HW 51

-Paulo Fiere --> Memorization, students not really learning.

Growing up, ever since I was a small child, school has always been like a jail or a system of keep us in line. From chinese schools to americanized schools they all have a similar goal. I have always been told to never marry a white man or a "Gweilo", get good grades in high school to go to college and get many degrees as I can so I can live a happy life because I will have a good career and be rich. It seems as if there is already a time line set out for me. So far I have only successfully completed two. I can never see my self with someone who is chinese so that is crossed off the list and because I am looked down upon by dating someone who is not chinese I have to bring myself up by being a super student. I am more americanized so I have a great passion to shove it in everyone's face that I have the ability to do good in school because many people do not think I have what it takes. Right now I get fairly good grades and I am on my way to college. Take that.

When I tell my family and friends about my A's and B's and how I have gotten into college they congratulate me and tell me how intelligent and hard working I am. At times I feel sort of guilty (which is really weird) as if I actually didn't earn these grades or that I did not work hard. I think it is because I know I play it by the rules and most of the time I am never really expanding my knowledge and abilities to learn. It is easy to be a "good" student which is like conforming to what is expected in school and getting a A.

All my life I have been told how school is suppose to effect my life and how significant it is. It's said it teaches us how to be respectful, and helps us have a successful future. This is what is mainly focused on in Obama's speech. He tells students how nothing would matter unless we took the responsibility to take school extremely seriously. He even talks about his struggles for education when he was our age, which seem to be a strategy to make us feel grateful for our eligibility to be in public school. Although students are suppose to be grateful like we are told most of the time we are the complete opposite probably because of all the things education lacks.

For one thing public school seems really similar to jail. Every time we step into school we are told what we are allowed to do and what we are not. We are suppose to respect and listen to our teachers who have the most authority and who seem to be seen as higher then the students. The students are just scum. This can be reflected a lot in many movies such as Blackboard Jungle. The students are always seen as a nuisance and hopeless in life. The teachers are great intelligent people who are meant to "save" students from there meaningless lives.

In reality most teachers are not really "saving" students and teaching them life longing skills. They seem to just be teaching what they are being payed to teach. In six lessons by John Taylor Gatto he writes about his lessons about his curriculum or how he teaches. Although it is stated as 6 lessons it seems to be more like 6 rules or guidelines. Many of his lessons seem unemotional and robotic. Some lessons include what he expects from his students; the students have to drop whatever relates to the class if the class is not in session, to sit quietly and obey rules. Which sounds much like a lifeless jail. The six lessons article really shows how maybe many teachers are not really teaching anything significant. Everything seems like it is taught from a book which the majority of the time is probably the case.

Instead of learning, according to Paulo Fiere, students seem to be more like objects that suck in information and memorize it. The teachers are the knowledge givers. In most cases students never really learn anything, and if they do it is not significant enough to remember so students tend to forget right away. This is extremely true for probably math and science classes. When taking a test or studying, students try to cramp information into their head, remember what way to write it down exactly on homework or tests. In this case this is not learning but memorizing numbers and letters.

In many cases we are always looking at our future, we are always doing things in the present that will benefit our future. Although I feel that there is no such thing as a past or a future. The past is a memory and the future is the present. We are told that school benefits our future. It is branded into our brains that it prepares us for the professional world. School is "to prepare you for society, to help you cope with different personalities and set you up a future in the professional world." Alicia Proto states in a interview about school. It seems a lot of the materials that we learn in class are not significant to our daily lives. Instead we should be focusing on things that will help us through life such as how to cope with getting old, how to communicate with different types of people, or how to budget things. None of which we actually learn. If teachers and the educational system actually took the time to design a system for individual learning needs and interests learning would probably be a better experience and maybe even fun for students.