As a student of American academics, I was taught the importance of mathematics and science at a very young age. I was always under the impression that literature and English somehow came second, along with the arts. This is something that fueled my rebellion at a very young age, for I loathed math and science. I am not a very logical thinker, and when it comes to arriving at one right answer, I usually come up short. I have always felt that in mathematics there are too many opportunities to be wrong. Something I hated that happened several times in my academic life was arriving at an answer, and then noticing that it isn’t even a multiple-choice option. This feeling is one of the worst that I have become familiar with, and it certainly influenced my love for literature. Literature and the arts involve interpretation and unique thought; subjects like these allow you to use your mind in a way other than journeying to the one correct answer.
My resistance to logic was also mirrored in my distaste for science. I would clumsily mess up steps during lab times, and frequently come up with results that differed from the rest of my classmates. Frustrated, I turned to art classes and English for relief. My Dad, who is a neurologist, ironically is also an artist. A man of science as he is, one wouldn’t expect him to value art as much as he does. Growing up, he always encouraged me to challenge my creative side. Often, we would play drawing games together in which he would divide a piece of paper in two and would draw lines, having me mimic them on my own sheet, eventually forming a picture. This challenged my sense of wonder as well as my drive to be artistic and creative.
Yet, my artistic side was often ignored in school, for teachers were constantly aiming at preparing us for standardized tests, like the FCAT, which were only Math, science, reading comprehension and writing. These tests were quite mundane and boring, and were known to be not very challenging. Yet our school received money every time there was an increase in scores. So the school’s main goal was to increase these scores, resulting in bland teaching of FCAT methods. Under this model, teachers don’t have any need to teach personal perspectives, rather they are encouraged to regurgitate what FCAT or whatever standardized test has laid upon the academic doorstep. According to University of Chicago Physicist C. Johnson, “a teacher is no longer a teacher but simply an information coach, constantly pounding the same few concepts and themes that WILL appear on the Standardized Test!” (http://mb-soft.com/public/school.html) Clearly, standardized tests make education less enjoyable and is really more of a money oriented aspect of the American school system
In class, we discussed the novel and film The Wave based on a teacher attempting to explain how and why people could live under Nazi ideals. He essentially turns his classroom into a pseudo-communist learning center in which strength, discipline and action are emphasized. The children grow into a more closely knit group, despite certain outcasts who think it is questionable. They continue to contribute to more Nazi-like behavior throughout the film until the teacher finally reveals to them that if their group, “The Wave” was real, its leader would be Adolf Hitler himself. The film is a perfect example of how students take what their teachers say to be a sort of absolute truth. The educational stages of a child’s life are very vulnerable; it is here that they formulate what they will believe in, who they are as a person, and what interests them. This just shows how influential the American style of learning is on children. As a child, it told me that I was a rebel for being so interested in the arts, and that my road to financial success would be paved with many steep obstacles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(novel)
In class, we discussed the novel and film The Wave based on a teacher attempting to explain how and why people could live under Nazi ideals. He essentially turns his classroom into a pseudo-communist learning center in which strength, discipline and action are emphasized. The children grow into a more closely knit group, despite certain outcasts who think it is questionable. They continue to contribute to more Nazi-like behavior throughout the film until the teacher finally reveals to them that if their group, “The Wave” was real, its leader would be Adolf Hitler himself. The film is a perfect example of how students take what their teachers say to be a sort of absolute truth. The educational stages of a child’s life are very vulnerable; it is here that they formulate what they will believe in, who they are as a person, and what interests them. This just shows how influential the American style of learning is on children. As a child, it told me that I was a rebel for being so interested in the arts, and that my road to financial success would be paved with many steep obstacles.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wave_(novel)
