Shaking off the rusty keyboard

Can plastic Rust?

Anyway, time to work out the kinks in my fingers with some good old fashioned ranting.

Has anyone else seen the inherent problem in our schooling system? It's not the cafeteria food that's crawling across the linoleum floor, or the bipolar Central air system that has students shivering and sweating all at once. No, it's this perverse grading scale. It's not based on actual ability, or even how well you can fake knowing a subject. No, it's based on how much work you have time to finish, how many tedious packets a teacher feels they can endure grading. For instance, in a creative writing class, a student with no conventional or stylistic skill will get a higher grade than a veritable Shakespeare simply because the good writer had a game the night before the paper (or whatever) is due. These grading scales teach our youth to bullshit (excuse the slang) their way through a complicated assignment and just ensure that it looks good, rater than actually making sure the end product is concise and correct. It's teaching students to rush through their projects, rather than doing the responsible thing and spending the time a project deserves to make sure it's polished and ready to inspect. The students who, like me, get bored easily but know their stuff, have to do mindlessly tedious tasks rather than actually learn anything. It's barbaric and bizarre, the way primary and secondary educational institutes refuse to actually educate.

The way I see it, lazy students slide by without doing anything more than turning in a paper with a bunch of scribbled down guesses, and the determined students are stuck at a slower pace than they can endure. And grades themselves, might I add, are an abomination. The only possible outcomes after a report card comes out are self absorbency or self loathing. The pressure put on students to perform well in school, while it may be well intentioned, is repugnant and medieval. It's used as a social status, as a determination of intelligence. Really, it's an entirely inaccurate reflection of a person's academic ability or lack thereof.

There will be more to come on this subject if I ever find some time to rant more.