Rant
In 2 days there's gonna be a pretty big event in my school for 11th graders (or whatever grade it is for students aged 15-16). We're gonna recieve our oh-so-fancy diplomas for passing some shitty exam. It baffles me how they put so much effort in congratulating people for succeeding at an exam that has 98% success rate, instead of focusing on things that actually matter. It's the way things are in french schools. No one really cares if a student is bright and could have good potential, all they care about is things that they would realise are completely retarded if they actually looked at the outside world.
I'm very thankful for not being born in france, I can actually get a perspective on this country and kinda see things from outside the box. When you get born in a family that does many silly things for no reason and you never get to look at other families, you'll never really realise that those things are silly and you shouldn't be doing them. And even if you grow up and do look onto other families, chances are you'll be so used to your habits that you won't even think about questioning your ways of doing things.
This is my conception of france and why it sucks. Usually when someone offers a shitty idea and it is accepted among the people, later on in the future they will realise it's shitty and they'll cancel it, but that's where something went wrong in france. We are still stuck with primitive rules and mentalities from 1800 but no one with enough power to stop it actually questions it, and everyone got used to it. I generally dislike things that could easily be more effective where other people don't care about it, but this is more than that. This can also ruin my potential future and that's why I'm angry.
I'll just give you a few examples of specific things I find stupid in my school (and apparently my school is one of the most tolerant ones in France as it is international; I feel sorry for the other people):
If you're most than 5 minutes late to a class you need to go to see some woman in the administration and tell her why you were late, and ideally she will write a little note for your teacher to say that you are allowed to go into class. If, however, she judges that your excuse for being late is not acceptable (or if you have no excuse at all) you are not allowed to go in class and you must spend the rest of the time in a room filled with other idiots who did stupid things and got punished.
If you are absent in a class, you must present your excuse, and if you have none (like when i overslept morning classes many times this year) you aren't allowed to go to this specific class until the next day if you got your parent's permission with an excuse, or if you call your parents on the phone and ask them to tell this woman you are allowed to go in class.
WHAT THE FUCK! why the FUCK would they not let someone go to a class that HE WAS ALREADY ABSENT TO?! Is that their solution? Make you absent to this class AGAIN so you can be sure you'll have to spend 4 hours at home getting the lessons from your friends and writing them on your note book? WTF!
Just the other day we were in economics class and this guy was 5 minutes late, the teacher told him to go to the woman and he came back 30 minutes later with another woman who said "the woman was not there so this student couldn't get his permission to go to class, so he had to wait in the room but no she is back and it's all ok". what the FUCK! this guy was 10 times taller than her, and they treat him like he's 5 year olds or something. This happens no matter how old you are or who you are, even 18 year old people can get stuck in this "room".
Another thing that bothers me is having to study a bazillion things that I don't give a shit about. I always see people complaining about math lessons and asking "why do i have to do this? When will I ever need to know this math in my life if I want to be a <xyz job>? ill just buy a calculator to pay my bills". As much as I disagree with this behaviour and think that this world would be a better place if everyone supported science, logic, and common sense, I do agree that people should not have to study things they don't give a shit about at this age. I agree with this because I have to study ridiculous things in subjects like french, economics, literary analysis.
I won't even dicuss literary analysis with you because I don't think it's worth the effort. We all know it's COMPLETE bullshit as demonstrated by the xkcd web comic. People derive absolutely ridiculous ideas from texts that don't suggest anything. You know when something is bullshit if you can give 1000 different interpretations of it and all of them will be considered valid by literary critics. That's not the point of my original argument though, because why literary critique may be retarded, my argument is that we should not have to study things we do not want to study. It's ok that you learn this stuff when you're 10 year olds, but once you're 16 or 17 and you decide something doesn't interest you at all, guess what, studying it more will probably just make you hate it more.
This is why I admire England for its A-level school system. I would be much more satisfied with my life if I only studied the things I want. My teachers think that I don't want to study, that I don't want to learn. Heck, last year they apparently even thought that I was doing it on purpose so I could go back to Israel, obviously they are missing the point. If I had only math, physics, and computer science classes, I am confident that I would be a lot more motivated to study at home. However, when i come back from school at 6 o'clock every day after 10 hours of stupid shit, I don't even want to study the subjects that most interest me (vis a vis physics and mathematics mostly).
This is how our school is very effective in one area: making students dislike studies. I find myself in a class of people who are already not very bright to begin with, and additionally, in the process of being in this shitty schools for so long, have lost interest in subjects like maths. Well, I don't know if they lost interest or not, because it seems like the huge majority of the school studies a lot at home. However I presume with confidence that they are only doing this because they "have to" and that's what they are used to. I'm actually starting to question my theory about french people accepting this shit only because they are used to it, as in this international school many students from across the world are not acting differently than the french students. Perhaps it's just me, perhaps something went really wrong in my life which made me become a failure at school. Or maybe, as I would hope to think, the problem isn't with me, it's with the school.
Sometimes, due to my grades at school, I'm actually not sure if I'm a retarded person or a genius. Usually I just gain confidence in the fact that I won this french logic and maths contest thing, but still I cannot help but notice that it's too easy to always say "the problem is with them, not with me", because I see students who are retards who always say it, though I hope it's not for the same reason. I would like to think that I'm a smart person, and the reason that I'm not doing well at school is because I'm smart and I don't want to co-operate with this stupidness, as much as this view of things may look stupid. My physics teacher, who actually recognizes my intelligence, advised me to go to a special school for people who learn fast, but I can't go there as it's only for ages 10-16 (ill be 16 on my next school year). It made me think about einstein, who also failed at school when he was young, but I don't see the point in comparing myself to him as most of the other great theoretical physicists such as max planck, richard feynman, diarc, schrodinger, etc all excelled at their studies. bah no more characters. I guess most of you didnt read half of it anyw
