You may not know this, but I'm from the Midwest. People think that we're slow. We're not slow, we're traditional. Adding ma'am and sir at the beginning or end of a sentence is normal. Smiling and waving at people, being polite, and and showing courtesy to others is just a part of life.
My parents taught my sister and I manners. We spent a lot of time with our grandparents who were all born in 1925 (two of the four are still living), so we knew from a very early age what it meant to respect our elders. Anytime something was asked of us, we were expected to do it with respect even if we didn't want to. Education was high on our parent's priority list. I still remember Momaceta telling Dusti and I that Great-Grandpa Carr told her that, "Education is the single most important thing in your life. It's the one thing a person cannot take away from you."
Coming from this type of background, it may not be difficult for you to understand why I'm appalled at the way some kids behave these days. Cussing out a teacher, skipping classes because you don't want to attend, assuming that you are equal to all the adults in your life, demanding things because you feel that you are entitled to it in the first place when you've done absolutely nothing to earn it, wanting to put forth no effort into actually learning something and expecting the teachers to do all of the hard work for you, wondering why you have a low grade when you've a) turned in nothing, b) turned in all of your work with no quality behind it, or c) expect to be given full credit when you hand 9 weeks worth of work the day before grades are due, throwing a temper-tantrum when something doesn't go your way, or not being held accountable for any actions was not something that would have even been considered, but somehow, that's the state of the world today.
They say that the way a civilization breaks down is when the family breaks down. I'm not entirely certain I agree with the statement. To me, it depends on what you are defining as a family. As you get older you can choose who your family is--not relying on the one you're born into. If you have a support system around you, people that you care about and depend on, those that you share your joys and sorrows with regularly, the ones who applaud you when you succeed and carry you when you fall, then you have a family. It does not have to be traditional: man, woman, son, daughter, cat, dog, white picket fence. Using this logic, everyone has a family of some sort.
Civilization is not breaking down because the traditional family is evolving into something new. Nope. Our civilization as we know it is breaking down because education is not being placed first in our community. It doesn't matter what type of family you come from, it's a fact that the United States does not care about education as much as it did in the past. A perfect example: I have two students who moved here from the Middle East. Their schools went from 7 am to 4 pm with homework that lasted from the time you arrived home until around Midnight. In America, the average student attends school from 7:30-2:30, a little bit of homework in the evening after two hours of sports practice. The weekends are not spend studying for exams or completing extra work, but hanging out at the movies, shopping, playing video games, or other various recreational ways.
It's just a thought, but what if we made the kids more accountable for their own learning? Give me a moment to outline a possibility.
With class sizes in most public schools reaching a breaking point for the teacher, we should not try to focus so much on one-on-one class time. Elementary schools would teach the basics just as they do now, but junior high schools (6-8) would focus entirely on study skills and learning styles. They would research different job options for post-secondary education and decide for themselves if they are best suited for a university/academia, or if they should go into something like manual labor/ready-to-work skills that requires some sort of a certificate. Their main classes (general science, biology, chemistry, algebra, geometry, calculus, trig, English, civics, history, economics, etc.) would all be held in a lecture hall. Rather than having two sections of sophomore English with 25+ kids in it, I would have them all at once and lecture for 30 minutes about what it was they were supposed to cover the night before. All of them would hit their core classes together because they wouldn't have any electives yet. By lunch, they would be entirely finished with their lectures and have time to spend in independent study, labs, the studio, peer tutoring, or sign up for one-on-one time with a teacher that would be a daily first-come-first-serve basis, to catch up on reading, and to complete research. We wouldn't have daily assignment that they would have to hand in, but a few projects total for the semester to make sure they grasp the concepts that were presented. It would be entirely up to the student to complete the work and learn time management, rather than having teachers constantly harp on them to finish the assignment for the day.
You may be saying to yourself that school should be like this already, but that's not the case. It seems these days that a teacher must hold a student's hand just to make sure the basics are completed. Perhaps some schools are already this way, but I'm unaware of it. If high school kids are in such a hurry to be treated like an adult, a college kid, someone who is responsible, then why don't we make their high school education like that of an adult, a college kid, someone who is responsible?
