By Tyler Kacalek
Many students of today’s age find school troubling, causing them stress and anxiety due to assignments, due dates, and upcoming tests. While it is important for students to be challenged, school should not have an effect on students’ mental health and should not make students feel worse about themselves by any means necessary.
According to deconstructingstigma.com, kids usually develop things such as social anxiety disorder, generalized anxiety, and depression which can make it harder to focus in class at around the ages of 5-17.
Students as of recent feel like grades define who they are, and will do anything to achieve better grades, even if it means losing sleep, missing other activities, or neglecting time with their peers. This is one of the many problems with the education system, and why something needs to be done to improve the mental health of students and increase their chances of success in their future.
Another example of a problem of the education system can be seen as the increasing power of AI, and how easy it can be to fake things today. For example, teachers sometimes abuse AI to create assignments instead of using the given curriculum for their students, and result in students not learning what they are supposed to be taught.
On the other hand, students can sometimes abuse AI to do various things such as cheating on assignments, generating inappropriate images or content, or simply just staying off task during an assignment.
AI is overall a very useful tool, and can be used in many different ways for students and people in general to gain more knowledge, but it should not be used in settings where students are required to learn from a teacher, or where a teacher needs to teach a class. Students should be able to rely on their teachers in order to learn, and teachers should be able to rely on the curriculum that their schools give them to teach their students.
Another way that schools need to be fixed is the fact that more variety needs to be implemented in the schools themselves, and the curriculum provided. A quote from Benicia High senior Carter Guevarra states, “I feel like most students need to learn by doing something they can interact with and learn with at the same time, rather than just listening to lectures for hours on end.”
The problem with students learning in modern classrooms is that most of their classes don’t engage with them at all, and just spew random knowledge out of them without that knowledge being retained.
In order for a teacher or a school to actually get a student to learn something, they need to conduct activities or something fun that the students can interact with while still learning the curriculum. This would create a better understanding of the topic in the students mind, and would allow them to have fun in a school setting at the same time.
A way we could fix the education system, or at least try to fix the education system would be by using new forms of technology that are reliable and great at teaching students new information, while still being interactive and entertaining.
Something like a new website or app that could teach students curriculum while still keeping them entertained could ultimately teach them new things and knowledge. While also preparing them for their future of learning past college.
Instead of giving lectures every day, teachers could then rely on this new form of technology designed specifically for teaching students information, which would give the teachers a break while also keeping the class entertained and learning.
The last way that we could fix the education system is through the current grading system and standards we have as of current. So many students feel that grades define them, and the idea of pushing grades on kids just trying to learn is horrible because it expects too much of them. Grading should simply be seen as a marker or indicator of how well a student is learning a material, but also how well that teacher is teaching that material, and being held accountable for teaching the students.
beniciapaw.com 