Who needs algebra, anyway?
This week, a 15-year-old schoolgirl from New Zealand was suspended for giving an epic smackdown of a speech that criticised her teachers for being lazy and for teaching kids useless information instead of important life skills.
Year 10 student Anela Pritchard delivered the speech as part of a class assignment, and it was so cutting that it apparently left her English teacher in tears.
Here are some of the zingers from her speech that’s gone viral on Facebook (with more than 20,000 likes, 7,000 shares and 700 comments).
“Teachers are paid to teach us, not paid to hand out a piece of paper with words on it and sit round and do nothing.”
“Do I honestly need to know what a= 1+rn to the 2nd power is, go over the treaty Waitangi every year since I was literally 5 or memorize the periodic table in order to get somewhere in life? Do I honestly need to know the structure of a seed and how it works and whatnot? No, I don’t think so.”
“In High School, we should be learning about the real world, how to pay my taxes, apply for jobs, mortgage my house, buy a car, things that we will actually use in the future. So far, I’ve only learned that whatever I manage to get done in a short amount of time isn’t enough.”
“It’s teachers like this that make us students want to skip class and not go to school …our teachers chose this career and need to try to cater for each individuals education.”
Ouch. But does she also have a point?
Is Pritchard a precocious brat? Maybe Probably.
If you have beef with the school curriculum, is it appropriate to handle it by making your teacher cry and probably committing her to years of therapy? No.
Should you attack teachers personally because you’re not happy with what’s being taught? No.
But while everyone is getting shouty about the speech, they’re kind of missing the point – that among the important stuff, we’re also taught a whole pile of useless crap in high school.
At 18, I knew that osmosis meant “the movement of water across a porous or semi-porous membrane which results in each side being equally diffused” – but I had no idea how to address an envelope or sew a button or, you know, change a light bulb without being electrocuted.
Top Comments
The problem is kids don't want to learn things without a reason. Algebra, Pythagoras, etc. are not just about learning what they are, it encourages your brain to function in a different way. It is the skill of being given a problem or formula and then being able to apply it.
It is actually a hard skill, and unless you go on to higher education about the brain or thinking, it's not something you can just tell someone to do, they have to work it out themselves in order to develop cognitively.
However, work studies was a joke and learning about taxes and more practical skills would have been better than the syllabus, back then anyway. I also think OHS and discrimination legislation should be taught in these classes - kids need to know what they are not allowed to be asked in an interview, and how to stay safe.
Are you kidding me? Ummm, I was never taught how to address a letter, sew on a button or change a light bulb at school either. And yet, somehow, I know how to do all these things. Maybe I watched someone do them ONCE. Maybe it was trial and error. In any case, these sorts of things have no place in a secondary curriculum. We need our teachers to teach us things we can't work out for ourselves, for goodness sakes.