Organizing

I’m not in a very festive mood this holiday due to the budget impasse. And now we have less than a month to raise our debt ceiling and prevent a major financial problem from occurring (or a minor inconvenience which will allow us to be free from evil big government according to Republicans). I really REALLY want to discuss this but I can’t coherently write down my frustrations. All I can say is that I think Republicans are acting like dicks because of some narrow/rigid ideology of insane paranoia against government and they are using this crisis to forcibly shrink government because they have misinterpreted the results of the 2010 midterm elections. If I continue to think about this, I will go crazy.

So moving on, sometimes I think Middle and High School conspired to ruin my grades. Yes, I was a slacker at times and procrastinated on assignments. That ultimately prevented me from getting the best grade that I could. Unless of course it was math and no amount of effort could make me good at it (except for 7^th grade in which I somehow was really good at it).

What bothered me the most was when teachers graded us on organization. Every stupid paper handed out during the quarter (or trimester/hexmester in 8^th grade. I’ll go into more detail on that later…) had to be put in order in your binder. You had to hold up the binder and shake it; if any papers fell out, you failed. Or you had to surrender you binder at the end of the quarter and the teacher would go through every page of every student’s binder and check off which ones you had. Or they would just come around to your desk and look through your binder asking you where each handout was in each divider. Those yellow dividers with plastic tabs used to separate your papers? They told you what to label them and in what order (i.e. in French class: Verbs, Culture, Homework, Nouns, and one section never used, etc.)

I am not an organized person. I was always very messy. When I got a paper, I threw it into my backpack. I would always end up with a huge stack of papers from every subject in my backpack. I would always struggle to find the right handout or homework assignment, causing me to freak out.

Why did they need to grade us on organization? What does that have to do with my knowledge of science, math, French, English, etc.? It was a pain for teachers to have to grade about 100 stupid binders, on top of all the other work we were doing.

This is one of the few times in which I think applying “Free Market Principles” is the right approach. I am a messy person, but I have limits. When my room gets too messy, I start to clean it. When I get frustrated that I can’t find my homework for the hundredth time, I start organizing. If my grades are suffering because I am losing my assignments, I will take some personal initiative to fix the problem, or my parents will notice my report card and force me to start organizing. Of course I was told in study hall (or one of the many stupid alternate names they kept giving it) that I was not doing real work by going through my papers and separating them by class and should stop organizing and do real work. You know what? If I am going to be graded for my organization, then it is ‘real’ work. Don’t complain that I am not organized and then yell at me for organizing.

Also, why did they dictate HOW we should organize things? What if I or someone else wanted to organize things by date not subject? WRONG!

This brings up something on a related note. When we had to do research, we had to do it their way. I’m not talking about online only research versus book research. I’m talking about how we took notes. We HAD to do it their way AND we were graded on it. In one class, we had to write the bibliographical information of one of our sources on a note card and give it a number, making it a “source card”. On another card, we would actually write the notes on it (i.e. “The industrial capacity of the US grew rapidly between X and Y”) and put the number of the source card on it, meaning that note/information came from source 1.

I hated it. It may sound complicated, but I just suck at describing things. It wasn’t hard, but knowing me, I would misplace the source card. Why couldn’t we just take notes our own way? I like writing in a notebook. I place the bibliographical information on the top, write notes below it and beside each note, I write the page number. Nope. Their way or the highway.

I thought the purpose of education was to learn, learning to do things one way. Maybe in China, but not here. (Stop comparing us to China. China forces facts into the heads of their students through memorization, but the kids have no idea how to do anything if they are not taught how to do it. There is no thinking.) People are different. People learn differently (supposedly. I thought I heard that was BS but I’m not sure). Allow kids to learn their own way and find their own path at learning. Don’t force one method on kids and tell them it is the only right way of doing something.

On a side note, how many writing no-no’s were shoved down our throats in school are practiced by successful writers? Incomplete sentences, sentences starting with ‘and’, passive voice? I remember learning how one word sentences were bad, then immediately meeting the author of a book we were reading who used them a lot.