I preface this blog by acknowledging that we've all grown up in different places, attended different schools, and thus had different educational experiences.  In the hope of learning something from my experience, these ramblings revisit my own education:

I never much cared for school. In the beginning, I couldn't say what felt so off about what was going to consume the next 12 years of my life.  The education seemed stale. Information was relevant only in the confines of the books that contained it.  Facts were presented as irrelevant points of memorization.  By the end of high school, much of my education was primarily tailored to the standardized tests that determined our school's future budget.  I absorb knowledge and information like a sponge when things interest me.  But for everything else, the pendulum swings the other way.  Thus, I spent the bulk of my time served in school bored and disinterested.

The curriculum had no meaning to me.  Just a bunch of bullet points disguised as facts, it created hoops to jump through and tricks to perform in order to get a decent GPA.  The root of this uselessness didn't lie in the concepts we had to learn.  The problem was the way we had to learn them.  Because the tests we faced were formulaic and irrelevant, the lessons became formulaic and irrelevant.

Teachers and students aren't solely responsible for poor test scores and grades.  The system that they work in largely determines how they can learn from and teach each other.  I felt compromised by the connection between student performance and the school's future budget.  Such a policy encourages schools into a narrow curriculum focused on a single, short-sighted outcome. Under this system, teachers have no choice but to abandon in-depth instruction for  a single test, the scope of which does nothing for life beyond the classroom.  Until a shift in the paradigm of standardized testing and teaching occurs, we're working towards a poorly-educated population that kicks ass on the SAT.

-allen