account whenthey are promoted. As a result, many students feel bored and as though the concept ofschool is a compulsory endeavor which is constrictive and dull (Sarason 4). It is obviouswhy this does not work. No one can learn in an environment like that.Another problem concerns practicality. Many of the subjects and classes dontreveal to the student how it will be useful to them in the present or the future. I canremember sitting in algebra class thinking to myself and saying to my friends, Where inthe WORLD am I going to need to know how to subtract x from both sides? Of course,I have found myself using what I learned in algebra to figure out more problems than I canremember from percents to gas mileage. The problem is, where I picked up some of thealgebra I would need, I did not pick up all of it. That is true among many students in highschool, if not even to a lesser degree. Relevancy and validity are left out of the classroomsmainly because of approach. Algebra problems could contain practical uses of theequations (some do, most do not). The estimated time of arrival of two trains leavingfrom different stations and traveling different distances is one of the least practical wayssomeone can learn. Show students how to balance checkbooks. Show students not onlyhow to compute interest, but how and why it is important. I remember being shown howto compute interest but what interest was and what it might mean to me in the futurecould have prevented my abuse of my credit cards. By showing practical, important usesfor these subjects, students are learning about practical, life experiences. Not only arestudents learning, but they are being prepared for life outside the classroom.Another big problem with education deals with history. There are plenty of historyclasses and plenty of focuses. All of them fail to show the importance of history. Theyfail to show how the present contains the past (Sarason 4). Human accomplis...
