Our Education System Is Broken - Sorry.

     In my (almost) 14 years of school, I have come to learn one thing more clearly than anything else I have ever been taught: our education system is broken. When I say sorry, I mean to all the students that have been told that they are too dumb to continue on with something they are passionate about, and sorry to the teachers that are forced to teach something that they do not feel passionate about themselves.
     The fact that I'm being told that I control all my results, is personally just a lie that I'm being fed to ensure that I don't blame anyone else except myself. What I find especially disappointing, is when I try my hardest but am still told, "You know, you could have done a lot better if you put more effort into it." (Something I have been told countless times- last time being last week) Excuse me? I put my heart and soul into that, and the fact that I'm being graded on my creative efforts by a teacher who wants nothing but perfection is dissatisfying to say the least. I'm not perfect, and neither is my work in any teacher's eye unless I do it by the book.
     When I got a bad grade in math last year, of course I was to blame. No one would dare blame a teacher who is forced to teach curriculum in a dated, boring way, even if everyone else in the class was barely passing.
      The truth is, the best way to get a good grade, is to not do your work in the way you want too, but instead, to do it the way the teacher wants it. If you feel strongly about a subject but it isn't what the teacher wants to hear, then write about something else. If you describe the scent of a person as nostalgia but are told to change your phrase to a scent that exists (although what you wrote made perfect "scents" [that was a pun] to you) then you must change it, unless you want a bad mark. No disrespect or anything, of course.
      I would say that ninety-nine percent of the time, teachers pick favourites. It's just what happens. When this happens, the teacher will take all their effort into making sure that the student is thriving in the environment of their classroom and that they get where they want to go.
     The only time that I have ever met an instructor's expectations while following my own interests, is when I can read about a subject and then rephrase it to exactly what the teacher is expecting, and then slapping my work on a poster board that I have painted to fit the subject. The work is relevant to what the teacher wants, but what is seen was my own work. Something that I wanted to do.

     In Finland, students learn happily. By high school, they are fluent in several different languages. I know this because this is what my friends tell me over Skype. Teachers enjoy their work. Testing isn't about memorization but actual forms of knowledge. Teaching methods aren't outdated, but instead, they are keeping up with current times and teaching methods. They help them to get jobs in fields that interest them. The learning, is paced to their needs and they enjoy what they're learning.
     I think it's time we get to those things; things that matter to teachers and students alike.

#SorryNotSorry