Matthew Tully Manual

As both the standards of school work and stress levels of student’s rise, the American school system remains unaltered, unchanged, and unaffected for over a hundred years. School is an institution that can serve as a massive gate in life granting you access to a job, stability, and a future or it can become a giant pillar in the way of everything you wish to achieve. While we recognize that a student’s own motivation, study habits, and will to learn, are cardinal in any schooling system, we must also understand the issues with an institution that is fundamentally unsound from the ground up. In today’s world, students are shoved with the hands of docility, and amenability as they render themselves in a system that has inadvertently failed them, by neglecting to celebrate their differences, and varying learning patterns. Conformity in the education system has shown to damage the personalization and

The social issue Botstein is addressing and trying to solve is ineffectiveness of high school and that it is “obsolete and should be abolished” (para. 1). He references the multiple instances where graduates have come forth to express that the “cliques and artificial intensity” inaccurately define the student roles. (para. 1). Botstein further details that these experiences do not translate to the “positions” individuals achieve in the real world. The high school environment amounts to an MTV reality show

When Mr. Clark originally taught at Eastside High School, the culture seemed very competitive and full of high standards. The students seemed very eager to learn and at a pretty high level for their age. Twenty years later, the culture flips dramatically. The school quickly goes from pristine to a graffiti-infested playground. The teachers are the prey and the students (mainly the ‘hoodlums’) pretty much do as they please. Education is a small goal for any of the students, and the students that do want to do well fear those “hoodlums.” Mr. Clark identifies this immediately when returning to Eastside High. During his first assembly, Mr. Clark let the entire school know that he was the HNIC. He gathered up all the trouble makers and sent them home, expelling them from school. Most were drug dealers, 5th year students, or drug abusers that were dulling the spark of the other students.

(40) With this in mind, Lawrence B. Schlack uses his status effectively, by referring to high school graduates as a destructive force. “The go-to-college tsunami,” in other words, Schlack is trying to convey that students have this perception that they must attend college. And with that said, students place themselves into a situation they don’t know how to handle. Despite the shortage of credibility, Schlack makes up for it with the amount of pathos he provides in the

Conversely, as a need to be accepted became increasingly important to me during puberty, I slowly began to tuck that hunger away to avoid the criticism that comes with a love for education. Many people in Elko have achieved success solely through labor-intensive work. As a result, many individuals seem to underestimate the value education can have in other settings. This stigma on education not only affects those with a passion for learning, but it also impacts the students struggling to attend school in the first place. Elko is similar to a lake in this essence, and we are the fish; only allowed to grow proportional to our environment. It didn’t take long for me to identify this as an issue I was not only propagating, but also something I had the ability to

At Hazelwood High School, they do things differently than at my school. At Hazelwood, most of the people worry about themselves and nobody else. Most of the school doesn’t get good grades and the school does not do anything about it. One day in English class Andy walked out when they were reading Macbeth because it was too emotional for Andy to handle. His friends were concerned and told the school counselor. They said, “But… but… it seems like… like… he needs help or somethin’.” Then the counselor said, “Well, I probably shouldn’t tell you boys this, but he is getting some outside counseling… So you boys can relax and be assured that he is getting whatever help he needs”(100). At Harrisburg High School, if someone had an issue like that, the counselors and teachers would be concerned, even if the person was getting outside help. Another thing about education that is different than mine is the school. In Ronda’s English homework, she wrote, “Our school building must have been built about a million years ago, because it was brown and tall and raggedy-looking, but it fit right in with the rest of the day”(16). At my high school, we are very fortunate to have a very new building to learn inside of. At Hazelwood High, they were not fortunate enough to have a new high school be built. Culture and education are very important pieces of people’s

These students “reported that high school was ‘boring, nothing I was interested in,’ or ‘it was boring… the teacher just stood in front of the room and just talked and didn’t really like involve you’” (Rumberger, 2011, p. 157). Mike Rose recognized this in his story when he said that the vocational track was “most often a place for those who are not just making it, a dumping ground for the disaffected” (1989, p. 3). The teachers had no clue “how to engage the imaginations of us kids who were scuttling along at the bottom of the pond” (1989, p. 3) and lacked inventiveness. In the 1980’s and even in 2005, students were bored with the teachers because the teachers were uncreative in their lessons. The students, in turn, stopped liking school and felt no need to

I am aware that there are better and worse high schools out there than Fremont High School. And yet, reading Kozol's account of the terrible conditions that are endured by these students made me feel more aware of the severity of improper or inadequate education that poorly funded schools provide. All of these problems, alongside my awareness of my fortunate years of education, make me wonder, just as Mireya did, as to why, "...[students] who need it so much more get so much less?" (Kozol 648). Interestingly, I have little to comment on Kozol's actual writing style, even though he wrote this account of his. I was just so attached to the characters within that school that I wanted to be able to reach out somehow; Kozol definitely achieved something very touching here.

Journalist Alexandra Robbins ventures back to her old high school to examine the competitive efforts students are having to take to compete on the battlefield that is the education system in her book, The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids. Robbins explores the lives of multiple students who are stressed and pressured to maintain good grades and get into an Ivy League college. This text allows for intriguing insight on how the educational system has “spiraled out of control” and displays the different measures students must now take to be the best. Robbins’ The Overachievers is an eye-opening bestseller which exposes the social pressures and anxieties students must overcome in their high school lives as they attempt to impress and prove to colleges they are worthy of acceptance.

The Walton Academy is located in rural Vermont. The style of its main buildings is imitation-Gothic. The all-male institution is deliberately cut off from the economic and social life of contemporary America. The typical age of its beginning students is sixteen; for most of the adolescents the experience of Walton’s rural solitude is somewhat trying. Some call the place "Helton.” They all groan under the academic work load and many of them feel oppressed by a system that hands out demerits for the slightest infractions of discipline.

Class after class, day after day, I often sense a massive amount of repetition with school. Each lesson feels more like a chore than an actual learning experience. That’s the way school has always been though, like a job. It is hard to note that there is any sort of progress being made in terms of the everyday learning experience. In his essay, Against School, educator John Taylor Gatto claims that the everyday boredom of school is truly meant to demoralize and dumb down students, destroying individuality and the ability to create independent and critical thinkers. Gatto explains how children are not really growing up, they are only getting older, indicating that public schools exist only to “cripple our kids.” By using his experience in the classroom, Gatto creates an element of pathos and develops a structure which almost fools readers into inferencing what his opinion truly is. Gatto ultimately, through these rhetorical devices, wants to ignite thoughts about what the true purpose of school is, displaying the modern day public school education as a factory to create a mindless population of students.

During high school, I struggled to maintain my grades and focus. I was in a small town, and every ounce of opportunity seemed to slowly be sucked away from the town as the years past with the aid of the downward economic spiral beginning. I felt, like many of my fellow classmates, that opportunity had passed us by. I didn’t dare conjure even the thought of attending Eastern; it would’ve been too similar to the

In Chapter 7 of the novel “Doing School”, Denise Clark Pope, a Stanford Alumni and Senior Lecturer at Stanford, describes Faircrest High School functions and how the upsides and downsides present themselves throughout the school’s system and how they “do school.” Based on Pope’s claims “Doing school” is when students are not engaged with learning and they don’t commit themselves to school or the values that the school has. Pope observes the school’s five “best and brightest” students and their behaviors over one year to discover what these young people do to get “good grades, win awards, pursue extracurricular interests, do community service, and help teachers and administrators.” She uncovers the truth behind achieving great success in school: the students are thought to be hard working, intelligent, and

Olson’s premises for the book are that engagement in learning is the key to a happy life and that school separates many individuals from that possibility. School practices that wound and make students hesitant learners have to be investigated so they can be changed. If we understand what school wounds are, why they occur and what can be done about it, we don’t need to harbor these wounds forever.

In James Baldwin’s speech “A Talk to Teachers,” he says, “The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.” During elementary and middle school, a very impressionable time period in students’ lives, children are taught what will be the foundation of their moral compasses. While learning is not entirely the responsibility of the education system, it still does have a major impact. Despite the fact that teenagers’ minds have matured, high school is still a very pivotal and confusing time in their lives. This is the point at which students are examining the society in which they are being educated, in some cases they are even encouraged to do so. While the foundation may have been laid, it can still be altered and built upon. As teenagers search to find themselves, the education system “assists” them in the