Interesting homework? Jan 25, 2007 9:36PM PST

Our English III AP teacher gave us a couple articles to read and we have to comment on them next class(tomorrow i.e. Friday so expect an update tommorrow afternoon). One of them was a teacher complaining about how American schools need to blame the kids more often. Her point is that foreign exchange students(mostly of the Asian variety) who don't speak a lick of English get higher grades because they work harder than the whiny brats who have their parents buy into the notion of "if a child fails, blame the teacher". And... she's absolutely right. Teachers don't have control of how much work kids are willing to do. I honestly think some kids believe they have an out with complaining about crappy teachers. Personally, I think this American attitude stems far beyond schools: in our society admitting your wrong makes you weak. We think it's perfectly fine to have ridiculous flaws as long as we admit we have them, and some people go as far as wearing their flaws as a badge of pride. So yes, student's grades aren't ENTIRELY teacher's faults. However, there ARE just plain crappy teachers. For instance, my old World History teacher would do nothing but make us look up crap in the book and put it online through either blogs or something called wikispaces.com. Usually one group would have a chapter to do, divided by each person's section of that chapter. The result was that everyone would know thoroughly anything in their section but wouldn't know jack about the rest of the chapters on a test. Not only that, but more than half the time we had no idea we had a test on test days because... when the hell did we go over this crap? Oh right we didn't. You mumbled something(this guy needed to speak up too) about looking up stuff in the book. Of course we did know we had tests when we did test reviews.... which although they were basically free 100s were completely hit and miss because there was 5 pages of crap on them, and only maybe a page of it total(from various sections) would be used. And sometimes questions appeared on the test that had nothing to do with the review. AND, he would give me 0s on online blogs I did because he didn't check to see I had done them. So many emails I shouldn't have had to send.... Ok so maybe your putting me in the whiner category now. Fine. But the fact is this boring, frustrating bookwork simply did not help me learn jack. In contrast, my US History teacher this year realizes how funny US politics can be and always gives you funny or interesting spins on real US History lessons(and just irrelevant funny stories). Come test time he usually goes over everything about the test right before we take it, but I don't even need that. I can just answer questions on his tests by going "oh right that was that funny story he told about..." and I get 90s or above in there almost always. I can give other examples but I've rambled too long anyway. So that's what I think: there's definitely whiny slacker kids, but there's also definitely crap teachers(though decent people outside class). Your thoughts? UPDATE: Ironically enough, we didn't get to the articles in class, so for homework we're doing a blog on our thoughts.