Middle School...

            Let us talk about botany, a subsection of biology. My school does not offer botany as an “important class” and the same goes for other science classes like ecology, geography, and astronomy. I am sure everyone has heard that story where a middle school student, usually a sixth grader wants to be rebellious, like most sixth graders are, and decides to try drugs for the first time. Then you hear all about how he wants to buy weed, and ends up smoking it, but after a while, he becomes enlightened when he realizes that all this time, he has just been smoking oregano. In fact, my friends and I were joking about doing this, by selling oregano to middle school students as a joke and to fundraise for our club. Keep in mind it was only a joke and we do not condone the use of drugs, unless you are living in Colorado, in which case we do.

            My middle school classes were all terrible, as in I learned next to nothing in them except for a few catchy phrases, like “There actually is no such thing as cold, but instead, a lack of heat,” so interesting, but exactly how does that happen. I think that middle school classes should be a lot more interactive with the students, because middle school was an extremely hard time, and I can personally testify to that, and this is actually where many students decide on how they want to live their life or when they decide to do drugs or take alcohol, which all might affect the development of their brain much later in life. Students will often come to regret their decision later in life, and so if classrooms or schools were more interactive and encouraged students to actually learn, instead of trying to strip them of all individuality. This is shown by the Calvin and Hobbes comic about snowflakes, shown here.

            I also think that parents play a deciding factor in a student’s behavior, as in the students will often model their parents, or at least how their parents want them to act. This was always me, because I always kind of was the child that my parents wanted their life to be, as in go to one of the best colleges and earn tons of money. Personally, I was fine with a mediocre college with a mediocre life, and it was not until high school when I realized that my ambitions did not align with my parents.