hiii

so this was an assignment for my creative writing class and i figured i'd share it here

ok bye ✌️

I hate school.

It's a phrase that everyone's heard and everyone's said. So, when I was working on a personal project in which I would redesign the school system, I had to ask: Why does everyone hate school so much? I brought this question to my friends and came up with a variety of answers.

As a high school student myself, and with my friends on the same boat, I like to think we have some authority to comment on the way that school works, and after a deep analysis of the school system, interviewing my friends about their experiences, and research into the psychological effects of school, I feel even more qualified to speak about this topic. This year, I'm taking an advanced math class. It's the exact opposite of fun. 0 out of ten. 100% do not recommend. I think it's weird because I've always been at least passable at math. Am I a prodigy? Absolutely not, but I'm not one to fail in a math class. This particular class only has one teacher, and the entire school will say the same exact thing: she sucks and I hate her. We started the year with her literally telling us that if we got below a 90% on our grade the previous year, we shouldn't be in the class. Did she say this nicely and give us alternatives? No, of course not. Why would you ever want to do that?

Now, I had a 92% so I stayed in the class. Biggest mistake of my life, especially because AP Stat and Calc AB were right there. Over the course of the year we've been yelled at, been told the classic "this generation is [insert random thing to call us lazy without explicitly calling us lazy]," been told we probably won't pass the final because we are "lazy", and been told, "Wow, good luck on the exam, I didn't understand any of this until my senior year of college." Real encouraging stuff, I know.

The best part has to be the fact that she doesn't do math with us and instead shows various powerpoints of math problems and expects us to understand something after seeing it being done once.

At the moment, I have a whopping 64% in this class and I study so much, literally everyone in my family and also my doctor and also my therapist are telling me to chill out and relax for once. Unfortunately, if I do not get an outside resource, I do not understand the material. This is shown by the way I got a 50 on my last test when I took the break I needed and brought my grade from a 70 to a 64.

But it's so weird because last year I was good at math. Now, my current teacher said "maybe you thought you were good at math, and you took this class and found out you aren't," to the whole class. However, I like to think that I'm at least okay at math, but last year I had a teacher that did everything in his power to make me good at math while I was in his class.

My teacher for Pre-AICE Math 3 (a real mouthful, but it's basically Algebra 2 and pre-calc meshed into one class) was one I doubt I'll ever forget: Mr. Craig.

Mr. Craig made my worst subject one of my favorite classes that year and he did it by being a good teacher. I remember when we were learning the Pythagorean Theorem, he told us the history of the equation. It used to be a part of a cult which would murder people who believe in irrational numbers. He told us he was giving us an invitation to join a math cult, which I obviously accepted. a^2+b^2=c^2 is forever ingrained in my mind. I remember when we were learning quadratics, I'd asked when we'd use this in real life to which he said, "In case someone kidnaps you and would only let you go if you know this equation by heart." But I think the most important thing he did was give each of his students his focus individually. He would address every one of us at least once a week to ask if we had any questions after his initial lessons ended.

In my current math class, questions are usually met with looks of annoyance and the small jab at the fact that I should already know these things. I don't really ask questions in this class because I don't want to deal with that. Besides, her explanations are usually just her repeating the same thing whilst artfully evading the question I actually asked. Everything I learned this year to keep my grade up hasn't been from her, it's been from my own outside resources.

I've recently found this difference so staggering with my elective classes. I'm taking ASL and Creative Writing this year, and to have not one but two teachers genuinely encourage my creativity and style was insane to me. How is it that a language teacher was more encouraging to me than when I was in band and writing my own music and told it was terrible—it was true, but still.

In Creative Writing, I have so much range and options and I get actual feedback from my teacher. In ASL, if I make a mistake, I'm not reprimanded for it, instead she teaches the correct sign. And even more astonishing is the fact that these teachers are actually nice to me.
The thing is, that's how teachers should be in general. The fact that I was shocked about this is a problem. But at the same time, I can't blame my bad teachers about the fact that they can't teach well, or the content they teach in class in uninteresting. It's not their fault, it's the system's fault. Besides, there are people (2 students) who are thriving in that class, I just don't understand it.

I asked my Abuelo, a mechanical engineer, to help me out with derivatives and he told me "You know how to do derivatives, it's these stupid questions and these tests." I told him that it wouldn't matter if I "understood" derivatives, it matters if I can pass the test. That's how you thrive in school. He told me he didn't get this until he was getting his Master's. I'm clearly smart, but not to the school. Why doesn't the school think I'm smart enough?

I asked my parents about the teachers they had growing up, and they were able to list off a wide variety of people who really had a positive impact on their lives, but that all stopped around the time they were graduating, 2001.
That was the year that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act was signed.

What is NCLB? It was a law that would give all children equal access to education, regardless of disabilities, language barriers, and learning issues, making sure that no child is left behind (roll credits). Everyone thought that NCLB would have been the saving grace in American education, but it wasn't. In fact, over 20 years later, NCLB is known as a colossal failure.

NCLB put a lot of pressure on schools to see a noticeable difference in education, and in order to measure improvement, there was a lot of standardized testing. If students did not pass the bar, the school would be punished, then the school would punish teachers, then teachers would punish students in what small ways they could, and that seemed to mean being the first thing to decay my mental wellbeing.

Now with NCLB, the government was able to see how some people are just naturally better at this system than others, and since we are NCLB's pride and joy, we are accelerated.

Teacher's don't have as much freedom in their teaching anymore. According to Zoe Bee, an ex English professor, in her video essay "Grading's a Scam (and Motivation's a Myth)", teachers are no longer able to teach their students things they deem important. Instead, they teach to the test. My current english teacher is a prime example of this. She recently told us a story about how when she would teach high school students more complex sentence structures, she would be punished, so she had to find ways around it to teach what it was that she deemed to be an important subject.

But it doesn't matter what the teachers think, it matters what administration thinks, and administration wants the money from those test scores. Administrators will sort us into different factions of people based on our ability to give them those scores: the gifted, the smart, the average, and the hopeless. At least that's the difference between me, who is a great test-taker and has been constantly described as gifted in my best classes and smart in my worst, and my brother who just needs some extra help understanding science.

Ever since I was little people have made it clear that As were what you needed if you wanted to succeed in life. And when I was younger, getting that A was...easy. In elementary school, teachers actually care about you and understand the way a young mind works. Elementary school has stimulating environments and different resources across the school to encourage creativity and teachers had a small class, and only one class. They knew who understood the material, and would encourage them to keep going. They also knew who needed more help and would take the time to help them.

Now, my strong suit in elementary school wasn't music or art or PE, it was what we were learning. I got 100 after 100, A after A, but there was always a problem.

At my school there were two extra classes. One was for people who didn't speak English, or spoke it as a second language. The other was The Smart Kid Class.

The Smart Kid Class was amazing. On Fridays, people in The Smart Kid Class got candy and pizza. The Smart Kid Class does multiplication. The Smart Kid Class gets to read the chapter books at the library.

That last one was what I was most jealous of. When I was 6, I had a collection of chapter books which I would read and reread and reread. At the time, spending that extra 8 dollars on the book was stupid when it could be spent on something more important like food. I obviously didn't understand that my parents were broke at the time or why I had to lie about my address because the school that was next to my house at the time was a D school.

I begged my 1st grade teacher to be able to borrow chapter books from the library, and she said that it was a privilege only for something called the gifted class. I didn't know what that was, so I asked my friend who was in The Smart Kid Class, and he said that the gifted class was The Smart Kid Class.

The good thing was that I had straight As in my 1st grade class. I breezed through addition and understanding the difference between 10 and 100 and all of those As I got brought the attention of administrators and teachers. I received a form and by the next week, I was in The Smart Kid Class.

It was made clear in the Smart Kid Class that I was naturally gifted. I was naturally a genius by 1st grade standards. I was given more work to really encourage that genius.

I never really studied or spent much time on homework when I was younger, I didn't need to. I would take the test, get an A and go on with my life because I was naturally better.

That natural genius became a part of me. Honestly, it became the only part of me.

As I got older teachers would assign more work and it would be easy and I would get that A and that A would keep me in the gifted class, because it really was stupid to call it The Smart Kid Class. The gifted class would give us rewards for me simply being in that class. Cookies, chocolate, and candy galore. Even the materials we got were better. The Dry Erase markers actually worked. Not that we'd need them because that was the only class in the school with a Smart Board.

Everything in that class was better, and made my actual classes easier. When the classes were easier, I got that A. When I got that A my parents would give me ice cream and pizza and not yell at me for failing.

One day, my 2nd grade teacher accidentally typed in a C instead of an A. Everything flipped. If I didn't get my grade up, I wouldn't stay in the gifted class. My parents grounded me for the rest of the year and began micromanaging me down to my handwriting. Teachers called me lazy for never really paying attention, even though she was the one who put in the damn grade. Next week, my teacher realized the mistake and fixed it. I stayed in the gifted class, my parents let me watch TV and my teacher stopped calling me lazy. In fact, my teacher didn't tell anyone but me it was a mistake so my parents didn't give me any congratulations and the gifted class didn't care. The A was expected of me. It was the bare minimum.

I didn't like the way it felt to not be perfect, so I made sure to double check my grades. I didn't need to change anything about the way I went about school, doing nothing but the bare minimum gave me an A anyways.

I kept doing that even through middle school, taking high school classes. Everything about me was my smarts. I didn't take many electives because I wanted more "important" classes to get As in. I was naturally better and naturally smart. All I am is naturally smart and that A was my pride and joy. Rewards got smaller and smaller and my parents no longer care if I get 105% on my report card, that's just Gabby. They needed to focu on my brother, who had As but needed to work for it, unlike me. They always said they'd never need to worry about me. I was just naturally good.

Going into high school, I got my first B. It was horrible. Did my parents care? No, not in the slightest. But I cared. I wasn't naturally good anymore. Now, I'm having breakdowns over Cs and now a D and I don't know how to work for it. I say that I do, but I don't. I never learned how to study, and even if people around me think I am intelligent, my grades tell me otherwise. I am my grades, and I am a failure.

They call this Gifted Kid Burnout, which is a severely intense type of burnout that comes from being tolf you were superior all of your life, only to find out that in reality you are at the same level as everyone else, and the pressure of being perfect used to lift you up, but you keep failing because you never learned how to actually work for your accomplishments. It causes a lot of stress and itt's quite an interesting psychological subject that has turned into a massive meme within the community because none of us have healthy coping mechanisms.

The sad part is, it's not just people with Gifted Kid Burnout, it's almost every high school student in America. In high school, there's a lot of pressure. So much pressure that, according to Psychology Today, the average high school student has the same amount of stress an anxiety as a psychiatric patient in the 50s.

All of this is because high school decides our future. Specifically, our grades decide our future.
Almost anything to do with problems with school (besides the fact that people who design prisons also design schools, which helps make it seem like a hellhole), can be tracked back to the way everything, from a quick homework assignment to a final, is graded in American education.

The current grading system began in the 1970s, where work would be graded on a bell-curve. This is where you get those markers that people associate with grades (grade-level, average, above-grade-level, etc.). The Bell Curve would take the overall grades of each student and average it, placing you on a dot in the bell curve. If most students got 80s, and you got an A, you would end the year with a C, because that's the same level as everyone else in the classroom. Now, at the time, people thought that this was a brilliant idea. I can assure you, it was not.

People very quickly there were students who were significantly higher and producing A level work and they were given a C or B- because of the scores of the class. Meanwhile, if a class is producing all As, and you get a B, you would be scored with a D. Because of the imbalance, teachers very quickly shifted to grading on an individual level.

Now the problem with looking at the individual work is that it is now extraordinarily clear who is excelling more than someone else is, and the person excelling will be praised and pressured to stay at that level or even reach an impossible standard.

The grading system has good intentions. It's meant to be a tool for teachers, students, and parents to track the progress of a student. But it very quickly turned into a ranking system. Students with Bs were smart, students with As are amazing and perfect. Cs, Ds, and Fs were for dumb students. You want and A. You need the A.
As stated before, learning is no longer for the sake of learning, it's to get the grade that gets you things. It gets you recognition. It gets you the scholarship. But, the sad thing is that improvement, the thing grades were created for, is no longer the reason we are obsessed with grades.

So then, what's the solution? Most people would say that teachers should give a grade, but also give a comment. However, according to the studies of Jeffery Schinske and Kimberly Tanner, "if a paper is returned with both a grade and comment, many students will pay attention to the grade and ignore the comment." This essentially means that if you got a C, students will focus more on the grade as an evaluation of skill, rather than look at what can be done to improve the paper, regardless if a resubmission is available.

So, no. Grades do not serve as a tool to track improvement. Instead, they serve as a motivator. To quote Zoe Bee, "If you don't want to get a bad grade on your test, then you're motivated to study for it. If you get cash from your parents or free movie tickets from your school from being on the Honor Roll, then you're motivated to do all your work and really commit to learning. If you want to get an A in a class you're motivated to do whatever the teacher tells you to do... And if you really want to get an A, then you'll do whatever it takes. You'll do anything. Anything."

But if that were the case, why is everyone so miserable. If rewards really work, why is everyone so stressed, anxious, and depressed? Why isn't this system working if grades are the perfect motivator?

Well, they aren't.

Motivation is an interesting psychological concept, and it's only recently been researched with most of it starting in the late 90s. Nevertheless, it shows a lot about how both the school system and, honestly, capitalism itself, is a pretty terrible system.

There are two types of motivation. The first in intrinsic motivation, which is doing something for the fun of it. Me and my mom will build a random dresser not to sell it, but just because. I write random papers that no one will ever see because it's fun. Intrinsic motivation is internal motivation. Extrinsic motivation is the opposite; motivation from an external source. People work to get paid. You go to school to get a grade.

In 1996 Mark Lepper and Diana Cordova conducted study in children giving them a prize to be their "assistant" in learning how different computer learning programs worked. Some were just asked to play the program with no title or reward, others were given the title, and some were given a title and reward.

The study concluded that the students who were offered a reward and title were the least likely to go back to the program the next day. Those given the title were little less likely to go back and those who got nothing remained the same.

That, in a nutshell, explains the problem with using extrinsic motivation. Think of it like you're doing the dishes, and then your dad comes in to tell you to do the dishes. All of a sudden, you don't want to do the dishes anymore. The reasoning for doing a task changes and you don't want to do it anymore, as shown by the results of the study and me feeling literally sick when my parents tell me to do something that I'm already doing out of the goodness of my heart.

When you are given a reward, you don't want to do things anymore. Grades are a reward. So the solution for this problem would be to find a different way to measure the success of students. Rather than give grades give feedback in general. Get teachers that will reignite that passion you probably had when you were younger.

Here's the thing: public schools are forever screwed. Why is that? Well the source of all problems of course. Money.

There are two primary school systems in America: public and private (charter schools are an odd in between). Public schools are a public institution paid for by the state and federal government, meanwhile private schools are owned by private owners and used for a profit.

The thing is that, overall, private education is much better than public. This is because they get much mre funding because they're able to make a profit out of having good students. The state doesn't really care that much about public education, and even has bills to get underprivileged kids into private schools rather than public schools.

Obviously, this causes public schools to loose funding and the pressure of that goes on to teachers, and those teachers (understandably) leave. This makes the classrooms bigger with a larger student to teacher ratio, which makes more teachers leave and more students go to a private or charter education. This causes the school to loose more funding and it's a terrible cycle.

So, what can we do to fix this? The reality is that I, as a student, cannot do anything about this. All I can think is to change the entire system. Give schools funding, stop standarized testing nationwide instead of just in Florida since DeSantis is apparently more petty than me even though I'm 16 and he's a fully grown adult man governing a state, but okay, I guess. Also maybe give teachers support so that they don't leave or don't suck.

It's really weird because they're all really absic things, but apparently it costs too much money. So. I don't know, I guess we were doomed to fail.

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"How to Help with Burnout in Gifted Kids." Davidson Institute, 26 Aug. 2021, www.davidsongifted.org/gifted-blog/burnout-in-gifted-children/#:~:text=What%20is%20Gifted%20Kid%20Burnout.
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Bee, Zoe. "Grading Is a Scam (and Motivation Is a Myth) | a Professor Explains." Www.youtube.com, 22 May 2021, www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew.
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"Why the Bell Curve System for Giving Grades Needs Reform." University World News, www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20211019082700738.
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Schinske, Jeffrey, and Kimberly Tanner. "Teaching More by Grading Less (or Differently)." CBE—Life Sciences Education, vol. 13, no. 2, June 2014, pp. 159–166, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4041495/, https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.cbe-14-03-0054.

Thnk. "3 Reasons Grades Are Bad for Education — THNK School." THNK, 22 June 2018, www.thnk.org/blog/3-reasons-grades-bad-education/.
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Di Domenico, Stefano I., and Richard M. Ryan. "The Emerging Neuroscience of Intrinsic Motivation: A New Frontier in Self-Determination Research." Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, vol. 11, no. 145, 24 Mar. 2017, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2017.00145.

"Mark Lepper: Intrinsic Motivation, Extrinsic Motivation and the Process of Learning | Bing Nursery School." Bingschool.stanford.edu, bingschool.stanford.edu/news/mark-lepper-intrinsic-motivation-extrinsic-motivation-and-process-learning.