Centuries ago teachings primarily focused on life skills rather than academic knowledge. Generally, young males were taught outdoorsmanship and young ladies were shown housekeeping tasks. In that period in time those skills were imperative for survival. Today, schooling has drastically changed. Instead of teaching life skills, modern schools tend to focus on academic knowledge. High Schools make the effort to prepare their students for life as an adult. Classes are given to teach students how to manage their finances and avoid living paycheck to paycheck. However, a textbook will never provide a real, hands-on experience. In order to create a desirable learning experience, a combination of knowledge and wisdom is essential, accomplished through …show more content…
Walt Whitman expresses this concept in his poem entitled When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer. He writes, “Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself.” He incisions learning in solitary as his ideal place for education. Whitman shares this desire with numerous students. However, school system struggle with accommodating to each student’s preferred learning environment, and adjusting for every student is impractical. Earlier in Whitman’s poem, he writes, “When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them”. Whitman appears to point to the fact that this type of knowledge is of less importance than learning from the world around him. However, school teaches many things that cannot be …show more content…
Over the years school curriculums have become more difficult and intense. For many students, their focus has drifted from learning and making an effort to understand the material to seven hours of memorizing. Students hold onto information for only as long as necessary. Their focus is not trying to enhance their knowledge to better themselves in the future. A large part of the problem includes the expectations put on young adults attending high school and college. A large emphasis is placed on these students to take higher classes, receive higher grades, find a part time job, and have social life.These expectations push students to forget the purpose of school. This causes the current learning system to be ineffective. School systems need to create an arrangement to capture the students attention and present information in a way that students have the desire to
Faust, Drew, and Wynton Marsalis. “The Art of Learning.” USA Today. 02 Jan 2014: A.7. Sirs Issue Researcher. Web. 26 March 2014.
Clearly, all students should learn the basic things that every adult should know throughout their life. A majority of students have to go through real world situations on their own, and they though...
During my first few days of sophomore year at Stuyvesant High School, I saw how the ways of thinking were diverse in each of my classes. In my European Literature class, where, in our first reading assignment, we questioned the purpose of education itself. I always went with the flow in my learning, and never stopped to say to myself, “Why am I doing this to myself?”. However, once I read Live and Learn by Louis Menand, I started to think about Menand’s three theories of college and juxtapose each of them to my experience so far in high school. In the end, I concluded that many of my classes followed the main points of Theory 2, which was the theory that I mostly agreed with when I read the article for the first time.
In one of the sections from the poem, “Song of Myself” Walt Whitman starts out with a child asking a question, “What is the grass?” Grass is a symbol of life. God, who created both the heavens and the earth also gave birth to life. When Whitman refers to grass as a “handkerchief of the Lord” (7), as a gift. When people look at the grass, they do not think of it as a creation but rather just a plant. Whitman refers to the grass as “a child, the produced babe of vegetation” (11, 12). Here, the grass is a metaphor for the birth of a child. In often cases, the birth of anything is celebrated because it symbolizes a new life, a new beginning.
Society pushes today's youth towards higher education. The goal of grade school is to prepare the students for middle school. The goal of middle school is to prepare the students for high school. And finally the goal of high school is to prepare the students for college. The entire structure of education is to prepare youth for the next level of education. The problem with this system is that not all students are college material, as seen in the essay The Case Against College by Caroline Bird.
Walt Whitman poem is about the marvel of astronomy. He wanted to learn about the stars. He went and heard an astronomer. He tells, “When I heard the learn’d astronomer, When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me.” All the data about astronomy was laid out in front of him, but this did not captivate his interest or filled his curiosity. It mad things worst. His plan to see the beauty in the stars was turned to boredom and sitting in a tiresome, lackluster lecture. He writes, “How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick.” The lecture, data, and astronomer were not the beauty he wanted to see. The visual experience is what he wanted to see. The silence and view of the stars was better for him than the lecture and data. The beauty is what he really wanted. He did not want the hard facts.
My theory is that the scientist are just as appreciative of nature as the poet Walt Whitman. While I do believe this I also do agree with the writer of the essay that science does "Sucks the beauty out of everything. Reducing it all to numbers, tables, and measurements."(Science and the Sense of Wonder pg. 249) However I also feel that science explained while it is beautiful because it tells us why we see blue as blue, red as red, or green as green. Scientist don't just look at a deer and the first thing they do is take measurements and study it sometimes they just look at deer to look at deer. While yes 9 times out of 10 we do unethical things like experimenting on animals but it is just as bad as those people who are going out and shooting deer yet people say "They're getting out into nature." At least scientist aren't murdering for
Walt Whitman’s poem Time to Come explores Whitman’s curiosity of what happens when people die. Rather than taking a pessimistic approach, his writing is more insightful about the experience. The title alone introduces an aspect of his purpose; to point out that dying is inevitable. With Whitman captures the reader’s attention and shares his curiosity with vivid images, sophisticated diction, and his use of metaphor and personification in Time to Come.
This teacher talks all of facts, and seems to not care about the feelings of his students. "When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me... How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick." These lines from the poem shows what lecturing strictly facts can do to a student. The student featured in the poem dreams of leaving the class and looking at the stars, while the teacher, an astronomer, drones on about facts and figures of the stars.
The purpose of a high school education is to prepare one for college and ultimately, the workforce. By the end of freshman year, in high school, the average student has learned a sufficient amount of material in enough subjects that he or she can be considered "well-rounded" in his or her studies. This is because the rate at which material is covered in schools, across the nation, has increased dramatically compared to the past. Students now learn more advanced curriculum at a younger age, and this continues to become more evident year after year. High school has now become more focused on teaching students a small amount of information on several essential subjects, rather than having them focus deeply on the subjects they seek to pursue in their career.
Whitman: “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” Whitman uses many literary devices in this poem to tell his story. The poem is divided into two halves. In the first half, the poem sets place in a lecture room. The narrator is a bored student who is listening to the astronomer’s lecture. He signed up for the class because he enjoys looking at the stars and space, but the course did not meet his expectations.
High school seniors takes deep breaths and parade onto the stage. The beginning of a new chapter awaits as they make the journey from one point of the stage to the end. They reflect on what they have been taught in those many years of high school. The most terrifying fact while graduating high school is the next step: making it on their own. Because they have taken part in the appropriate classes, the students are certain that they have gained the correct knowledge to begin making their mark on the world. In high school, it is crucial to achieve the appropriate classes in order to feel ready to take on the world ahead as an adult. However, many students lack proper education. One key example is financial literacy. Financial literacy is the
Some believe that life follows a timeline and everyone’s lives have been planned out. Cummings’ “since feeling is first” and Walt Whitman’s “When I heard the learn’d astronomer” show us that life is too short to worry and that we should follow our own life paths. Cummings’ poem suggests that those who concern about living life in order, will not truly enjoy things in life as simple as a kiss. Whiteman’s poem shows that the speaker learns that looking past what the astronomer teaches and the structure of learning, he can find beauty in what he loves. Though “since feeling is first” by E.E. Cummings and Walt Whitman’s “When I heard the learn’d astronomer” have few differences, the two poems similarly demonstrate that life should not be lived by a specific structure through poetic techniques such as the use of
Emphasis and importance is supposed to be put on the learning going on in school. However, when the teacher and administration is more concerned with getting the right assignments done and get enough information out to have a certain amount of exams at certain times, the learning process fades and loses its significance. The effect of all this pushed on both the student and teacher is short-term memorization, which itself can end the learning process(Kohn 8). This short-term memorization takes away the substance and meaning gained by actually learning something. With the loss of meaning, it becomes more difficult to remember much of the information, creating a lower resistance to
Having explained the reason most children have become disheartened at the thought of school, I now turn my attention to the students who do realize school’s educational value. These are the students that will continue to prosper throughout their lives because they realize the extreme importance of education. There is a secret, yet not so secret, motivation behind their determination to exceed standards and expectations in school. The secret they withhold is their overwhelming desire to be successful in the future.