Daily Prompt – Only Sixteen

Tell us all about the person you were when you were sixteen. If you haven’t yet hit sixteen, tell us about the person you want to be at sixteen.

Oh, I was a bit all over the place when I was sixteen. I was focused on my dancing, and riding my bike everywhere. All I wanted to do was hang out with my friends. I was trying to be an individual, and trying to fit in at the same time. I had a major crush on one of my closest girlfriends, but also knew I liked guys as well.  I was sexually confused and raging with hormones. I loved English, Drama, Food Tech and Computer Studies at school, and absolutely despised Health / P.E., Maths, History, Geography and Social Studies. I wore Doc Martens to my Year 10 Formal, and was obsessed with The Spice Girls. My favourite possession was my Discman, and I listened to the Remixes of Aqua’s album Aquarium more than the actual regular album itself. I also discovered just how much I enjoyed all the unknown songs from The Vengaboys… hmmm… I might go see what they have on iTunes….

UPDATE: So after writing this, I then sat up until 3am scouring through the iTunes store looking at all different artists from when I was 16… Aqua, Vengaboys, Steps, Mandy Moore etc etc. Talk about a distraction!!

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Daily Prompt: The New School

You get to redesign school as we know it from the ground up. Will you do away with reading, writing, and arithmetic? What skills and knowledge will your school focus on imparting to young minds?

I wasn’t a fan of school, probably because I was bullied and none of my teachers cared enough to step in or reprimand my tormentors.

If was able to completely redesign school, it would involve a complete overhaul.

I would make english, maths and health the only mandatory subjects, but I would structure it like my senior years in highschool whereby everybody had to pick enough subjects to make up 12 ‘units’. That way, all students would be free to choose the topics that they want to study throughout their high-school years. You wouldn’t be forced to study science, or geography, or history if it didn’t interest you.

There’d be better systems in place to deal with disruptive students and those with learning difficulties… basically I would take everything that was completely wrong with my high school and do the complete opposite so that it would actually function properly…

…and I wouldn’t end up sitting in the back on an English class full of dickheads who think it’s entertaining to throw a pot of glue and bananas at high-speed ceiling fans so they explode all over the class room, and everything, and everyone contained therein.

I wouldn’t force people to learn useless mathematical formulae that will be completely pointless for majority of students once they finish highschool… I’m looking at you trigonometry… You still never told me what x was…

I would have a zero-tolerance approach to bullying. I would have a school counsellor available every day, rather than just once or twice a week.

I would make P.E. mandatory and make it 3-4 times per week. Given that the world is talking about an obesity epidemic, and that it’s a major problem for children and teenagers, I’d be introducing major changes in an attempt to combat this problem. If the school had a tuck-shop / cafeteria, then it would only serve healthy and nutritional foods. There would be no sugar, and either natural sugars, or specific types of sweeteners would be used as subsitutes. We would have a smoothie bar, and nutrition would be a part of the health curriculum, as would healthy cooking classes, in order to give students a better idea of healthier meal choices they could be making and creating on their own.

I would introduce a system whereby every student can have three half-day study leave passes each month. Had a late night and didn’t finish your assingment that’s due tomorrow arvo? That’s okay, use a study leave pass, skip your classes for the morning, spend it in the library and finish your assignment, and pick up your homework from the morning at the same time.

All years would be able to have all homework tasks delivered via email, or school intranet, but all classwork would require to be handwritten. Only essays and assignments will be allowed to be typed, in order to provide a focus on creating humans with legible handwriting. For those with illegible handwriting, they would be required to make it part of their core English subjects.

There would be better behaviour management systems in place to remove disruptive, unsettled and delinquent students from the classroom to allow them more one-to-one attention, counselling and testing.

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