Iowa Test of Useless Skills

                Our school has just finished taking the Iowa Assessments which were not difficult for me personally, but I always hate being judged by people who do not really know me and compare me to everyone else in the nation. For those of you that do not know what they are, it is a standardized test given across either the nation or just Iowa, I cannot recall at the moment but that is not very important. I feel that because the United States heads of state feel insecure about the future of education due to the quickly advancing “geniuses” in China, they put more and more importance into school. This, at first, sounds like a good idea, because with school, the students will be educated and learn a lot, which will then carry into life. Anyone who has ever attended or is in a high school knows that this is not even close to the truth.

                School has always been “eat, regurgitate, and forget” and I am not just saying this with no credentials, I am at the top of my class and I will say that I often do this. I can also safely say that if you gave me a test on everything that I learned in my freshman year, with a bit of luck, I would say that I could maybe get half of them right. Even the more prestigious Advanced Placement classes are subject to this, though all of the teachers I have had have said, “You are going to need to this remember this material, because the entire rest of the year builds off of this material,” and I do remember the information… at least until the end of the year comes about, which is when I do not have to be graded on how “smart” I am. I do pass the class with a good grade, but it doesn’t have any actual real life value or application after the class. Even if the class would have an effect on my life, my school does not present it in a viable way.

                One of the problems with me taking any applied classes is because those are usually labeled as the “dumb kids’ class” because at our school, an Advanced Placement class gives a lot more bonus grade point average points than a regular course would give. For example, our school’s accounting class is not taken by any of the class’s highest ranked people, because many of them are expected to just take one of the two advanced classes, either calculus or statistics. I think the school should have more applied courses that people actually see the reason in learning it.