Making Mistakes and Learning
By Brian Curcio, age 15, Chicago
Published in Be Honest, And Other Advice from Students Across the Country
Life is about second chances, about making mistakes and learning. In first grade, if we got a problem wrong, the teacher would correct it. A fight on the playground would result in a time-out. People didn't look at us on a piece of paper but instead saw who we really were. Not anymore. Now, in high school, it feels to me as though teachers only care about the letters next to your name and your transcript. Once those are tainted, it seems as if you're dead to them. Why can't the world look past the sheets of black and white? Past the small characters that decide it all?
All my life, my parents have told me that I'm special, that my mind holds all of the world's possibilities. They have told me that I should be smart beyond books; that being people-smart is just as vital. People should be able to communicate with one another, not just test well. What's the point of good ideas if you can't express them well? I'd like to see a test for people-smarts.
In my freshman year, I was an academic mess. I had recently transferred, and for me meeting new kids in high school held a much higher value than my schoolwork. The border between work and play was so corroded that by the time my grades came around, they weren't promising. I knew I had more potential. My parents knew I had more potential. But all of the "possibilities" my parents said I had were vanishing before my eyes. The issue was that I was under-motivated and throwing my life away. But was that really the case? When I looked around at kids who were getting A's—the kids who stayed behind after class, the kids who raised their hands to speak—they never seemed happy. I wanted to be engaged, because at one point I do remember enjoying school, but between the worksheets and the monotonous lectures, the excitement of education was lost. I no longer caught the knowledge thrown at me and trapped it in my mind. Instead, I felt stifled by the information until I slipped into a daydream or the dismissal bell rang.
People aren't just computers that hear, memorize, and recite. Beneath the reiteration of facts, there are emotions. There is a person. The all-important studies that are done on child education say that an engaged student will learn more, and I wonder: shouldn't the same hold true for a student who is happy? I believe that enjoying school is one of the benefits a student should receive from his or her education. If students are genuinely happy, they can learn more. My teachers have always tried to hammer information into my mind, but it only falls back out again after the test is taken. What would happen, though, if the teacher didn't have to simply cram in these facts, and kids were happy while learning? Excited by what they learned?
Everyone likes new knowledge. People like being smart. If schools could take a moment of self-reflection and think about how to truly engage a class, make the students enjoy that writing assignment, I'm sure that grades would improve. Beyond that, these graduates wouldn't just have memorized pages. They themselves would be books of knowledge—books with covers, titles, and emotions throughout. These students would transform from just chasing a grade to becoming a well-rounded person.
So many statistics put the blame on the students. Graduation rates, literacy rates—they all come back to the student. In reality, I believe that the root of this problem is that students are not being engaged by their teachers in class. Schools need to account for the students as people, not the fact that they're numbered takers of a standardized test. Teachers should use a range of styles in the classroom, incorporating technology and other tools to interest their students. Teachers should diversify their lesson plans not just from year to year but from class to class. For example, if a class has a specific interest in one of the topics, such as the Incas over the Mayans, then let that class study the Incas more. It's my belief that every kid has the potential to learn. I've had friends who are failing and friends who are acing tests, and the only difference that I've observed is that the successful ones are engaged in school. Everyone has that switch. It's the teacher's job to find it and turn it on.
Unfortunately, most teachers face a major obstacle when it comes to teaching. They have national tests. From the way they have been described to me, these tests, which say who will succeed and who will fail, can take the once-bright spirits of a teen and crush them. These tests conform the very essence of who students are—of who I am—into the rigidity of categories and hierarchies.
In the strictly academic world they want me to live in, you don't get points for asking questions. One day in my history class, we were reviewing the rise of the Nazis. A friend of mine asked the teacher a question, wondering if the rise of the Nazi party was similar to the rise of certain groups in the Middle East. The relation from the past to the present seemed to bring the history to life. But the answer was "It doesn't matter; that's not on your test." So now when my friend goes home and his mom asks what he learned today, he can simply regurgitate the facts. How can a teacher turn away the curiosity of a student? For a student to raise his hand and try to relate—isn't that a teacher's dream? I've always thought the reason to study history was to learn from the past. How can we learn from the past if the present isn't "on our test"?
Rules are rules, and they cannot be broken. Teachers tell us that. Parents tell us that. Maybe it's because if people actually began to think about how our current system worked, then there would have to be change. God forbid anything changes; at the current graduation rate, everything must be perfectly fine. This isn't to say we need to do away with all rules and throw the education system into anarchy, but when you reflect on some rules, and the severity of what happens when they are broken, the figures on both sides don't seem to add up.
My entire education, I've pushed boundaries due to my intellectual curiosity. As long as I can remember, I've been praised for lust for knowledge at teacher conferences. In sixth grade, I wanted to shape the fins on my bottle rocket differently, to see how the bottle would fly. It failed—miserably. But, for me, that wasn't the point. The crash landing isn't the part I remember. My memory is that I could build my rocket how I wanted, and that I could test whether it flew. At the age of eleven, I had the control to follow my curiosity and explore my own ideas, the ones that engaged me in my design technology class. As a result, I continued to love that class throughout school.
In this world, I've found that some people say one thing and mean another, while others don't mean anything. When it comes to the proverb "Kids will be kids," I don't think anyone actually thinks about what this implies. "Kids will be kids" refers to the fact that we all push boundaries and make mistakes. If adults—the rule makers of our system—always say this, then why isn't disciplinary action based on the same principle?
Throughout my education I've been friends with all types of kids: whiz-kids, student athletes, and troublemakers to name a few. Of these kids, occasionally I lost a friend due to harsh, unrestricted disciplinary action against experimenting. The curiosity that we're told to have obviously will lead to kids occasionally trying out drinking, testing out new drugs. These are the little mistakes of adolescence. These miniscule mistakes held drastic consequences - drastic consequences that most likely altered the course of their lives. The consequences altered their life in high school! Perhaps they were not kids? Or do certain missteps close off the opportunity for a second chance? Maybe the proverb "Kids will be kids," should have a little asterisk at the end, signifying that this applies only when the student's parents have enough money to cover the issue or when certain circumstances validate a second chance. In such a rigid system, broken rules shouldn't have multiple resolutions.
I don't know the answers to the rhetorical questions above. I can only slightly grasp the problems. I just don't understand how the basic morals we are taught as kids—that everyone is a unique person—doesn't hold true in a multiple-choice test. There is no bubble to fill in for "I enjoy my life and wake up with a smile." No box to tick for the number of close friends you have. Instead, we fill in bubbles for how much of our life we've signed away to work. Some kids go into that test and might have half their bubbles already gone if they broke a rule a year back, an opportunity that they equally deserve cut off from them. They were curious. They thought outside the box. Unfortunately, the scanner can't read that. In fact, unless what you say is marked with a No. 2 pencil inside the inked lines, it can't read much of anything.
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