Author: Juan Baez

When I was younger I used to love school. It was the place where I would form memories with my friends and Open myself up to complete strangers. But I guess that’s just my gullible young mind thinking everything was amazing. As I grew up I soon realized that school was just like prison. It’s a place where you’re forced to go and do certain things that you don’t want to. It’s a very common emotion to hate school. You’re constantly waking up early to make it on time to stay in a building for about 8 or 9 hours and Sit in uncomfortable desk and have knowledge thrown at you. You are then expected to understand and process the information with excellence. We are also then compared to our pears and judged as a whole other then being evaluated as an individual. This is a sad thing society has Implemented onto the future minds of the world. As in doing so the future will not be run by leaders with passion in what they do but with discouraged beings who will focus their decision of what others might think of them. But I bet you knew this and even if you didn’t you should know you help contribute to this dismaying part in our society. You contributed by treating your students the way you did.

 In middle school my worst memories would be going to to your classroom. I would walk in there knowing I would be sad when the class finished. You made sure that every kid attended your class too, if they hadn’t come in you would personally call their parents. The thing was no one wanted to be their though. You constantly made everyone in competition with each other, valued other student ms over other ones and made sure they knew.

       Let me tell you about one of the times where in my life I knew school was probably not a good safe environment. The person who made me think like that was you. I was in 4th grade when I first had your class and the incident occurred in my 5th grade. You had noticed that I would slack off in class and play around making jokes and not focus on my work. I then would fall asleep when handed work. In your eyes I was just being a horrible student. Maybe if you looked through a different perspective you would see that I was not focused on my work just because I wanted to fool around, it was cause the work you were giving was the same standard procedures you have always been using and I grew bored of it because it was too easy. You thought that I was being a insubordinate child but I was simply not being challenged enough. After your decision on me was final you was convinced that I should be placed in special education because I couldn’t possibly keep up with your star students. My mom would not tolerate me treated in this manner knowing that i was actually a pretty smart kid that didn’t deserve to be in there so she set up a meeting with the principal to allow me to take a test to show that I was advanced. To your surprise I passed the test with flying colors and I got transferred to a higher level class. This goes to show that the same way of teaching doesn’t apply to every kid. We shouldn’t be based off of other kids we should be based on us. Like gato says of modem schooling basic functions “ the integrating function. This might well be called the conformity function because it’s a tension is to make children as alike as possible.” The thing is we are all different and can’t be categorized into groups, we are all our individual selves and cannot be taught in 1 standard way.

 

Yours sincerely, Juan Baez