Scary gym class and teachers - Here's the scenario: Scrawny Johnny, in his mangy red gym shorts and hole-y shoes, lines up with the other kids on the volleyball court. His gorilla-of-a-man teacher tells his protege Hugus Brutus to make the teams. Johnny gets picked last and picked on mercilessly after missing the stupid volleyball. Johnny is then told to go sit down. Teacher sees Johnny "slacking off" and tells him that he will never get better. As an extra-added measure to please teacher's oppressive and inhumane desires, he commands Johnny to go run laps.
OK, maybe I exaggerated on that last part, but doesn't this sound familiar? It's not too different from my own humiliating experience. It created for me, and others in that outcast category, an abhorrence of anything related to organized sports. And adults wonder why we now prefer TV to the outdoors.
The "Gifted and Talented" program - I was put in this program for a few years, and I always wondered why the other kids couldn't have the same enrichment I did, when they were perfectly capable of learning.
From what I saw, the program could instill an arrogance in the "GT" kids as being better than everyone else, and a feeling of abandonment in the rest.
We don't need to provide an exclusive group for those "smarter than thou" and shove it in others' faces. And as I look back, I don't think we really needed the GT program at that age. Just like gym class (and art, history and science contests) the GT program ranks and rates kids.
It's no surprise to me that so many kids give up, before they are even given a chance to show what they're made of. Schools need to get rid of this kind of classification system and teach and treat all equally.
ANYWAY, I should move on to rant about what I'd get rid of in my high school, Castle.
Lousy, old videos - I can't stand watching "instructional" videos made when my mother was born. Come on, a lot of things have changed since then.
Besides, this is the generation that grew up with color TV and slick, quick-cut video. I have enough trouble paying attention to "Lassie" in black and white.
The DOE could put their money toward new videos, instead of spending it on the obligatory, and I'll bet cursory, teaching of all grade school kids how to speak Hawaiian. (I'm not talking about the separate immersion program which I totally respect.)
Teachers who don't teach - Last year, I had teachers who threw assignments in our faces and said, "Here, do this," without spending any time explaining or going over the work. It was just: read the boring textbook (a jumble of meaningless facts that read like a telephone book), take the chapter test, and fail it.
Dress code - A dress code is unnecessary. The only thing distracting to the learning environment is not what kids wear, but the kids themselves.
Who are girls harming when they wear cutoffs and midriffs? In my school, they let guys prance around in bikinis on the football field for Homecoming. The nerve!
The DOE also has this weird idea that they have enough money to pay for public school uniforms. The DOE can't even afford to pay for textbooks , which should be their first priority.
Maybe they expect us to pay for the garb. Excuse me, but if our parents wanted or could afford that, they'd send us to private school.
Well, that's just me ... and my school. And most other public high schools on the island, I imagine. I have a feeling that some adults may become slightly peeved by what I've said here. To them I say, "You made your own bed and now we're all lying in it."