What I Learned in College

I was one of those rare, and really annoying, kids that everyone hated when the “future” talk came around.

You know how some kids pick some random career path when they’re 4 and stick with it until something better comes along? I did that. Mine was “teacher”.

Only, nothing better came along. In fact, when I was in 5th grade, I was made a “group leader” for a project. I was in charge of 3 other kids, and it was my job to make sure we worked together to get our project done. I relished in it. I knewI wanted to be a teacher, so I could encourage kids to use their talents to their advantage. Pretty freakin smart for a 10 year old.

Satisfied with my career choice, I smugly went through school declaring every time someone asked me (which was a lot) what I wanted to be when I grew up, that I was going to be a teacher.  Adults would smile sweetly and say “How wonderful!”. Peers would shrug and say “Cool”. I never put much thought into the whole thing.

Fast-forward to my senior year of high school. I picked a college with a great education program. I went into college as one of those annoying freshman who declares their major early. I didn’t deal with that “undecided” garbage. My future was set. I shook my head and smiled at the “percentage of college students who will change their majors” lectures from R.A.s, professors, advisers, etc. I had more forethought than that!

Guess what?

I changed my major. Not only did I change my major, I did it during the middle of my junior year. I was on track to graduate in exactly a year and a half, and I decided to change my mind and throw away a year’s worth of Early Childhood Education work that I had put in. You’re reading the blog of a journalism major.

The question I’ve been getting pretty consistently since then is “Why”? From everyone. Friends. Family. Random people who remember me as “that girl who used to play Twister in the dorm hallways freshman year”.

This is me thumb-upping right after falling

Or even better, “that girl who used to boy’s bathroom on the second floor”. And before you proclaim how gross this is, I would like to say that my friends’ room that I was visiting was right across from the boy’s bathroom, and my former boyfriend’s room was 3 doors down. It made more sense to just yell “cover up!” as I opened the door than to climb 2 flights of stairs to the nearest girl’s room on the third floor of my co-ed dorm. And also, the girl’s bathrooms were no less gross than the boy’s. Hush.

The one person I haven’t told is my father. Simply because I don’t tell him anymore than is absolutely necessary for him to know.

Anyway, so all these people have been asking why I changed my major that I was so excited about. And like a mature adult, I’ve been shrugging them off and feeding them b.s. “I just wanted to try something new.” “I might come back and do it later”. The truth was, I didn’t exactly know why. All I knew was that I left the education building with a knot in my stomach every day.

But now that I’ve had some distance from it, I’m beginning to realize what was causing said knot. The education program killed teaching for me. Not only killed it, but destroyed and maimed it beyond recognition. What I ended up learning was not education, but robot-building. Children weren’t children, they were little mini-military troops to be controlled and forced into a mold. They were small adults that were to act maturely and responsibly all the time or else.

I love kids. But my professors made me despise the thought of being around them for hours a day. I can’t be around kids who are acting eerily like adults. It would totally creep me out. One professor in particular forced me to care so little about her class that I stopping even pretending to listen to her lectures and did word searches instead. Needless to say, she wasn’t pleased. Needless to say, I didn’t care. I remeber begrudgedly making an example schedule for a first grade classroom for her once. I ended up quite pleased with the result, only to have it returned to me full of red ink. Mostly pointless nit-picking on her part that I ignored, but one thing that caught my eye was the fact that she tore me a new one for providing my fictional 6-year-old with a 30 minute recess. “This is far too long!” she said. “15 minutes is more than enough time!” she said. I balled up the paper and tossed it in the trashcan as I left the room, fully aware that she was watching me do it.

Before I go any further with this story, I want to make it known that I am very respecful of my teachers. I always have been. Very rarely do I dislike one. I’m not one of those students who decides they hate a teacher for assigning too much work. I recognize that it’s their job. However, I do begin to despise a teacher for two reasons.

1.) They are rude to me. I have had a few teachers in my life who were just plain rude. And I don’t mean to the class as a whole, because that wouldn’t bother me. I’d just do my work and stay out of their way. I mean to me specifically. This tends to happen after my short attention span catches up to me and they catch me doodling in class or staring into space. I try to pay attention, but sometimes people are boring. And when they chose to speak harshly to me in the middle of class and then proceed to glare at me for the remainder of the year/semester despite the fact that I’m easily pulling an A in their class, I get a little annoyed.

2.) They’re a dumbass. I’ve had some teachers who make me wonder if they cheated their way through middle school and beyond. I find the mere fact that they can presume to teach me anything insulting. I can’t learn anything from them that reading the textbook won’t teach me. Submitting to the authority of these teachers has always been a pet peeve of mine.

The professor from my story before falls into the second category. She was completely lacking a personality. She gave off the aura of someone who hated life. The only time I ever saw her smile was when she was boasting about her own accomplishments. She was everything I hated in a professor. In fact, I disliked her from day one. As soon as she began talking, I knew I wouldn’t like her. If I have anything resembling a 6th sense, it’s the ability to know when someone just isn’t going to rub me the right way.

So back to the story. Aside from insisting that I give a group of 6 and 7 year olds a total of 15 minutes in their entire 8 hour school day to play outside, she also made sure that I devoted an entire hour to math and reading. Reading I understand. Reading is awesome. But an hour of math? In first grade? How much math do first graders need to know? That irritated me. When I asked her about it, she said “Well, they have to pass their CRCTs”

I cannot put this more bluntly-a child’s happiness is MUCH more important than their score on a test. We are teaching children that school is a place for them to be trained on test-passing, not a place to receive an education. Why do they hate school so much? Because school is boring. They have to sit in a desk and act like adults for hours on end. They are drained of their creativity and drilled. I know, it happened to me. When I was in high school, I went 3 years without writing. I love to write, I always have. But I was so drained by school-the endless routines, the worksheets and SAT prep, that I became a zombie. I went through my school day, did hours of homework, watched maybe an hour of TV, went to bed.

Why are we doing this to our 5 year olds?

Because our society is so success-oriented that we’ve forgotten what success actually is. People aren’t pushed to nurture their talents, their passions. They’re taught to find a way to form those passions into a job in the corporate world. For example- I stated earlier that I like to write. Upon telling people this, they suggest that I teach writing or English classes for a living. I look at them blankly and reply “Or, I could just write”. They look at me like that’s the dumbest idea ever and scurry off to their generic ungraduate business classes. More people need to do what they love instead of finding a way to turn what they love into something “socially acceptable”. You waste precious time doing that.

Also, maybe the reason your kid can’t pay attention in school has nothing to do with them having ADHD. Maybe they’re just bored. You know, that feeling you get when you’re 7 and you have to follow the same mind-numbing routine every day of your life? I remember being very young and seeing the world as a wide-open, mysterious green place. Then, I went to school. I learned that it was already totally mapped out and discovered, nothing left for me to do there. “Here’s the world. It is what it is. Go find your place in it and for god’s sake, be beautiful!” You can’t remove all wonder and excitement, every ounce of spontineity and surprise from a child’s world and then expect them not to be bored. We are killing our children. We are replacing their souls with corporate logos and stupid facts.

Dear adults,

Has 90% of what you learned in school ever come in handy?

My answer-no. Most of what I needed to know in life came from talking to adults (parents, grandpatrents, friends’ parents), reading books and newspapers, and paying attention to mistakes (my own and those of others).

I wish I lived back in the days when you learned to read and write, then you were an apprentice and learned first-hand the skill you were interested in, then you worked. Straight to the point.

So, when people ask me “Stephanie, why do you want to be a journalist?” I will respond thusly:

I want to seek out people and events that amaze me and share them. I want to tell the stories of the world. I want to show the robotic citizens of this society that their fate isn’t sealed. That they have options. That passion is not useless. I want to inspire someone to do something.

People need to wake up and snap out of it. Life is more than anything you can learn in a classroom.