Imagine that you could know the most about any subject in the world. Think about how many lives you could change with your knowledge and how you could spread it throughout your environment. Consider the fact that you are the greatest mind of our generation and that everyone else bows down to your extraordinary mind. Now what is it that you want to know the most about: World War II, politics, chemistry, neurology, grammar? I’m sure the majority of us would want to know the most about something that would factor into giving someone a well-rounded education that could serve a purpose to them in the future. I, on the other hand, would choose to be the minority. I would like to know the most about pop culture. It ranges from movies, music, and television. My mind works differently, I think, from others. Freire’s banking principle applies mainly to our minds absorbing pointless knowledge that some of us really wouldn’t give two sh*ts about, pardon my French. Countless numbers of teachers don’t care about how their students are supposed to learn the material presented to them or how well the students can relate to the subject matter at hand when the teacher “teaches” the class.
I know that there was a class my senior year of high school, World Civilization, that my teacher wasn’t too concerned with teaching. He would sit at his desk in the front corner and give us an assignment that had been written on the board all day for his previous classes. The work would usually be a section or two section reviews filled with vocabulary, a few important guys and documents, and then some critical thinking questions that played no factor in my education whatsoever. He would also never take up the homework, so it rarely got done, which means that I didn’t get the full experience that I should have if it had been presented to me in a different way. That sounds sort of bad. I obviously should have done the work so that I would be able to understand the material in a more complex way, instead of using my teacher as a vice. With that said though, I had to work twice as hard when studying to remember the facts because I had to teach myself. If it had been presented to me first, and then studied, it wouldn’t have been the same situation.
I think our minds learn what they want to learn. If you try to teach me rocket science with a side of calculus, you’re wasting your time; on the other hand, if you give me the Rock n’ Roll Encyclopedia I would be much more inclined to read and learn interesting things about each topic. Yes, the banking system will be used. No, it wouldn’t be a chore to read something that interests me. What would be the perk of beating ourselves useless knowledge into our brains, if we are only going to forget it by next weekend when we go see a movie and understand the plot of ‘Inception’? That movie took a couple years off of my elementary education. (SPOILER ALERT! Who saw that top coming at the very end?) Anyways, the point of that is that we learn what we want to learn.
I remember one day in class my teacher started getting pissed off at us and decided that the next review was going to be taken up for a grade, so naturally fearing our lives we all did the review. What happened next class? He doesn’t take up the review. Yeah, we were royally pissed at the man. I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m sure that we all could have done something better without time than to do a review that wasn’t going to be graded or be relevant to the test over the chapter. For instance, there was probably an episode of 24, Lost, or American Idol that I had to miss because I had to learn about how Napoleon Bonaparte was a bastard. It may seem that I’m bashing education, and I partially am, but in a way it’s important that we see both sides of the importance of knowing about the French Revolution and how to configure chemical reactions. Honestly, I have no intention to do anything close to resembling math or science when I grow up, or who the king of England was in 1054. If you know who the king was…awesome, if not…good.
We all have dreams. We all have aspirations of what we want to be or do. So who wants to bother with other events that only seem to derail us from our overall goal someday? If I were to be a mailman for the United States Postal Service after I graduate from college, then that would probably be a waste of time and money to have spent on an education. If I end up deciding I want to be a businessman and end up running Apple by the time I’m 38, then learning all that I could have in college would be highly appropriate. Then again any one of us could drop dead tomorrow, which would be quite a tragedy. Sorry for taking it to a dark place, I’ll try not to lead you back down there.
Have you noticed I’m trying to bring up how education might be a good thing? Education is obviously the cornerstone of our society and civilization as we know it. How cliché is that, right? But for real, if we didn’t have the capability to comprehend certain principles and functions then we would be nowhere as a creative being. There would be nothing but grass in the fields because we would be too brain dead to come up with anything, such as a house. I’m getting pretty off topic, I know. And for that I apologize, feel free to haze me with hate comments. Just don’t taze me, bro! This is slowly beginning to become non-educational, maybe I did that on purpose.
Going back to sitting up against the heater next to the window on the bottom floor of Owensboro Catholic High School, I begin to wonder what the teacher’s perspective was of his students. We thought of him as a lazy dude who just wanted to have fun with us and be Mr. Chill, but I’m sure he saw us as diligent and hardworking students who should be interested in Napoleon Bonaparte and the king of England in 1054. I now ponder if he ended up being disappointed in us when we failed to do the review for him that he said was for homework and actually was for homework. He has every right to be angry. That’s his job. His vocation as a human being is to mold young minds. If we don’t respect his and every other teacher’s goal then we are declining our minds for the growth of education. We need to appreciate the fact that these people have dedicated their lives to teaching our generation because education is the future of civilization for our country.
I never would have imagined that I would use my high school teacher who wasn’t a great example of teaching as the center for a college paper, but I have now realized that all of my past experiences have become pre-requisites for my future learning. One of my friends who is still in high school mentioned to me that everything I have ever learned or achieved has gone completely out the window, but I disagree. Even though she is a great friend who I love that I always agree with, I had to go out on a limb. All of the information that I have compiled over the years has been crucial to my study habits and pursuit of happiness…yeah that was a Kid Cudi/Will Smith reference. I would like to feel as if everything that has been accumulated and pounded into my brain over the past eighteen years of my life has been for a purpose. I’m not positively sure what the purpose is, but I have a feeling that it is for my best interest and will serve me well as I grow into full adulthood with my wrath of education.
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