I Need to Rant

Pleasing people- it's so overrated. 

You'll never be able to please everybody, so why do I still try? Why do I care so much about my appearance, about saying the right things, about keeping up my facade, when nobody cares? 

But it's not only about me. 

I was in math class earlier this week, and we got onto the topic of awards. Why don't the creative teachers, the exciting teachers, the teachers who care about the students, win the Teacher of the Year award? Why do the teachers that give us 'homework buddies' and strict rules and limited hall passes get the prestigious awards? My teacher had an interesting answer. (I'm paraphrasing, in his words).

"Because we care more about pleasing the students than the administrators. I've won student-nominated awards before, but never an award from the bosses." 

For some reason, that stuck with me.

What's the point of school? I was under the impression that everybody's here for us, for the students, but for some teachers, it's all about impressing the higher-ups and doing a good teaching job, if only to prove that they have what it takes, not to actually help the students learn and grow and understand.

Pardon my French, but, what the hell?

The teachers that should actually be winning the Teacher of the Year award are the ones getting written up and suspended and threatened because telling stories in class isn't going to help the students pass their end of year tests, you know. Because if every single minute of class time isn't used to teach us how to solve radical equations, we've effectively wasted the time. If the teachers that actually help students grow as people don't help those students ace the end of year tests, then what's the point?

I absolutely can't stand it.

In classes like Creative Writing, and math (surprising, I know), we learn more than simply writing words on a page, or drawing graphs. 

We learn about the real world, about dating and heartbreak and loss and happiness and the world, and everything in between. And, to me, that's so much more important than whether we can pass the tests at the end of the year, the ones that exist for the sole purpose of showing the administrators which teachers are doing their job 'correctly'. 

It isn't about the awards. It's not even about the teachers, really. It's about the fact that we live in such a stifled society, that if a math teacher speaks one word that isn't directly related to math, he'll be written up. It's about the fact that the teachers, the ones who care about their students more than their reputations, they're the ones who are scrutinized. It's about the fact that if even a moment of school is devoted to helping students with their actual problems rather than math problems, that's a definite no-no. And for those of you who know the math teacher I'm referring to, you'll understand what I mean. 

That's the problem with our society- no, that's the problem with our world in general. People have an image, a model, a stereotype, and if you don't fit exactly into that, you're wrong. You're written up. You need to be put back into line. 

I don't even know what I'm trying to say here, tbh.

Be different. Be happy that you're different, and if you're bending over backwards to try to please everybody, stop. It'll never happen.

Be the kind of person that cares more about the people they help than the people who look down on them. My teacher likes to tell us that he's a counselor disguised as a math teacher, because who actually goes to their counselor when they need to talk? Teenagers don't like being told who they should talk to, who they should go to. And I love that.

Be you.

Until next time.