What We Teach Too Often

My parents visited this last weekend and I heard my mom say "shit" more times in one minute than in my entire life. She was reading an excerpt from the book Muchacho by Louanne Johnson about one kid's experience with school. He points out something that too often is true: We teach crap to tests rather than real things that actually matter. I liked the excerpt so much and it aligned with my view of some of the major problems with our education system, that I'm sharing the passage with you all. Enjoy.

That’s the kind of stuff they should be teaching us in school. It’s okay to learn algebra and biology and grammar and all that stuff, but you could always learn that stuff from a book all by yourself. They should teach us the stuff we really need to learn--like how to make somebody really love you and how to turn of that little voice in your head that tells you what a loser you are and how to teacher your dog to pee where it’s supposed to, and how to get over being sad when your little cousin dies, and how to talk to your father without both of you getting so mad. But they probably couldn’t each us stuff like that in school even if they wanted to, because if they teach something in school they have to give you a test to make sure how much you learned.

They need to stop giving so many tests in school because they’re making everybody hate school, even the kids who used to like it. If they have to give so many tests, at least the could give the kind where you have to make up your own answer and not just guess which one is right. Primo says a monkey could pass a multiple choice test fifty percent of the time and he’s probably right because one time T. J. Ritchie got everybody in our math class to put down all C’s or else all B’s for the test and then take a little nap for the rest of the test period. T. J. got busted for being the mastermind of the whole thing but they didn’t expel him because the kids who put all C’s passed the test, including me. In fact, that was one of the best math grades ever which was probably pretty embarrassing for the math teacher who made up that test.

“They got the whole thing backasswards,” T. J. said when we were sitting outside the principal’s office waiting for his mother. “They keep giving all these test because half the kids in New Mexico flunk out of school because they can’t read or do fractions,” T. J. said. “But they keep teaching the same stupid shit. That’s why they keep getting the same stupid test scores.” He grabbed my notebook and drew a picture of a dog. He drew a giant pile of steamy crap behind the dog’s tail and a big bowl in front its head that was filled with schoolbooks. T. J. draws real good, almost as good as Primo who could probably have been a professional artist but he flunked out of art class because the teacher said he had to draw pictures of a chair and a vase and a bowl of oranges instead of lowriders and couples dancing the tango and sexy girls with tattoos on their nalgas.

“You keep feeding the dog the same crap,” T. J. said, “you get the same shit. You can test that shit and test that shit and test that shit and it’s still going to stink because mierda is mierda.”