Getting Ahead

It is Wednesday and I have spent all day doing homework and going to classes. I slept in until 11:40 or so which really helped combat my lack of sleep and how tired I have been. Then I ate and went to class after which I ate a little more and did homework. Then class again, then food again and then homework until 9:30 and then a shower. I have all of my homework for tomorrow done and since I don't have homework due for Friday I started my homework for Tuesday. I finished my reading for my Content Lit class on Tuesday so now I have the project left for that class and reading for Poetry due that day. I'm trying very hard to get ahead so that I can go into next week in good shape especially since I don't know what my work schedule will look like. I'm also hoping to get all of the stuff for Tuesday and Wednesday done early so I can use my Monday where I have no classes to complete one or two assignments for my SED class. I need to get more points in that class so that I can get an A. We are ten classes in, there are only 28 classes, I need a 1080 points for an A and I so far only have 319. So almost halfway through the class and I don't have half the points yet. With a couple of assignments though I should be able to catch up though. If I do an RTI I can get 100 points and then if I do research I will get 50 points. That's two classes worth of assignments and will put me almost halfway with 2 classes to spare. Hopefully, I can get one or both assignments done Monday if I work all day.

Anyway, enough about homework. Today in my SED class we talked about this new legislation that Obama wants to put through. He wants to make kids go to school for 10 hours instead of 8. Yuck! No way is that helpful. By the time the kids get out of school after a ten hour day they will be burned out, tired and hungry. One guy in class made the point that most school days are made up of 4 periods and each one is 80 minutes which means kids are only spending roughly 5 hours actually in class. So maybe I can see cutting back on time in between classes or cutting out study halls but then when do students who don't do work at home do their homework? Also, what about the kids that have been awake since 5 am because they had to take 2 buses just to get to school. They are going to be even more burned out then the rest of the kids because they have been up for so long and they will have no time at night to do much of anything because they will have to go to bed early so they can get up early the next morning and do it again. I haven't even mentioned yet what this does to teachers. Teachers already spend eight hours with screaming kids all day. And not just one or two but 80-100. You want to add another two hours on to an already busy and stressful day? Any person with kids will tell you that is insane. I like Obama. I voted for him. I have liked most of his policies. The only thing I have never liked has been his some of his policies on education. He has not gotten rid of the No Child Left behind Act in favor of a bill that would stress instead the importance of standardized testing but that would require teachers to teach kids how to think. He has proposed more funding for No Child Left Behind and he has proposed using standardized tests to determine a teacher's salary. The last part there is completely unfair. I saw my students in practicum last semester take the MEAs and they did not take it seriously. A lot of them didn't even try the math problems. They simply made up the work and the answers. How can teachers be expected to make students take the test seriously? It isn't going to help them get into college. It isn't going to affect their grades and it certainly isn't going to stop them from graduating from middle school or high school. What do they care if these tests may shut their school down for good. After that year they never have to go back. Plus they hate school, they would be ok with school being shut down. Don't most kids hate school?