I’ve always heard people say that the American school system is pretty bad, and I got a prime example of this last week. My teacher of sophomore World History is a 60+ year old, white male with a fascination with YouTube shorts and dad jokes (nothing wrong with this, I love a good dad joke).  His idea of a lesson is a movie/show vaguely related to whatever historic event we are “learning” about, and then allows the class to sit on their phones for 20 minutes. Last Friday at the end of the period, my teacher said he had a book to read to us and that it was “very important.” My history teacher then proceeded to read Walter The Farting Dog. If you are unfamiliar with this story, it is about exactly what the title makes it out to be. My teacher could hardly read the book, as he was laughing so hard he had tears coming down his eyes. Fellow classmates of mine had unsure reactions, not sure what to make of this.

As you can probably infer, not much history has been learned in this class. In my opinion, I have learned more history in my English class. My teacher is similarly an older white male who likes comedy. In this class, we have not only worked on our writing and read works of literacy, but we have explored other art forms and learned how to make new connections. In one of our units he introduced us to resources that are working against hate crime, and allowed us to find new ones to share with our peers. After a bit of research I found the Instagram page @stopaapihate, which calls awareness to crimes committed against Asian American Pacific Islanders. I feel as if this class is a good example of a proper education, with the information being relevant and actually taught.

As weird as the first lesson I mentioned was, it was pretty enjoyable. Highschool learning should have its fun moments, but we are not learning through random movies. America should push creative freedom that will enable us to focus better in the classroom. An example of an activity that fits my suggestion is doodle notes, which is something we often do in English. My teacher plays a podcast or gives a lesson, and we take as much or as little notes as we please. We are encouraged to doodle during this activity as well.

As you probably noticed, these notes aren’t really about an English topic. These notes were taken while listening to the Play Mountain podcast by 99% Invisible, a podcast about Isamu Noguchi and his architectural dreams. This podcast was also used as an introduction to our unit on Japanese Internment camps. I found this unit to be SO informational, and I had never heard about it before. It had not even been taught to me in History, which feels pretty messed up. This podcast may also reveal other problems within the US schooling system, problems that can be related to lack of encouraged creative expression in children and teenagers. America has a lot of problems, and better schooling could lead the new generation to better solve some of them. We need to be teaching the next generations useful information, while still sometimes allowing us to experience Noguchi’s main dream: “to feel like a kid on a playground.”