The Future Leaders of America...

I completely agree with the way that she feels, i think the governemnt has put up this requirements that are too high sometimes for students to reach. For example, making the Fact mandatory in third grade, i wouldn't want to imagine third graders on the day of the FCAT thinking about passing an exam or not been able to move on to the next grade. Last semester when we were discussing this same issue in ENC, i realized i wasnt the only one that felt the way i did about the FACT. I think the Fcat is an useless exam that doesn't really measure a thrid grader or a sophomore's intelligence. The fact is suppose to measure the student's proficiency in standarized exams. However, if you have ever taken an FCAT exam, you know that its a bunch of stories that require some level of critical thinking and been able to work out some math problems. In reality the exam doesnt really measure how smart you are, or how well you are doing in a certain subject, its a waste of time. Something that really bothered me in high school was the fact that teachers had to follow an fact type of schedule in classes. By that i mean we had to do fact prompts every month (even if you had pass the exam already). i am talking about a senior english class where we were suppose to be learning writing skills for college we were writing 5 paragraph format essays to FCAT questions. The teacher also had to learn how to incorporate fact teaching skills or somthing like that they called it to the class, it didnt matter if it was english, spanish or math. The time that we actually had to study something educational and useful for the future was the last 30 minutes of class. Moreover in senior year when you need to do SATs, ACTs and study to get good final exam grades, I had to sit in a classroom and hear a lecture about the FACT style of writing, the new FACT exam (science) and the ones to come like FACT history. I can only imagine how a third grader feels hearing about the Fact. At least we were old enough to accept and get used to the idea, but its sad to see how they (third graders) are going to grow up with no creativity, a closed perception of what an english class is and of course terrified about 10th grade, when to FCAT has to be taken again.