This place is a joke and I completely agree with all the other reviews, and it surprises me that the same issues still occur even after eight years. And just to justify my position, I attend this school.
1. The Integrated Sciences
- is probably one of the most idiotic decisions ever made
First of all, you don't even learn anything in this class. Every Integrated Science teacher I had didn't even teach that well. Why? Because most of them had no clue what they were educating to the students. In one unit, we were supposed to learn oils, and then it went to soaps, and then it went to cancer cells, and then it goes to sunscreen? I'm sorry, did I miss something? Like was I supposed to connect the dots or something because I have no idea what I am learning, and that should be the instructor's responsibility to be able to communicate with their students about what the whole point of showing up to science is.
2. Forceful Education
NHS says that they implement critical thinking into their curriculum, but it's honestly just terrible.
All the instructors tell the students to be "curious" and "thinkers" but forcing a bunch of puberty-experiencing teenagers to be "curious" about some literature that makes absolutely no sense, to to try and think about what is happening to the chromosomes in a certain part of a cell that no one cares about isn't going to help students learn. Like Prince Ea said, "that's no education, that's bulimia". Because honestly I don't even know what's being crammed into my head and then thrown up back on the multiple choice quiz every Friday anymore. Why? Because I know that on five years time, I'm going to forget every single thing I learned in high school.
One big example is the Anchor. The Anchor is an essay freshmen and sophomores take twice in each year about the overall unit that they had learned about. You take these in your humanities classes (history and literature). And, just to let you know, that the first two years of high school, you're supposed to "LOOK FOR YOUR IDENTITY" or "UNDERSTAND HOW IDENTITY IS PRESERVED" and we implement these ideas into the courses of history and literature. BUT WE DON"T EVEN HAVE THE LIBERTY TO WRITE WHAT WE WANT TO WRITE ON THE ESSAY. Sure, we get to talk about the ideas given of freedom and liberty through the Americans -blah-blah-blah, but we only have a limited amount of resources, GIVEN BY THE HUMANITIES DEPARTMENT to write about. So basically we can't even pinpoint what we want to write about because they give us a set resources that we can only use and then we have to write about these ideas, without any choice, BECAUSE WE JUST WANT TO GET A GOOD GRADE. By the time the essay is submitted, we wouldn't even understand what we had written because we were too nervous and stressed about whether or not the MLA format was good or if the literary device made any sense. It's just ironic to me that Humanities strives to teach students to be individualistic, but doesn't give them the freedom to be.
3. Let me get this straight, NO ONE WANTS TO BE THERE
The only reason students show up to school is not because of education anymore, it's to MEET THE GRADUATION REQUIREMENTS AND GET THEIR HIGH SCHOOL DIPLOMAS TO GET OUT OF SCHOOL.
No one cares about what Aristotle said, no one cares about what makes prokaryotes and eukaryotes different and similar, and no one cares about what Hamilton did in whatever time he was alive.
Because everyone just wants to get the hell out of there.
And it saddens me a lot because I WANT to learn. I WANT to have good experiences, but when the school system and the IRVINE DISTRICT in general ruins the idea of education itself, which is to bring forth or to bring out, students often forget why they had initially come to school. To learn.
But no, all NHS does, and hundred of thousands of other education systems do is make everyone into working clones.
What, "to make better members of society"? That's BS. Do your job right IUSD.
4. The Standard Based Grading.
God, this is the most dumbest thing I have ever seen a school do.
Literally the worst decision in the entire world.
Instead of grading by letter scale (A, B, C, D) the school, and the district, wanted to change this into a numbering scale of only (4, 3, 2, 1). Like what. This isn't elementary.
The reason that the school switched to this decision was to "ensure all students would have high levels of learning". What.
"to increase hope, efficiency achievement, and accuracy"
Yeah, no. What SBG is doing is NOT this. The thing about standard based grading is that it's VERY LIMITED. It doesn't have 4+ or 4-, but only straight up 4, 3, 2, 1. And teachers mention that your essay could've almost been a four, but no sorry, you get a three because you didn't do the MLA format right.
So dumb. And this APPLIES TO LITERALLY EVERY CLASS. Doesn't make any sense.
Get rid of this. read more