We're Always Proving Who We Are...

There are moments when I fall, intentionally or otherwise, out of my bubble and come into closer contact with the nastier parts of Real Life. I don't like those times. There's an article in The New York Times this morning about No Child Left Behind and the changes that schools are making to their curricula in order to perform to the benchmarks of standardized testing that the government expects. Students are taking six periods of classes a day, two math, three reading, and gym. That's it. No history, no science, no music, no art, just the test subjects. As if there isn't reading in history and math in science and maybe approaching it in a different light might make it easier for them to understand things. These are ninth-graders, students only seven years younger than I am. No history or science...It boggles the mind. Reading about kids saying wistfully "I bet it'd be cool to dissect things", honestly, literally makes me cry. How dare anyone think that focusing teachers' and students' lives down to one stupid test that isn't even well-written will ever ever help anyone do more than learn to hate the rote misery they're put through? I get that other peoples' lives aren't going to be like mine. I get that plenty of people don't have parents who read to them every single night until they're at least six or make tapes of the multiplication tables to play while they're asleep so that they'll learn it subconsciously (My brother, not me, and I hated having those tapes droning on every night while I was trying to sleep right across the hall). But...I firmly believe that I love to read and am very good at it because it was always fun when I was growing up. Turning that fun into drills isn't going to instill a desire to read, only the basics of the ability and an entrenched distaste for doing so. How can anyone think this is right?

I didn't mean to write so much. I'm going to go brush my teeth and cry myself to sleep now.