The following article is based on my own high school experience and may or may not be what you experienced or how your high school may have been set up.
I feel that most of junior high and high school was a waste of time, here’s why:
Walking in the hallways- In my high school we had seven slots for classes. We had five minute passing periods to get to those classes. If you add that up, you will find that there is 35 minutes spent simply going from one class to another. This may not seem like a lot of time, but that is 175 minutes a week, not quite three hours. If that number doesn’t seem like a lot to you, think of this way. In the 180 days a year that I went to school, 6300 minutes was spent going from one class to the next. That totals to over 100 hours. So much time is wasted walking in the hallways to get to the next place of learning.
Class time- Each of my seven classes were approximately 45 minutes long (perhaps a couple minutes longer). I’d get to class and everyone would be talking. The teacher then would have to try to settle the class time. About 10-15 minutes would be spent on that. Then they would teach and assign homework in the next 15 minutes. After that, class would almost be over and everyone would start talking again, so then the next 15 minutes were spent trying to calm the class down again. It wasn’t necessarily like this with all classes, but most of them were. So in that 45 minute period, only 15 minutes was spent with actual teaching. Add that up and not even 2 hours were spent with learning. Not that much for an 8 hour school day if you ask me.
I’m not sure how this can be fixed, but some schools do block scheduling now, thus giving you fewer classes a day. This also means less time spent in the hallway and more time spent in a classroom. Whether or not this will improve anything, we’ll have to wait and see. I doubt the average student attention span is all that long, so having a longer class may not do any good if the students attention is going to be elsewhere for longer.
Teachers- Many teachers seem to be just that, teachers, not teachers. Teachers are teachers because to them it’s a job with a paycheck, something that they need. Teachers teach because that is there passion. Educating others is something that they have a desire for. It’s something that they really want to do. They don’t just do it because they have to. They do it because they care, unlike teachers. I’m sorry to say that most of the time through school, I just had teachers. I only had a handful of teachers.
Honestly now, you can tell the difference between someone who likes their job and someone who doesn’t. Which person would you rather be around, who do you think is going to be more enjoyable or likable? This really made a difference to me as to how much I tried in class. The attitude the teacher had rubbed off on me and had an affect on how I learned in there class, or if I really learned at all.
Also, no matter if the teacher was a teacher or a teacher; some of them were just really bad at teaching, regardless of how they felt about it. Sometimes, they could explain things 5 times and I still wouldn’t understand it. Whether I understood it or not though, we’d have to continue with other things. This definitely made things more difficult, because if I didn’t understand this, how on earth was I supposed to understand that? This particularly wasted time. There would be so much confusion on some things that it was a waste to even have to learn it, considering that in the end, I still never figured it out or had it made clear to me. It was as if I didn’t learn anything at all.
Things taught- Algebra 2. Am I ever going to use this in my everyday life? If I become a mathematician, maybe I will, but I’m not going to be a mathematician. I’m not going to do anything math related at all. I hate math. That’s partly because I don’t understand math, but even if I did understand it, I doubt there’d be much that I would actually end up using. Even with the simplest math problems, I whip out my calculator. Because of more advanced math and the required use of a calculator to do that math, I am not longer able to do much basic math in my head. I wish I could, because I think that that would help me more than Algebra or Geometry ever will. Even with some other subjects, there are some things I feel like I will never use. It just seemed like a big waste of time to bother.
In addition, I’ve been out of school for not even 6 months now. I can’t think of a single thing that I remember. Vocabulary and stuff for tests, I’d remember just for the test. Now, I can’t really remember any of those vocab words. If you’ve seen that show “Are you Smarter than a Fifth Grader,” you will see how people can’t remember things from elementary school. Granted that was a lot longer ago for the contestants than high school, but then again it should be a lot easier than the thing you learn in high school as well. So I think it kind of evens out in that aspect.
There were a lot of classes offered in my high school. However, very few of them taught me things that I will actually use in life. English Lit. doesn’t prepare you for life. Neither does Physical Education. A couple classes to teach me a thing or two about the real world would have been nice, maybe then so much of my time wouldn’t have been wasted in high school like I feel that it was.
