While reading an article on Time.com called The Myth About Boys I was surprised by statistics I read regarding education with boys and girls. In a very small nutshell, it says that girls generally do better in school than boys. Now, that's a REALLY general statement, so I would deffinately reccomend reading the article. It's four pages of words, but it's not a terrible read. I tried to get through four pages of "How to Leave Iraq"... didn't happen. Ah, the small attention spans of teenagers. At any rate, here's one quote that disturbed me:

The standardized NAEP test, known as the nation's report card, indicates that by
the senior year of high school, boys have fallen nearly 20 points behind their
female peers. That's bad, not because girls are ahead but because too many boys
are leaving school functionally illiterate. Pollack told me of one study that
found even the sons of college-educated parents had a 1 in 4 chance of leaving
school without becoming proficient readers.

Ouch. My soul. How in the world do you get through high school without being
able to read!? I see that as a failure on the teacher's part, mostly. I understand that not every student can become a CEO or a doctor or a lawer. Some people just aren't academically inclined (which is intirely different that academically incompetant; there was quite the fight about that on the reality show Beauty and the Geek. I just made a B&TG reference. I might just be a nerd.).

At any rate, not becoming a CEO is far different than not being able to read proficiently! Good Lord in Heaven, reading proficiently doesn't mean you have to go through "Crime and Punishment" and be able to do a 100-page synopsis on plot, characters, and the symbology of cheese in the story. I should research what the standards are. I do know, though, that they're reasonable.

That's so frustrating to me, to be trapped in a school system in which roughly 25% of graduates can't friggin read! How are these people supposed to get good jobs? God help them if they start a family and still earn minimum wage because of the flaws in the education system!

Though I must pause for a moment to say something positive about our education system and be a little less judgemental and a little more understanding. Schools do produce CEOs, doctors, and lawers. They do provide a quality education for those who really want it. I've been blessed enough to be in advanced classes at my high school. I've really learned a lot from those. Also, my high school's drama program is really good. We're pretty poor, not gonna lie, but we still do five major productions a year, and two productions of student-directed one act plays. The high school one town over, though, isn't as lucky. Though they have more money than us, they only put on three productions a year. That's it. Sad, really.

I sympathize with the delima teachers face while teaching general classes. I was in a US History class this year, opting out of the Advanced Placement US History becuase of its reputation for destroying GPA's (unless, of course, you're a history nut or have a history teacher for a parent, neither of which apply to me). I was bored out of my MIND. We literally wrote down what the teacher said, word for word, and then did worksheets. WORKSHEETS! Anyway, there were still kids who were struggling with the class.

So the challeng is: How do you provide a class that caters to all levels of -I hesitate to say intellegence- academic-type-stuff that is challenging to students who are easily bored, but still not have a class that is impossible for a not-so-academic-type to learn something from because they don't grasp it.

Maybe someone'll figure it out.