Alexis Kirkland: Speech

          Let’s begin with a show of hands. How many of you feel like your homework load can be overwhelming at times? How many of you feel stressed or anxious about testing and the scores you receive on said exams? How many of you have ever felt like the academic expectations you’re being held to are a little extreme for a minor who’s not even allowed to wear a hat on most days? I’m sure all of us have felt these things on some level. School today is more maddening than ever. 30 years ago, however, this was not necessarily the case. Kids our age used to be able to willingly shoot some hoops outside afterschool, call up their friends, and even sit down and spend time with their families, without having the dark cloud of school obligations looming over them the entire time. Today, kids like us are putting off our dinner to be able to cater to the needs that our education system demands of us. We are prisoners to our grades, we are stripped of our opportunities as the children of America to be creative, to be active, to be free. Our youth can no longer be enjoyed to the extent that it could for children a generation ago. What happened, in so little time, that turned education into a nightmare for so many of us? Perhaps it’s today’s look on testing, and the insane amount of pressure we feel to perform perfectly. Maybe it’s modern day homework, and how it’s being abused more than ever. Has anyone ever considered that maybe a factor in this nationwide issue is that our individuality is more often than not discouraged? Well, guess what. It’s all of these concepts, testing, homework, and having to fit into a mold, that have destroyed what used to be the best years of our lives, and morphed them into the years that define the rest of our lives.

          Since finals are a mere couple of days away, let’s talk about testing. Raise your hand and give me a reason why testing season is so stressful. [Allow for responses]. Exactly, all of those are valid points. If we take a look in the classroom, we can start to pinpoint the origin of test stress. For starters, the education system teaches to the test. No one ever hears, “This is a skill that can directly benefit you in your problem-solving or decision-making throughout life, so you’ll need to know this!” We all hear, “This will be on your test, so get this down.” This is called “doing school,” as seen in the documentary, Race to Nowhere, which I recommend to all of you, if any of these things we’ve discussed apply to you. “Doing school” consists of memorizing content to regurgitate it onto a test form. We are pressured into thinking we can know everything and perform without mistakes. The competitive nature of testing now is taking away logic. No one can do everything perfectly, no matter how great you may be. Unfortunately, we are rarely rewarded for the scores we are forced to reach, so that the school can receive proper funding and bonus money. That’s right, thanks to our buddy No Child Left Behind, your scores are being used for money. The better your scores, the more money, which seems a little backwards, right? Wouldn’t you think that a school with poorer scores should be receiving more funding for improvements? I’m sorry, I thought the United States Education System was supposed to be helping us.

          You know what else doesn’t really help us? Hours upon hours of slaving after homework. Why is it that so many teachers believe that they’re the most important class in our day, so they have the liberty to give us one or two hours of homework, each? My teenage years weren’t supposed to be built around how much homework I have. Going out with family, getting eight hours of sleep, my mental and physical health are all pushed aside, so that at least I can get my homework done. One of the reasons why we have so much, is because it’s being abused. Homework is not, cannot be, and will never be, a replacement to teaching. I’ll say it again. Homework is not, cannot be, and will never be, a replacement to teaching. Packets, packets, packets! Read this packet, do these activities. Complete these worksheets, watch this video, read these chapters answer the questions at the end of the chapters, while I as the teacher sit at my desk and scroll through Twitter! Believe me, I’ve seen it. If I wanted to read a book about a foreign language, I would do just that. But I came to school to learn, not take home a book about how to teach myself. And as we do our packets and chapter questions on topics we never even discussed in class, the days turn to nights, our dinner gets cold, our fear of not finishing our assignments spikes. Emotional breakdowns are not uncommon for students like us. And for what? The maximum amount of homework we should be doing a night is two hours’ worth; the correlation between the time spent on homework and high school performance drops after that. Did you know that students our age in countries such as Finland get very little homework at all, and yet their test scores blow ours out of the water? Maybe we could learn something from them.

          When it comes to learning, though, there usually are more ways than one to do so. Right? Being creative, thinking of new ways to go about things, how to solve problems. But as a teacher in Race to Nowhere made it clear, “We can no longer be innovative thinkers because we don’t have the resources or time to think on our own or outside the box.” We are told that we have to be at a certain standard in every level, and any deviation from that means that we’re below average, we’re not smart enough, we’re not good enough. Our abilities to be intelligent in other areas are disregarded because of who our grades tell us to be. If you like music or painting or dance, all of that is secondary to your requirements for math and science. While we must accommodate for the growing field of technology, that shouldn’t mean that the things that make you you can’t be priorities anymore. There’s no time to explore, no time to get messy, the focus is on doing whatever you can to make sure you meet that standard. Saying that there’s a time and place for individuality and for you to be yourself is teaching is more about how to blend in with the crowd than stand out and be one of a kind.

          So how do we avoid being a cookie-cutter version of the person sitting next to us, drowning in content, and overstressing about tests? An interview with a fellow classmate says that we should have a cut-off point for subjects like math, making everything past Algebra, for example, optional. Comparisons to Finland suggest less homework, and minimal standardized testing. But nothing can truly be done until we all step up to say enough is enough. We are the future, and the future is now. But we’re not looking for a temporary fix to this issue that affects all of our lives. Right now, we feel the wrath of our education system through stressful testing, copious amounts of homework, and having to fit into a mold of who we are ideally supposed to be as students. If we don’t stop it soon, it could get worse, and generations to come could suffer more than we do. We should all have the chance to enjoy our youth, and truly make them the best years of our lives. But only if you finish your homework first!