I started hating school for reasons beyond waking up early in seventh grade. My friends and I had a conversation about grades in an Instagram chat at the end of the first trimester. We got into the whole “grades are dumb,” “grades don’t measure anything but how well you can follow directions,” “good grades don’t equal intelligence” fiasco. Despite continually striving to have straight A’s, that conversation stuck with me and I became more critical of school as I grew older.
Fast forward to this year — my junior year of high school. When Mr. Ziebarth blasted “School is the best place to learn” on the board in September, I gagged.
My initial thought was that school is not the best place to learn. School is not the best place to learn because there are grades, predetermined student learning outcomes, normalized cutthroat competition, exclusivity and more crap that I can’t list off the top of my head at 2 a.m. or might not be aware of yet. School is not the best place to learn because my friends, and many other students, have never heard the words “self-directed learning.” School is not the best place to learn because the only classes that I get to regularly self-reflect/assess in are AP Lang and journalism.
I did a deep dive into three problems that I have with school back in October as part of a Question Exploration for AP Lang. My question was something along the lines of “Is school the best place for me to learn?” and while I did go off with my criticism, I couldn’t answer that question with a hard no. Part of me got technical and said that school is the best place to learn because it’s the only place where we have access to the same resources, such as access to WiFi and free tutoring. We get to learn alongside many people at the same time, and there’s always so much information. I like knowing a lot of things (like that 72 degrees Fahrenheit might be the perfect temperature for studying), so I can’t complain about that.
School during the COVID-19 pandemic has taken me back to that Question Exploration and made me think more about why I couldn’t say with every cell in my body that school isn’t the place to learn. School is a good place to learn, but how can we make it the best place for as many students as we can?
There are many ways to answer that question. I answered it by first asking myself what school is really for.
Before the pandemic, I thought the purpose of school was to ensure that young people become educated members of society and land a job. It’s been three months and I still believe that. But now I also believe the primary purpose of school, specifically high school, is to create an environment where students are encouraged and able to pursue their passions, and pursuit should not be seen as an academic risk.
What I mean by “academic risk” is easier to explain through an example:
Student X loves astronomy. They have rocket posters all over their bedroom wall and cut out magazine clippings about space. They want to work at NASA, so they take advanced science and math classes and are involved in their school’s astronomy club. This student has a little research project going on as well. At the same time, there’s a lot of pressure at their school to take all hard classes, maintain at least a 4.5 GPA and have three hundred service hours to stand out, so Student X also piles on advanced English and history courses and volunteers for random clubs. Now Student X has to spend more time on homework and volunteering at a soup kitchen than furthering their interest in astronomy, otherwise, their GPA will suffer.
My situation is similar to Student X’s, and I’m sure many students are in the same boat. I want to completely invest myself in English and journalism, but this year I juggled four weighted classes, had to maintain my rank in the top 10% of my class and, before the pandemic, volunteered on Saturday mornings at a hospital. There’s a balance between doing what you love and committing to academics, but I haven’t found it yet.
I wish it wasn’t that way. I went into high school thinking that it’s a time to start specializing in what you like or at least dip your toes in various interests. Counselors and teachers always tell us to spend these four years of our lives becoming excellent at one or two things instead of trying to be excellent at everything.
I agree with their advice, but why is it that nowadays the point of high school is less about discovering what you love to do and more about crafting a stellar college transcript full of AP classes? Why is the American college essay less about an opportunity for students to express their interests and more of a demand for the best “Death, Divorce, Disease, or Daddys” essays? Why can’t we bring ourselves to dedicate the same amount of time to pursuing our passions as we do to doing homework?
This isn’t to say that students have to choose between only furthering their interests or only trying to get into college during these four years of their life. There’s a balance here, too. But it’s obvious that many students spend more time trying to get straight A’s than they do to building prototypes of a solar car or running an art blog.
“What’s Worth Learning in School?” by Lory Hough, published in the Harvard Ed. Magazine, is a brilliant read. I’m not going to get too deep into it because you should read it for yourself. The one thing I’m going to talk about from Hough’s article is what Harvard Professor of Education David Perkins calls “expert amateurs.”
Students can be experts. Expert amateurs, that is. I won’t have the expertise of a journalist with thirty years of experience in the field, but I’m entering my fourth year of journalism as Baron Banner’s digital editor-in-chief. My friend Shayla doesn’t have the expertise of a person who designs 3D printers, but she’s well versed with the machines, has her own printer and is in charge of 3D printing for a business class.
This is what high school students should be doing. Wholeheartedly doing what you love to do shouldn’t start to happen in college or university when you pick your major. On top of getting a decently well-rounded education and acquiring the knowledge and needed skills to transition to postsecondary education and careers, we should start becoming expert amateurs. Start an art blog. Use TikTok to showcase your art. Open an Etsy shop. Don’t limit yourself to just the art club or whatever else your school offers.
Doing all this to further your passion in art is what author Seth Godin calls picking yourself in “You’re It,” an episode of his Akimbo podcast. Picking yourself means putting your passions above all and abandoning the status quo. It’s thinking outside the box and creating your own learning. It’s choosing what you want to do and who you want to be. It’s taking charge of your life and making your own opportunities. It’s not trying, waiting and being picked by someone else.
I want to be able to pick myself, but I’m stuck in the system, held back by my grades and somewhat new to directing my learning. I go to a school with a competitive culture that I at first commended (um, what was sophomore-year me thinking when I wrote that?), but now I realize the competition is suffocating. I haven’t been able to truly pick myself or follow through with my passion projects/goals because if I did, I would get so invested in my work and probably end up committing academic suicide.
But then my school closed in mid-March, and I’ve spent day after day after day doing what I love because grades are out of the picture.
I’ll be honest and say that I abused my district’s “hold harmless” grading policy. I had all A’s when school closed due to COVID-19, so there was no way my grades could drop to B’s and C’s. I was burned out and had no motivation to do work. I turned in a lot of work late and have some missing assignments. Not caring about my grades for once gave me time to write a blog post that led to an exciting opportunity, as well as crank out sixteen articles for my school’s newspaper in just two months.
My school closure has made it even more apparent to me how burdensome and restrictive grades are. I’ve already written about why I hate grades in this blog post, so I won’t spend too much time talking about the criticism and potential solutions here.
The point is that not having grades as my number one focus in school has relieved me of so much stress (my acne went away!) and given me so much time to what I like. For once, I don’t hear that voice in the back of my head telling me that spending hours on my blog is a bad idea.
Another glaring issue that I’ve seen these past few months of distance learning is students, myself included, not doing work at all because of our “hold harmless” grading policy. A friend with straight A’s told me there’s no point in doing any more work after AP exam season. His final spring semester grades will be all A’s. What’s the point of doing the work and learning the material when not doing it won’t count against him?
I had an email conversation with a social studies teacher at my school about the “hold harmless” grade protection policy for a news article. He, along with several other teachers, was disappointed with this part of the grading policy because it was inevitable that students who were satisfied with their grades could get away with not doing any more work. I understand that it’s frustrating, but this is the result and reality of a school system that emphasizes grades to an extreme. We are not here to learn, but here to pass.
I’ve seen a lot of tweets from educators condoning grades. They say that the emergency shift to distance learning makes both educators and students understand how much grades suck. I hope that as we transition back to the physical classroom, school district leaders, educators, parents and students are ready to have conversations about grades and create plans to seriously get rid of grades or at least work with academia to deemphasize grades.
When that happens — when grades are not seen as a life-or-death matter in the eyes of high school students — at least two things will happen. More students will feel encouraged and, dare I say, allowed to do what they love. More students will see school as a place of learning and enrichment rather than a place of passing and rubrics.
And that is needed to take us closer to making school the best place to learn. A place where students are encouraged and able to pursue their passions, and that pursuit should not be seen as an academic risk.
Is school the best place for me to learn?
October 2019 Karen said no. June 2020 Karen says no, but not as enthusiastically because she actually misses it, and has a plan to make school a better environment for her.
I did something unexpected when I filled out my senior year course requests. I dropped science from my schedule. My senior schedule will be zero through fourth period (a full schedule is zero through sixth period, and my junior year schedule is zero through fifth period). I’m planning to take at most three AP classes instead of five.
At the start of junior year, I would’ve never thought that I’d do anything like this because I’ve always put my academics above all. But the lessons I’ve learned from Mr. Ziebarth’s class have made me more forgiving to myself and less scared to put my passions first. His class was a wake-up call.
A wake-up call to not conform and look like the rest of the top 10% of my class. A wake-up call to confidently say that this blog is more important than my grades. A wake-up call to use my voice to create a change. A wake-up call to pick myself and pursue English, journalism and, potentially, education starting now.
