fast times at [insert your] high

Teachers stand in front of a room of 20-30 people, and the most traditional method of communicating information involves turning your back to write on a blackboard. Then you expect them to teach you information but still pay strict attention to who is doing what in the classroom? It takes time for a teacher to develop that skill. You as the student will certainly have a much better view of what is happening in the room than the teacher does - you are paying more attention to your friends than the teacher anyhow, right?

Teachers are also overworked - they forget that you have other classes, and you forget that they have other classes. If they don't grade every word of every assignment it's because there are 80 of them to grade. At least. You don't have 80 homework assignments ever night or even ever week, now do you? Grading an assignment is almost as time consuming as completing one. Trust me, I've done both.

The reason that all the rules are focused on keeping students quiet and in their chairs is because those are the two things that students constantly do to disrupt the class - talk and move around. Not only are they prevalent actions, they are actions that take away from education. I had my students tell me that I didn't know what it felt like to be them, to have something they wanted to say and not be able to say it. I said to them "yes I do - every day I want to tell you about Physics but you talk over me - that's why we have rules, because I feel the same exact way you do". The rules are actually designed to balance the speaking time between student and teacher, at the teacher's discretion. It's just that it's already so imbalanced in the direction of children who never learned manners from their parents, that to re-balance it always takes the form of making kids talk less. And if you ever wonder why it's only the meanest teachers who have lunch duty? Two words: your fault. Try being nice when 400 kids are throwing their mashed potatoes and chicken nuggets at each other, while making out and dealing drugs.

The reason kids want to move away from their parents is that they have a very short-term, self-centered focus. They think only of what they want, and what they want right now. Anything that gets in the way of that must be bad. They don't have any idea of how much it actually costs to live any kind of good life in the real world - they may buy their own clothes and even pay for their cell phone plan, and gas and insurance on the car, and maybe they actually make the payments on the car loan. But how much does a house cost? How much does it cost to feed your lazy overweight butt every week? How much does it cost to repair the car or buy a new one when it breaks? How much does the water bill and elecrtic bill and gas bill add up to each month? If these kids ever learned to think in the long term, and to think about people besides themselves, they'd be...well they'd be adults. So just wait until they grow up to start expecting it.

I think the other issues mentioned are ones of general psychology even moreso than the last one I mentioned, and need no special insight from a teacher to explain, so I will let this one go at this point. Hope you've enjoyed it.