FinalsWTF

It's exactly 1:12 am right now. I have school today! Aaand, I have

finals

tomorrow.

Finals tomorrow, and I have homework due in every class today. What's up with that?? I've been listening to the same six songs on repeat for the past three hours, and before it has even begun, I'm starting to get a little sick of this whole finals week thing. Winter break was nice and all, but can you actually call that two weeks of nothing a break?

Oh yeah, sure I'll go ahead and take two weeks off to do something fun- but while I'm at it, I have to remember not to forget everything I've learned in the past seventeen weeks of school, because we'll all be tested on all of it when we get back! :)

Not only should teachers be a little bit sympathetic to the fact that students like me haven't even gotten on a decent school sleep schedule yet since the break, but maybe New Trier needs to rethink their whole first semester finals outlook. Maybe, just maybe, New Trier would be a better place if every class was a little bit more like American Studies.

Talking in class about standardized tests made me rethink everything I'd ever heard about them. Not that finals are standardized tests, but in many ways they are. If I believe that I've learned a lot in a class this year, what's the need to be given a multiple-choice test on it? It's setting students up for disaster. These multiple choice tests are designed to trick students. Isn't that quite the opposite of what teaching is supposed to be about?

I understand that this post may come off very angry and very obnoxious, but I thought that teachers were supposed to encourage their students to take risks, not throw them curveball questions from twelve weeks ago and call it 20% of their final grade.

Our American Studies final is something that I'm actually pretty excited for right now, because I guess I'm not looking it as an evaluation of my knowledge as I'm looking it as an evaluation of our class structure. I love this class, and I hope I'll be able to represent it well when time comes to write my essay tomorrow.

Well, I guess I should go then. I'm about 80% done with my homework and I'm pretty sure that's the same amount of my brain that's already asleep.