After School

                One category American excels at is post-high school opportunities. We have so many possibilities for students after graduation.

                College is big here, everyone wants to go to college and for most people college is the only way to have success in life (it is not). Our country is known for having some of the best colleges in the world. Colleges like Princeton, Harvard, Yale, or even less prestigious schools such as U of I or other schools in the area are extremely good schools and offer amazing opportunities. People travel from all across the world just to get an American education at one of these colleges. You see so many foreign students from China, India, Europe, and everywhere all wanting to join in.

                I feel our colleges don’t get enough credit for the great educations they are providing.  Things like the reasonable cost, research and internships also make future after high school extremely bright for Americans. We have amazing people working on research and things like that to better our world and to make everyone smarter. Joining research teams in this country is so much easier and better than everywhere else in the world.  Also, getting internships to learn about jobs and get better credentials is relatively easy. Opportunities arise often and it makes the future of all students in the country extremely bright.

                WE have such a negative outlook on our American education system but the amount of opportunities and options for students after graduation is amazing. It allows people to pursue what they really enjoy and have a happy life.

Education

                The United States education system has been hated on for the past few decades for not posting very good numbers and not keeping up with other countries around the world.

                I’m going to do three blogs this week, the bad about our education system, the good, and I feel the main problem with education – the teachers.

                So let’s first address some issues that have been discussed about how are our country is lagging in education. We are far behind some of the leaders in reading, math and science proficiency. With countries like South Korea, Japan, Canada, and Germany at the top, we can see the United States, the greatest country in the world, falling far behind other countries. Education should be a major priority in our country but to a lot of people, it’s just a bore.

                First everyone’s, including students’; attitude towards school needs to be changed. Education is the future to successful and world-leading country. Students need to realize they are the future and education is what they need to get a brighter future. Learning needs to be cool, nerds need to be the cool ones, and working hard in school should be a normal thing, not just for the smart people.

                I feel like although some programs offered by schools are amazing, they can always do more. Adding funding to schools will always increase student performance and their ability to learn. New opportunities can lead to a better education system, letting our generation of students become the brightest of the bright.

Teachers

                Teachers get so undercut in the school education system. NO one wants to be a teacher, they don’t pay well at all and you need tons of experience to be called a good teacher. Our education system has put all the blame on how teachers don’t care, how students don’t care, and how everyone just hates school. I’ll agree that there are teachers who don’t care about teaching and just do it and there are students who don’t care either. There are good teachers and there are bad teachers.

                Now I have a lot of experience with teachers.   I’m coming to the end of my high school career and I’ve been around different types of teachers for 12 years now. From personal experience, the teacher is the most important part in what I get out of a class. The teacher is the most important part in how much I learn. If a teacher is always there when I need help, bombastic about what they are actually teaching, excited to teach, and love what they do, they are going to be a great teacher. I get so much out of a class when the teacher is enthusiastic, then I become enthusiastic. If they find cool ways to teach and have fun with their students it makes the classroom a fun and amazing place. Good teachers make me want to pursue the topic they are teaching, I could absolutely hate a subject but if I have a good teacher, I could learn so much and do so much and love the subject. Good teachers allow us, the students, to learn so much more.

                But of course, not all teachers are good teachers, there are the bad ones. The ones that don’t care about you, they just want the least work for themselves, the ones who show videos the whole time and read lessons from a script make learning boring. The ones who do the littlest work possible and just give their students busy work are the ones that hurt our education. From personal experience, I learn absolutely nothing with bad teachers. If a teacher doesn’t know what they’re doing, what they’re teaching, or how to even teach, then I don’t learn anything from their class. With some teachers I don’t even bother, I just look up video and use other tools to learn as much as I can in a subject. These bad teachers are the ones that make school boring and I feel like there are sometimes a lot more bad teachers out there than good ones.

                Good teachers influence what we learn. Good teachers make our schools better places to learn and teach us how to become a better person. Some bad apples can just ruin the whole experience. I feel like the main reason our education system is stuttering is because of teachers. I see so many teachers, who just don’t care about their jobs, but there are those few amazing teachers that make school a total blast and I learn so much. If we want education to compete with the rest of the world, we need to find good teachers. We look at countries like South Korea and Finland who are top in all categories, they pay their teachers, and they make teaching a lucrative job, like an engineer or a doctor. These countries will even go so far that they will recruit top teachers from other countries to come teach at their schools. We need to make teachers more valuable here, being a teacher isn’t really the best job, their pay is mediocre with few benefits. When teaching is more appealing, more and smarter people will want to go into teaching, leading to more of those good teachers.  

                We also need to make good teaching the standard and make the teaching scene competitive. Not just standardized tests, ask the students how they feel, have administration watch a few classes, really look into how teachers are teaching to get the best ones. Find those bad apples and get them out of teaching, teaching isn’t for everyone. Getting rid of the bad apples and finding the good apples will make the American education system soar. Students will love coming to school and teachers will love to teach and make their students fulfill their potential. 

Flying

                This month, a Germanwings flight crashed into the Alps. The CO-pilot of the plane locked the pilot out of the cockpit and slowly descended into the French Alps.  This killed all 144 passengers. Read more here (http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32063587)

                This is so unbelievable sad, creepy, and bizarre. The Co-pilot made no contact with anyone and as far as we know, is not a part of any terrorist groups.  The creepiest thing of all, he just sat in a cockpit absolutely calm and silent with hundreds of people screaming as he was killing them all. It is scary that there are people in this world who can kill hundreds of innocent people without any guilt, regret, or thought.

                Flying is a touchy subject; it’s been in the news a lot lately with these missing flights and crashes. People have and are starting to acquire a larger fear to flying. Passengers were afraid there would be a terrorist on their flight.  The national government is afraid of an attack by flying so they have increased security (TSA).  Passengers now are scared that their pilots might turn against them and get them killed. This is a major hit, I felt like the pilot is the one person on the plane I could trust, the one that would look out for everyone on the plane. I won’t be doubting any pilots anytime soon but everyone will probably be a little more careful around their pilots. They shouldn’t have to feel that way, there are thousands of flights daily with thousands of trustable pilots but it just took one for everyone to lose trust in the person who has your life in their hands.  It really makes you want to appreciate and thank the pilots that do their jobs so well.  Pilots have hundreds of lives in their hands and they try their best to make sure we are safe, they shouldn’t be judged, bashed, or hated on just because of one incident. 

NASA

                Now this is a topic where I might begin to rant on so fair warning.   I like this subject and tend to get emotional.

                Science is extremely interesting to me. I love science, its fun interesting, and there is nothing better than learning about our world. Most of all, I love physics. The laws and the world that we discover through math and observations blow my mind sometimes. Science is awesome and our country and world is very determined to learn more science, tons upon tons of resources and a millennium of time have been used to try to unlock the unknown. I want our knowledge as humans to expand so far beyond this world, I want to know all about our universe. In this blog I’m going to discuss how science has been held back and what we can do to not let that happen.

                NASA is a government agency that everyone knows. It works on the deep and dark world outside of ours that is space. The agency has put a lot of people on the moon , taken some of the most beautiful and interesting pictures, help create a giant space station that orbits our planet, sent a robot  to mars to observe the giant red rock, and even sent a manmade object past our solar system. It’s amazing what the agency has done since the beginning of the space race in 1957. NASA has brought humanity a long way but there is still a lot to be discovered.

                Lately though, NASA and humanity has come to a halt on space exploration. After the golden age of space in the 60s, NASA’s budget has been cut severely, extremely severely. From when nearly 4.5% of our government spending was on space exploration in mid-60s, to today when it is at about .5% of our budget. That money is really important to the space industry. Science has been severely cut as well. We could have humans on mars by now and even possibly other planets. That just infuriates me for some reason. This is something I can get really emotion about. To think that we could have been discovering so much more and even gaining more power as a country, but we put space to the backburner and here we are, possibly decades away from setting foot on mars. Exploring our world is natural as humans and just forgetting about it isn’t the right option.

                The budget cuts began occurring in the 70s and lately have begun to increase more and more for many reasons. One is of course the reason we started our space exploration in the first place, competition. That’s right, we can all thank those wonderful Soviets for allowing us explore space. Mountains and mountains of money went into NASA just to beat the USSR, now that they are less competition, we spend less. Although that is the main reason, along with spending being moved to other areas such as our military, there are others. I think another reason is that the next obstacle, Mars, seemed impossible back in that time. Billions and Billions of dollars were spending just trying to get people to the moon and back. Mars is a much heavier task and I think a lot of the moral of our country dropped once we realized, the next step won’t be any easier. Reaching the Moon seemed impossible, it was so far away. Mars is about 150 times farther from Earth than the Moon, which is a lot farther away.

                I want the budget for NASA to increase greatly. I want to see us hit Mars and use our intellect to our full potential. There are a lot smart people in this world who want to see humans go beyond home and conquer the great unknown, we just need the resources to do it. I’m fine with taking out a few billion in national defense, which by the way is 57% of our federal budget. Take a few giant unneeded tanks and put them into the NASA budget, we could see a major increase of breakthroughs in the space world. We could unlock the unknowns of our universe, whatever it is. 

Rooftops

                                This is a quick post.  France has created a new law this month. This law requires that all new buildings must be built with to have either solar panels or plants on their roof.  Read more here (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/20/france-decrees-new-rooftops-must-be-covered-in-plants-or-solar-panels).

                This is an incredible idea and is just what you dream about. It’s what you see in all those cool futuristic utopia books.  With this law being passed in France that story is now coming true. France is taking steps, such as this, to make sure our world is clean and efficient. Other motions such as making public transit free which helps to cut the amount of cars on the road and making use of nuclear energy could make pollution in France non-existent. Here in the US, I feel we need to start implementing these types of steps.  Pass a few laws, even a few small ones, to help make our society cleaner. It may cost money, which seems to always be in short supply but I feel making our world a clean and wonderful place is important and I’m glad France has started making these steps to become a clean utopia.  

Iran

                The Persian Empire ruled and it dominated for a long time. It has probably been one of the most stable regions in the Middle East. When Muslim reform took over, diplomatic issues arouse, specifically conflict between the United States, Israel, and Iran. If you’ve seen Argo, which I would highly recommend as it is one of my favorite movies, you would know about the American hostages jailed in Iran. These, along with other incidents, have led to the United States and Iran to not really like each other that much.

                This week, the Obama administration has made deals with Iran to become better friends and prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. This is a tricky situation to me like everything else going on in the Middle East. Iran is a loose cannon, they have leaders that could very much be going against everyone. Trying to make friends with them could lead to some serious problems. I feel like Obama kind of just settled with the deal made (more here http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/03/politics/white-house-congress-iran-nuclear-deal/). This is a very sticky situation and settling is a bad idea.  Nuclear weapons in unstable countries like Iran are not good. Look at Israel who is being extremely war-mongering because they have nuclear weapons and aren’t afraid to use them.  Countries like this shouldn’t have a nuclear arsenal and we should do everything in our power to not let that happen. We can’t settle.