don't wanna be an american idiot

okay, so enough with the mindless babble that has been filling my brain and therefor my blog lately. get ready for a serious post. or semi-serious. or a post about something that should be taken seriously but probably won't because it's summer and that means seriousness is scarce. moving on.

as some of you probably know (and some of you probably don't), i spent ninth grade in saudi arabia at a british school. aside from adjusting to the fact that suddenly the letters IGCSEs inspired more fear in the hearts of students than SATs and that i was suddenly getting points off for writing "my favorite color for airplanes is gray" (note: i always preferred grey with an e) some of the classes seemed to be a lot more advanced than what i was taking in america. it felt like these british kids were getting education shoved down their throats. i reasoned to myself that it was just the different grade system, what with them stopping at tenth and going on to a-levels which in my head were like APs. i mean, they have to shove in more if they're taking less time, right? so my younger self figured, our schools aren't that much stupider than theirs, and i didnt give it anymore thought. i mean, the two biggest computer companies in the world are both american, so we must be doing something right.

recently, i was talking to a friend when she mentioned, all normal and offhandedly, that a british summer vacation is six weeks. six weeks! and suddenly, the generally three month vacation handed out to kids over here seemed a little like overkill. i mean, do they really need to stay out of school that long? (i can say this now because i am no longer in school so a shorter break would not affect me in the least bit.)

if you know me in real life, you may have heard me complaining about the way kids are taught now. remember when we were little, learning to read, and were told to sound out the word? guessing every word that started with "l" before landing on "light" usually got me in trouble. now, my brothers are told to look at the picture and guess what the words are from the starting letter. um, what?? that was just peachy when they were still in picture books, but moving on to chapter books, this means that words they hadnt previously learned are pretty much just skipped over because they (a general they, not just my brothers) cant read them. they cant even sound them out to try and learn them. also, what's with not correcting spelling or grammar because it interferes with their creativity? i learned how to spell and the proper place to capitalize and punctuate and still managed to retain some creativity in elementary school. and my brother's class all had trouble with some science homework, so what does the teacher do? does she explain it so that they actually learn something for once?? no, of course not. she tells them all to just throw it away. that's helpful.

and now with some schools switching to a four day school week because they can't afford to pay teachers for five, well, i just think it's ridiculous. it's always a big joke about how stupid people can be here. we'll post videos of beauty queens who know nothing of geography on youtube. we'll laugh at kids who know more about the history of a video game character than of their country. we roll our eyes at their inability to form a complete sentence or write with legible handwriting and blame technology. what we should really be doing is blaming ourselves and trying to do something about it. the future generation is going to turn out a huge mob of fat, stupid people, and we are letting them.

okay, i'll get off my soapbox now, but think about it. when you are old and depending on this younger generation with your life, i kinda wanna know that they can read and tell the difference between two different medicines.

*American Idiot - Green Day