Karen+F’s+OpEd+Article

== =**"I Want a Nerd Revolution!"**=

**//Examining the Need for Change Within the Foothill Administration//**
media type="file" key="karenf-muckraker-0910.mp3" A friend of mine recently told me he was running to be on the Burbank school board. He already has several individual endorsements, and is seeking one by the BTA, despite the fact that he's technically still a senior. Since the position is a part-time job, he's planning on attending community college simultaneously.
 * by Karen F.**

In our school, we don't have such proactive students. It might be just the luck of the draw, sure, but I think it's something more than that. Specifically, the administration is doggedly faithful to what they believe will help us prepare for success: shipping us off to college. And while that's all well and good, they spend so much time focusing on getting into college we're unprepared for actually being in college. At Foothill, there's a certain pressure to get good grades, get into a good college, and then later sometime in the distant future, get a good job. The problem is, that job isn't that far away, and we aren't getting access to the tools we need to determine what that job is going to be.

The school is required by law to do some kind of career exploration with students for a minimum amount of time. (I forget the exact number of hours.) Unfortunately at Foothill that translates into Mrs. Kapala making us take inane quizzes on bridges.com that don't reflect our abilities at self-evaluation, and are so ridiculously simple it's intellectually insulting. The careers listed are conventional and don't account for the variety that in reality exists in the real world. Not all "dramaturgs" are going to do the same thing, as the infantile descriptions imply. Bridges makes no acknowledgment towards the numbers, either - it completely disregards the fact that some jobs are more plentiful than others. No matter how well one might be suited for a particular career, it's impossible for everyone to have the same job, even though "dramaturg" was on most of my friends' lists of jobs. My point is that these instructions aren't informative, and aren't actually applicable to the real world. In trying to prepare us for life after college, Bridges fails miserably. By extension, so does the administration, by refusing to deign to educate students and instead leaving important life decisions to a silly, outdated website.

And looking at the nearer future, we find even more incompetency in regards to preparation. The administration at least tried to tell us what was going to happen after college - but what about during? Absolutely NOTHING has been done about deciding college majors. Teachers individually have mentioned in passing that a degree in English isn't very practical, and that people in Bioscience usually end up studying medicine. And while that's incredibly helpful when I'm trying to decide what I want to focus on, which classes to take, and what my priorities are, it shouldn't be the teachers' responsibility to tell students about college. That's the administration's job. Foothill is supposed to prepare us for college, but I feel like there's a huge gap in my knowledge in regards to majors that I have to fill in with research on my own time - research that could have been done at school instead of taking those silly Bridges quizzes. There are a lot of questions left unanswered by these "career exploration" days - questions that shouldn't just be ignored or answered on a case-by-case basis by a counselor. This information needs to be widely available, and the Foothill administration isn't letting it proliferate.

Instead, they focus on just getting into college - not only through mandatory "instruction," but by special Foothill sanctions that are in all honesty, jumping through hoops. Everyone is required to take a science their junior year - something that isn't widely publicized until well into sophomore year, meaning people who might normally just drop science freshman or sophomore year, and take it their junior year, leaving their total at two years are tricked into taking three. I'm not opposed to taking three years of science; I plan on taking four - but the method in which the administration achieves the result of three years is a bit shady. Honestly, people should be able to decide for themselves if they want to take a class if it's not a graduation requirement.

This brings me, of course, to EDA. To be completely candid, I hate EDA with a fiery burning passion. To be politically correct, I don't believe it effectively instructs anyone and instead is one of the classes people refer to as a babysitting service. The "technology" used is defunct and esoteric, and for the majority of students in the class, is something they mastered in elementary school. More than a few times freshman year, it seemed to me that the students knew more than the teacher. But there was no escaping that brain-sucking hour and a half. I've heard the administration used to have an option where one could test out of that class designed for kindergartners and take a class that was actually useful and not just a waste of time. Of course, the class was later discontinued due to budgetary reasons, and now everyone is stuck with learning that the big red X in the corner of the screen makes the program go away, even if they built said program themselves.

There is absolutely no way around such trivialities, especially those that come into play senior year. Why do we have to be "heroes" to graduate? A better question is why community service is required in the first place. The answer, of course, is simple: the administration thinks community service will help us get into college. While that's true to a point, seventy-five hours is a bother. Colleges don't even look at less than 500 hours, and the 75 hours are so regulated it's nearly impossible to do them. I personally have no problem with volunteering, and probably would have well over a hundred hours from organizations excluding FIRE by now, if I had kept track. It's the documentation Foothill requires that destroys the system of giving back. I have turned in exactly three of those many hours, because of the excessive paperwork involved that (I suspect) isn't even read. Those three hours were turned in only because of Foothill's ridiculous rule that one needs to volunteer for at least two approved organizations, for a minimum of three hours each. Since FIRE gives a copious amount of hours that are documented for me, I didn't bother jumping through the hoops the administration set up in the hopes of encouraging me to go to college.

I already know I'm going to college; I don't need them to prod me into doing community service. I feel I should be able to be admitted on my grades and extracurriculars, not because I sat in a room every day for a half hour during a study hall with a fancy acronym. The whole program is puerile, and from the people I've talked to the only reason anyone stands being a FIRE crew leader is because of the community service, the misnomer of "leader" and the cord at graduation. Colleges like the idea of applicants being leaders, and for those who are unfortunate enough not to rig a club's elections so they get an office to put on apps, FIRE is an easy in. FIRE, in theory, is a great idea. In practice, it is a total failure. (Es un fracase total, much like the new TPRS Spanish curriculum.) And the administration has once again failed to realize the inefficiency of the program. FIRE crew leaders are superfluous - the kids who are going to work, will work. The kids who never do their homework at home aren't going to do it during FIRE, regardless of the presence of FIRE leaders. Personally, I disliked FIRE when I was in it because as a ninth grader I never had lots of homework I needed to get done. I had looked forward to being on the other side as FIRE crew, but I quickly realized it's even more monotonous. It doesn't particularly encourage students to have "mentors" available to them, because in my experience as a mentor I've only ever helped a student with homework twice. It doesn't encourage the mentors, either - I find my soul is being slowly sucked away into the mire during the dull period after the even duller Spanish 3.

I'm not saying I'm completely against the administration at Foothill, though they definitely have their faults. If I had the time and the patience, I could probably write thirty pages about the recent class president elections, the fixation about blue tape on the posters, ISPE, PE in general, the cafeteria, the problems with forming the Quidditch Club, the Renaissance rally, (which wasn't bad enough - then they had to mix up the pasta. Thanks.) the lack of cover on rainy days, the library, the cancellation of Culture Day in Spanish, Renaissance Fridays, lack of trig books in the classroom, the Dustons, the school policy in the agenda that essentially establishes a totalitarian government, grade inflation, and other such problems I don't have time enough to list. First and foremost, however, is administration's attitude toward getting into college. They're focusing on that letter of acceptance, not actually preparing us for going to college or giving us real-world skills. We're going to graduate with little to no applicable knowledge. We might have four valedictorians with a 5.0 GPA this year, but in real life there are no GPAs. In real life, the administration isn't going to be there to force us into things. The sooner they realize that, the sooner we'll have success, instead of just a handful of acceptance letters.

Actually Karen, it is more complicated than this...If you have vista, then its a big BLACK X....it matters... - Ashish