Wednesday, March 30, 2005

I'm in Kaloustian's class, there's a sub, I have an hour to kill. I shall write.

Looking for colleges got a lot easier when I realized how completely disenchanted I've become with mainstream education. I want nothing to do with it anymore. There is a college I am seriously considering in Washington where they don't evaluate you through grades; only through written assessment. And the students assess the teachers as well. You make your own curriculum. It's small. It's different.

I met with one of the higher-ups at UCSD and even she doesn't think the UC's are all that great for people like me. Colleges like UCSD are way too big for any kind of recognizable community to form, everyone's scattered, your professors shirk their responsibilities and you end up being taught by grad students and many can't even graduate until year five because they couldn't get the classes they wanted or needed. It also seems to me like these colleges are based on the same systems that high schools and middle schools are: churning out a product. Molding a student, not a person. School thusfar has given me very few useful, applicable skills, and if anything, my ability to process information effectively has been severely hindered by it. I want out. With that realization came optimism, and for the first time ever I'm actually excited about my education.

Yeah, and fuck middle school. Seriously.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's fantastic, Matt. Ours was the last class at UCSC to get the option of written evals for all classes. It made such a difference. I would offer all the encouragement I've got to you to explore peripheries of higher education, but it sounds like you don't need it.

Anonymous said...

Eric: Bakit ka absent?

Matthew Louv said...

Pek pek mebaho!

Anonymous said...

seriously. middle school was a waste of my time.

Anonymous said...

Yeah I always have a hard time trusting the whole UC system because high school basically wants to push everyone into the UC schools and just pretend that no other schools exist. Oh yeah, and middle school did blow very much because I spent the two years I was in it just being surrounded by teachers who sucked the creativity and knowledge out of their students and punished people for doing anything out of the ordinary...wow I sure do hate middle school
-Matt