High school and Middle school
Like traditional school districts, Panther Valley follows the same set up as many other schools, teachers teach and students obediently learn. Elementary school was slightly different, because students did many hands on activities, mainly because young children cannot sit still and listen to lectures. The "Banking Concept of Education" applies more directly to my middle and high school years. We were taught various subject like math, reading, grammar, and history. Some subjects were purely based on memorizing like geography and history, and we did not question if it was true or not.
Panther Valley is a school district in the coal mining area of Pennsylvania; it is not a school that you choose to go to like the schools in the city, but rather, you go there because you live in that area. Our area used to thrive off the coal mining industry but now, the four towns in the district are turning ghost-like. People moved away because of the lack of jobs and our school district is turning upside down. In the high school, many activities and clubs such as swimming, golf, poetry, and culturefest were shut down due to lack of funding and bad academics. Teachers are told to do a better job teaching and those teachers that do not meet expectations are fired.
For many students, they would say that they learned absolutely nothing in our school. They would say that Panther Valley did not prepare them for college at all, which I think is a horrible thing to say about our school. For me, I feel just prepared as other college students; I think that Panther Valley may be slightly behind in academics but there are always good teachers there that know what they are teaching and truly care about their students. We have a tracking system and many students take the easiest track, and then say that they did not learn anything. I took the advanced track, the one for college students. We had to take Advanced Algebra II, Advanced Geometry, Advanced Trig, and then AP Calculus. For english classes, our teacher for the advanced track was dead set on getting us to college; she used many interactive teaching tools and always had interesting discussions in class. Our class size was always small, no class had more than 20 students and the teachers always try their best to do a good job teaching and helping us learn. Panther Valley was not supportive with college but it did a good job with other career choices like going to technical school. Students would have the opportunity to go to technical school and the school would be very supportive but if a student wanted to go to college, the search, and all the steps would be done individually by the student and our counselor would barely care.
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ReplyDeletehey, i think that sports such as swimming and golf and activities like culturefest and holiday events are important for a school, and i meant that my high school was doing badly, academic wise, and that by removing all these activities would just make things worse. I know that now with a dress code in place, a lot more students and teachers and staff members focus on our clothes more than academics. With the lack of fun things around the school, students are much more gloomy and they all hate the school.
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