Wednesday, 13 January 2010

Britain's education system...

You know the real problem with British school's these days? You know- apart from the obvious incapable dealings with the weather, persistent struggle against the addition of any useful subjects, abhorrence of a decent exam board or system and insistence on 'talking about our feelings.' Seriously, apart from all that, you know the real problem with British education today? Stationary. Well, stationary refunds, anyway.
Because, you see, in the past two weeks I've been doing practice examinations for my GCSE's, (which lets be honest, will be almost completely irrelevant by 2011) and I've got a really big problem with the way my school's been running things. I'm not referring to the 'men' in power's pointless struggle against mother nature and their own pride, or the bizarre tenacity with which the school insists on cramming two weeks worth of exams into one with only half their pupils present. No. I'm talking about the fact that before I travelled my 6,000 miles to go to school, I, like a good little school girl, got myself a new pack of pens. 4 of them, black Biro's, as specified by the exam boards our school has chosen (in it's infinite wisdom) to associate itself with.OK, I'll admit that one was, inevitably lost in the etha, most likely whilst my brother and I conversed in Pig Latin whilst going through security in Paris- (we were a little 'slaphappy' what with having just travelled for 13 hours watching my mini TV go technicolor and trying to convince ourselves the strange pieces of meat in our little tin foil packs really were pork, really...). However, the other three, perfectly fine looking, decent, average black Biro's remained in my possession. I even managed to get them to school.
In fact, I hung onto them whilst I unpacked my things (again), the boarders went on our weekend trip to the closest shopping centre (again) and I got soaked and freezing and hyper in a snowball fight (again).
But now, with my 'actual' GCSE biology, French reading and History exam looming, I find I am without a suitable implement, and I really honestly think I deserve recompensing.
Why you ask? Because, that school has destroyed all three of my lovely new black Biro's in less than two full weeks! No, my physics teacher did not finally lose all sense of reason and put them on the ice in front of his car before running them over repeatedly whilst cackling madly in his latest attempt to shut me up. No, because of our mock exams, all three pens are completely out of ink!
I mean, I know I've been criticised for being somewhat verbose, but it was all the school's fault for setting the questions in the first place- I swear! Really, they demanded that I wrote a sum total of 52 A4 pages so far...honest!
And now look! Three more big exams and I don't even have a pen. Can't even recycle it! I mean it's no wonder they've got problems with excess waste, the amount of exams we're having these days...I mean that's a heck of a lot of black Biro's!
Lets face it, climate change is happening, and it has been for a long time, and always has been going to (ice age anyone?), whether or not it's global warming speeding it up for quite such an eclectic multitude of reasons is debatable, but really, instead of looking back on a past we can't change, shouldn't we be looking forward to future that we can prepare for, and a present in which we can act?
I mean seriously, they're the educators, they ought to be providing the stationary in the first place! And whatever happened to the pencil?

1 comment:

  1. Thankyou Moonhawk for the update! Was beginning to think you had abandoned your loyal readers for good..... Hope the rest of your exams go well.

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