Tardiness

I understand that people should attend class on time but the tardy policy at East is pretty stupid. The rule is, even if you walk into class/the school about a couple of seconds after the bell, you have to go to the attendance office to receive a pass. When you line up there are a bunch of other kids waiting in line to receive a late pass as well. It doesn't seem like teachers realize this just makes us even much later and wastes our potential class time.

Sometimes it's not even the students fault they're late. Most of the time when I come in late it is mainly because of the traffic;  if I could kick all those cars out of my way just to get to class on time I would but unfortunately like every other normal person, I can't control that. There's also people that have to wait on family members that take a long time in the mornings and that wouldn't be really fair for students who would have to go down to the office because of that one person wasting their time.

Over all I don’t like the tardy policy at East. It’s ironic that if we walk in late we’re suppose to go get a late pass that will take us five minutes to receive and that makes us later to class. Basically it’s a waste of time and money.

Word search puzzles.

One of the laziest things a teacher can do is assign the students a word search as their work assignment, a lot of students including the extremely lazy ones agree it’s stupid. What will a word find teach you that your teacher can’t? Nothing really, all it’s good for is straining your eyes until you’ve found the word you’ve been searching for the past ten minutes.

It really is a waste of good learning/practice time, it’s not like staring at a single word will teach kids what the definition of it means. Text books are annoying to read but at least someone can learn from reading one while all you get from a word search is practice to see how nicely you can bubble in a letter, which may come in handy for someone one day, maybe.

No one likes paper work, student or teacher, but if we’re given an assignment it might as well be helpful to our education. A crossword puzzle would be better than a word search because at least with crosswords there’s always a description of the word given or a hint that will actually makes the person think. With a cross word all you do is find the word within the jumble of random letters, basically it’s like trying to find Waldo except we’re looking for words.

So word searches as school assignments are pretty pointless but hey, if any teacher wants to assign us easy credit points go right ahead, I really wouldn’t mind that.

Physical Education

Most of us are in school to learn, not to do physically exhausting exercises but we're required to anyways. The school board of education has good intentions of keeping America healthy but really if someone wanted to stay fit they would also excercise outside of school. Some kids won't even consider excercising once high school's oficially over with, it shouldn't even be a required class just to make sure you'll have a graduation.

Sure gym class may keep the kid healthy for a temporary amount of time but a lot of people would just go back sitting on the couch and eating potato chips rather than go running about outside when they know they can sit at home and relax. Though P.E. teaches kids nothing acadmeically the suppose point of having it required in schools is to teach kids of team work, drive, and determination.

In all of my P.E classes whenever we had to work in groups the whole point of team work was never really achieved. Within a group there's always at least two people that never got a long, the kids that are too aggressive, and the people that did not participate because they didn't care, mix these all together and nothing really gets done. That's great team work, obviously.

It's a given there will always be five or so kids in each class that has to have to satisfaction of winning but for a lot of the kids they don't recieve anything back. That's where teenagers just stop caring about trying in the class, they don't benefit anything from it. I can understand that though. Why would anyone be determined to run ten laps and just be extremely tired at the end? Unless there is a $100 prize given out I doubt many kids will be driven to do so.

Basically in P.E. all you have to do is attend class, dress up, and put little effort into the activites to get an A.

Analyzing literature

Everyone has had to analyze a piece of literature at least once in their English class. It's boring, somewhat useless, and it will probably never help you in your future career. Who really cares for what the green light in the Great Gatsby symbolizes? I'm 99% sure you don't.

Of course it's great to read books and it's even better when you can relate to the book, but what does looking deep into a simple sentence really do for you? Sure you might get the feel of what society and the environment was like during the author's time but when will you really need to use that skill outside of school?
1/3 of Americans don't even read books after graudating high school.

Analyzing literature through novels about intellectual history is a poor way to learn, there's a reason why there's social studies class; it's easier and straight to the point. Sometimes I wonder if all the complex analyzing we do/did in class is really what the author intended for the audience to do or if it's just the teacher trying to force their opinion on a meaningless passage.

An example would be something like this:

Passage: "The spider layed dead on the pavement."

What your teacher thinks the author meant: "The spider resprents the emptiness and depression someone in modern society can fall into while the pavement is like a brick wall that's in the way of people and their happiness".

What the author really meant: There was a dead spider on the pavement.

Interperating literature shouldn't be required to graduate high school but we all have to deal with it eventually.

Homework

Is homework helpful or just a waste of time? It's a pretty debatable topic, a lot of teachers may say it's a necessary element of the education system while some lazy students will whine and complain about how useless it is. As a student myself I do usually attempt to do all the required work assigned by my teachers and I rarely find them as of any help when it comes to improving my knowledge of a subject/lesson.

Unless it's a required reading in a historical text book, homework does not help teach students about the subject much. Geometry for example, some kids can't grasp the concept of things as fast as other so if the student didn't get it the first time in the classroom how will homework help kids get it outside the classroom? I mean if you get it wrong the first time you're most likely going to get it wrong on your homework and that just reinforces incorrect knowledge. It's the teachers job to teach the students, not a sheet of paper with a bunch of questions on it.

Sometimes if the student doesn't get the assignment it can even hurt their grade which is unfair. Homework is basically required additional practice, if you do it wrong in the class room you're going to practice it wrong outside of the classroom. Also with the block scheduling we have to deal with some teachers give out way too much at once just because the classroom hours is equivalent to two separate days. Literally I've spent up to 4am in the morning to do homework last semester.
Homework may get the student to think but it doesn't really teach the kid. If homework is given it should just be an option for kids to have additional practice or to finish up unfinished assigned class work.

Oh why hello cursive, why is it that you're barely ever there?

Anyone remember in second or third grade when your teacher told you that when you're older you would have to use Cursive all the time? Well that's pretty much a lie. I mean the staff of elementary schools lie all the time to the students but having to use cursive most of the time when you're older is probably the biggest lie of them all.

I barely meet anyone that uses cursive to write on a daily basic, students or teachers. After wasting your whole entire year of third grade perfecting  your cursive G's and S's in capitols you barely ever use it again.  I remember having lectures from my teacher saying how we all have to learn this, it's very important, it's a very adult thing, blah blah blah, you get my point. What's ironic is that when she wasn't teaching us cursive she would write in print. Ironic much.

The only use for cursive are signatures basically. A lot of the times you can't even read some people's signatures, literally my doctor's signature is one big scribble. Who needs a whole year of learning cursive when you can just make scribbly lines? A three year old can make some scribbles and it'll still be accepted as a signature.

Though cursive isn't really useless, it's more just less used. It helps with a child's hand-eye coordination and to help write notes faster but a lot of people barely use it. Maybe it's just me but I think print is good enough.