Waiting for Superman

For those of you who seek to reform our educational system this is a great movie to watch during your free time.  I had a moment of clarity when watching and I'm glad I made the conscious decision to dedicate my life to educational change. There is no way you can sit around and do nothing after watching this. You'll want to get up and do something!

Instead of doing my own work right now I am sitting here helping my cousin with an essay she is writing for her english class about a theme in the Iliad. It bothers me that she cares more about "getting by" than actually putting in the time an the energy to actually understand the concepts she wants to discuss in this paper. In a nutshell, she is basically telling me to write the whole paper for her (as if I don't have things to do). I have no problem with "helping" but doing this paper for her defeats the purpose of her getting an education. We are so worried about the letter grade we lose the concept of substance in the midst of our competition. It bothers me that she is unable to put together a decent 5 paragraph paper that consists of a clear thesis and supporting body paragraphs. I blame her teachers for failing to make writing  a priority. She is fine with math and science but her writing needs some improvement. She doesn't understand yet that writing is power. It doesn't matter if you can solve a math problem but how will you communicate if you can't write a decent essay?

This system is broken and it's time to start fixing it from the bottom up. Let's start with some decent teachers.