New Years Resolutions Update

Just before the New Year began I created a list of 4 New Years resolutions that I wanted to accomplish throughout the entire year after I had explained how pointless and useless New Years Resolutions are for the unmotivated (click here for that post).

1) My first  goal was to run my marathon in under 4hrs 30 mins. I didn't do this... well I won't do this. The marathon I signed up for in May I am unable to run. My training went to HELL because I caught mono. Hear more about that here (this is a link to a school blog I wrote 2 posts for, the post is on my experience with mono, mostly). But I also can no longer afford the hotel for the run. It is basically my months rent, which is not a wise decision to blow. 


2) My 2nd goal is to achieve an average over 70% in university. So far I think that I am accomplishing this. My first year is almost over. I have 70s in all of my courses except 1 I have a grade in the 60s and 1 I have in the 80s. I think I will accomplish this.

3) My third goal is to get a job before the summer. I have 2 jobs... well really one. I am working at a store at the mall (I start tomorrow and I am quite excited!). 

4) My final goal is to  manage my money and not overspend and create a budget and I will stay in my budget. I got lost for quite a while in this but the past 3 weeks have gotten a lot better with staying in my budget--- especially now that I am living with my boyfriend in an apartment and I have monthly rent to cover. 

So my goals are going fairly successfully. I am creating a 5th goal now.

5) I will run a marathon this year. Since I can't run the one in May I might save up and run one in October or something. I will have the summer to train and I will stick to my guns!

Why I don't really want to have kids

My mind is not 100% made up, come on, I am 18... but I don't want to have kids.

Kids have never been a huge part of my life, I don't desire to raise them. This isn't my main reason I don't want to have kids though.

I really just want to focus on my career, once I am older. I want to really do something in my career. This isn't my main reason I don't want to have kids though.

If I have a partner later in life, I want to be able to focus my love and energy on them and not my kids. This isn't my main reason I don't want to have kids though.

I don't want to wreck my body. This isn't my main reason I don't want to have kids though.

The main reason I do not want to have kids is because I am selfish. I am very, very selfish. I live for myself. I want to be able to be free from the restrictions of having kids. I don't think I could be able to put another person that far before myself. In a relationship, quite often you have to put your partner before yourself, not all of the time, but there is the odd moment, but the thing is that your partner is self-sufficient. If you just decide you want to go to the store by yourself to get ice cream, you can't abandon your 2 month old or 5 year old. 

Your life is tied down in ways you don't want to. 

I really REALLY just wasn't supposed to be born with a uterus. I hate my uterus more and more everyday. I really do. I am not going to get a hysterectomy, especially since I am only 18 and I may change my mind and decide to have kids someday, but I really just hate that I have a uterus. Not that I want to be a guy. I just want to be a person that doesn't have to get pregnant. 

There are only 3 reasons I can see myself having children:

1) I get pregnant and find out when it is too late to have an abortion (I don't want to put up a kid for adoption)

2) I am bored later in life and feel like something is missing and I decide to have kids

3) I am single. This way I can focus all of my energy onto my kid(s). If I have a kid I don't want to have a partner because I don't want to put something ahead of myself, let alone my partner. 

I am not a feminist in the slightest. I just hate my uterus. I am not meant to have kids and I think that people should think I am brave for this. I know I wouldn't be the best mother, not that I would be a crappy one if I were to get pregnant, but I don't desire to be a mother. It's just like having a job you need the money for but don't want to work. That is the type of effort I would put into parenting. I would do the job of parenting but hate it because I wish I didn't have it, but I would appreciate the kid/job because I have it. 

This is early to be thinking about, but if you read my blog you know I like to plan ahead far into the future. 

At this point I don't see myself having kids until I am 102.

So, I don't have a learning disability.

Last year I noticed something different a few months after I started my first year of university. I was having trouble concentrating on material, in lectures and while studying and writing assignments. I was pretty sure I had ADD. Most others around me also thought I had ADD when I described my symptoms to them. Thus, the journey began.

I approached my family doctor about my concerns and she referred me to my school to be tested for learning disabilities because she wouldn't prescribe me anything without a diagnosis. So I went to my school. They did some preliminary testing and told me that I am above average in my intellectual ability but I might be on the borderline of ADD. This was all found out around November, 3 months after I started university.

Today I finally had my appointment with the testing centre. My results? I don't have ADD. I don't have any learning disabilities. Again: I am above average in my intellectual ability.

I literally stumped the psychologist. My grades have dropped 20% since high school. Something is different, something has had to have changed.

Inevitably, grades do drop in university from high school but things just feel harder here. Or easier. I am bored. The material I am learning is not what I want to be learning. I find it boring. I love my majors (psychology and philosophy) but my profs are not doing it justice.

I explained all of this to the psychologist and he has decided to try to piece things together. Essentially, he thinks my inability to focus on my work has to do with my motivation, despite me having very high goals in my future. I have amazing goals it is just the tasks I have to accomplish to get to my goal (school) is not my cup of tea. I am stressed all of the time. I am bored. I am unengaged. I do not care about what I am learning. Even if I transferred schools it would still be the same format of learning.

So what do I do? The psychologist I saw informed me he was going to dwell on me a little longer and then contact the learning strategist I have been working with at my school and the three of us will work together. 

I wish I had a learning disability. I wish my problems could be solved with strategies or medication. But my problems are bigger than this because they cannot be fixed. My problems are my choices to face because of the goals I want to accomplish. 

This is the biggest rut of my life. I am sad. I am depressed. School depresses me. But I want to attain my BA in Psych and BA in Philosophy and then my Bachelor of Education, perhaps my masters in Education. Why? Well, I want to teach high school. I was fed up with the high school educational system and I wanted to help fix it from within but also teach high school as well to fulfill my passion for educating and being a leader. I am now leaning towards wanting to work in university education just because of how much it takes out of me. 

The system does not work for me. It does not work for most people. Human purpose is to live. A part of living is sleeping. University students do not get enough sleep. People should be able to live the life they choose but instead we pick the unhappy route so we can conform to society. This has been troubling me for a couple of years now and I still am conforming to all of this bullshit and it is maddening me. It is depressing me. It is pushing me deeper and deeper down into my own despair.

I shouldn't care this much about the university and education system in general but I am the type of person that likes to take charge and fix things and that is what I have been inspired to do. 

But for now, I am going to keep conforming to depression. Also, I can't do anything without a degree because of credentialism. I also cannot do anything because ageism (I am 18). 

Although, I did just get a good job (FINALLY). Readers may remember getting a job was one of my goals for this year. I am a Blog Editor and Marketing coordinator, it is an executive position with my university. I don't know too much about it because I was just hired and I have not started yet, but I find out tomorrow. I am looking forward to it. I am fairly lucky, job wise, compared to other people my age. I am not working a part-time shitty stressed job with some fast food or chain store. Someday I will probably have to again, before I have my degree, but for now, I look forward to having a job that I can actually do something effectively in. I am not putting down workers of chain stores or fast food stores, I am just judging the work of those places to have higher stress than my job and I am just thankful that I will (hopefully) not have to deal with it.

So at least that is good.

But I don't have a learning disability. I probably just have the psychological disorder called "conformity".

Can I call myself a non-conformist?

I used to call myself a non-conformist in high school, yet one of the largest things I claimed to not conform to was high school. I called high school out on all of its bullshit but I stayed and completed my diploma. I did not even want to go to university just because of credentialism and conforming to society's requirements of me. But I am at university.

So now I ask myself, am I even a non-conformist? I kind of dropped this description for myself a while ago.

I don't think it is necessary to declare oneself as practicing a certain philosophy like non-conformity, but I like to be sure of myself. I like to be able to find myself to be easily defined. I don't know. I am precise and weird like that.

So am I a non-conformist?

I am following all of society's conformities but I recognize that I am doing so. The difference between a university student attending university passively because they were told to go and myself is that I made the choice to attend an institution recognized in society as a credible way to get an education.

I do think that most people that are able to recognize the words conformity and non-conformity automatically drift towards non-conformity just because it seems like the more creative... that's not the word I'm looking for... it seems like the more liberal way to go. Not even liberal. It just seems like the choice one should make, I suppose.

Conformity does have its place. Chaos can occur in a non-conformist society but, I don't necessarily fear chaos, although, my character and background do suggest that I do like order. It is nice, but that is because I am in a structured society so I think it is expected.

I don't know. It's a hard call to diagnose myself as a non-conformist. I know that it is weird diction to call this a "diagnosis" but it feels like that is all I am really doing anymore. Trying to find what is wrong with me and what is right. I am just trying to figure out myself, still. I always am.

Whether or not I am a non-conformist is actually pretty irrelevant considering the fact that I consider myself a skeptic. I think. Maybe I am not a skeptic? Any philosopher/skeptic will get that joke. I hope. Please? Come on! That was solid.

Okay now I am just being dorky.

In general I would lean towards saying I am a non-conformist over being a conformist, although I feel like I obviously do not exude the qualities of a non-conformist. I don't refuse to do everything in society but I am aware of conformities in society and have a tendency to avoid them. I think that being a non-conformist is horrible for myself since I am still choosing to live in society. I hate doing assignments and studying in university because I don't think I am learning what I personally want to learn from it. Sure, I am studying subjects I like but I am not studying exactly what I want and not learning what I want either because university is structured learning. What I learn is dictated to me, which I hate. Therefore, my grades have a tendency to suffer since I am not enjoying myself as much and it takes me longer to get around to doing things I don't want to do.

It is not overly crucial for me to analyze whether or not I am a non-conformist, I just thought it was an interesting thought I had and went with it in this blog post. As I said, I just really like figuring myself out. I feel super dorky writing this post because I feel like it was what I blogged about close to a year ago. Not that I was dorkier then (well I was), I just feel like I have moved past a few things in my life and so it feels weird writing this post. I don't know. Here's me, just analyzing and over-analyzing every little detail of what I am writing and my life.

Dear University, I hate you.

I hate university.

I absolutely and positively hate university.

Why? I have learned nothing of value yet. I am at midterms in my second semester and I have learned nothing that has any value to me whatsoever. It is not that I am in the wrong program or at the wrong school, I love philosophy and psychology. It is just I am surrounded my professors who do not care about us. I am in an environment that does not support learning.

High schools and primary schools have a pretty good grasp on engaging students but just because we are paying thousands and thousands of dollars every year to learn, doesn't mean we are automatically engaged.

Sitting passively in a lecture hall isn't helping anyone. The material is dull, the professor isn't engaging and the slideshow really isn't helping anything.

I am bored. This is boring.

What I have learned about university is:
1) You learn EVERYTHING about one course from ONE book. This makes no sense. You have one textbook, maybe a few other books for one class and you are expected to learn everything about that one area or subject of study from those few materials. This doesn't seem very fair. The courses could be better constructed without following the textbook, or better than that, write the textbook to be tailored to a better course, Mr. Doctor.
2) Professors pretend to know everything. Sure, they know everything about their own subject but they assume this makes them better than most others. Of course, this is a generalization, there are some professors that aren't like this but, the truth is many of my professors and others I have met just seem to act like they know all.
3) You need a degree to do anything of value to earn money. I am in university and I can't even get a part time job at the mall. I've been searching for months.
4) Your program is not in the slightest bit tailored to you like high school was. High school had levelling to help you adjust to the material. University doesn't have this. Of course, you are expected to have a degree of intellect if you are in university. There is academic support for people who need tutoring. But what about me? I do not learn by reading or sitting in lecture, which is what university is. I learn by self-teaching myself. I learn with assignments. I learn with experience and actually doing things. But I can't learn that way to get my BAs in psych and philosophy.
5) You are an undergrad. Not a genius. You don't have a BA or BSc, or whatever you are aiming for. You are practically a child compared to people with PhDs.

I hate this. I have learned nothing, yet I hold around a 75% average. This tells you what university is like. There is the odd lesson or lecture that naturally engages me but for the information that is dull and needs to be learned, there has to be an alternate way.

Everyone hates studying. It is literally suffering for me. I feel like I am going to die. I go into mental breakdowns almost every time I try to study.

It is just not my cup of tea.

What is a "good" educator?

Right now in Ontario there is a huge waiting list for educators before they get a teaching job. After this year all BEd students have to do two years of the degree rather than one which most believe is due to the government trying to slow down the process. I think the two year style is a better one. It doesn't seem to be deterring too many people though. Especially since in my year, people who chose concurrent ed only do 1 year (after this year they must do 2).

I am in my first year of university with plans to go into education. I want to teach high school for a while but then I want to do something higher, possibly in the school board or even the government. Education itself is my greatest passion. I want to actually teach but I also have a desire to learn about education philosophy, study and perhaps test education methods and to learn how learning takes place psychologically and test that as well.

But not all educators have to have my passion for education.

My whole point with this "blah blah blah" intro is too many people are going into teaching because they don't know what else to do, they were told to, it is in the family, they have a pointless degree otherwise, etc. I'm sure there are many educators furious at me because they fit into one of these, which of course you can, but you should be a good educator and you can be.

So what is a "good" educator?

In grade 11 I did a research essay/presentation on the student-teacher relationship and the most important aspect of that said relationship.

One of the most important discoveries of mine was that there needs to be a relationship, period. So many teachers distance themselves from their students. Share your lives (obviously not too much), ask about the students. Don't develop just a relationship with the whole class, develop individual relationships with each student. Instead of scaring the students with grade reviews individually in the hall or after class, first, scare them with that because they'll think that is what is happening but then get to know them.

Getting to know each other establishes trust. Trust is another element I found important in the s-t relationship as well as in the classroom environment. Learning cannot occur until trust has. The student should feel comfortable in their learning environment. Comfortable with the teacher, with their classmates, etc. Then they will be able to forget their worries and focus on the lesson.

Caring was an important aspect that many students in the class I was giving the presentation to identified as important. A caring relationship also establishes trust and enables the student to feel truly... well cared for. You never know the students' home lives. You might be the closest thing they have to a stable life.

My teacher in that classroom identified communication to be important. Obviously all of these things have to occur with communication. But from perspective as a teacher it was more from the idea of she can't guess what is going on if the students do not tell her. I would also argue trust has to be here for the students to tell the teacher what is going on.

I think many teachers also act as guidance and support, both educationally but also emotionally/psychologically. I have had teachers (in high school) assist me with emotional problems. Not all of my teachers were like this. I don't think it should be expected. But there is a deal of compassion that I think should be a sub-requirement of the teacher. Even one of my "stricter" (in a way) teachers still showed compassion towards me at one point.

I also think humour is an important element of the teacher. Make your class laugh. Make them happy. If they are laughing and happy they are enjoying their time in your class and making the quality of their education better.

Of course, education is of course the conveying of ideas so the teacher should obviously not only know their subject but be passionate about it. I was very excited about one of my subjects of study in high school just because of the amount of passion my teacher conveyed in all of her lessons. Knowing your subject and then showing passion for that subject just helps students' learning.

I am sure (completely positive, in fact) that there are many more elements of a "good" educator but for now this is where this list ends.

My passion for education will hopefully take me places, despite the job wait for teachers. I will have to complete a 2-year BEd and of course I am still only in my first year of my undergrad, but it will be worth it. I am going to double major in psychology & philosophy and minor in english studies. The way my credits are structured I actually have room for a second minor so I can attain 4 teachables by the end of my 4 years. I am considering fine arts, classical studies and history. I wish I was in concurrent ed just so I can be learning about education (my true love) but not being in con-ed has allowed me to get 4 teachables rather than two.

What do you think is the most important element of a "good" educator?

There is not Enough Freedom in School

One time when I was in grade 12 we had to do a presentation on a theme based off of our two independent novels so I chose the generic theme of freedom. I began my presentation by asking people to place a dash on a scale of 0-10 (0 not free and 10 is very free)I drew on the chalkboard of how free they feel. It was a really good visual to see how free people felt. Most of the dashes were around the 6 mark.

I asked the class some leading questions and the one leading question was "Where do you feel the least free?" the class almost immediately responded with saying "school". I astounded my english teacher.

As a teacher I would think it would seem quite frightening to hear this. At first it does not seem like a big deal but in the terms of liberal education it becomes an enormous deal that students feel the least free in school.

Liberal education means questioning everything. Putting everything up for question and allowing freethinking to happen. If people do not feel free in a classroom, liberal education is not going to flow easily.

If there is a place for voicing your opinion and bouncing ideas off of other people, school should be this place. Especially high school. High school is when people are figuring out the world and who they are and who they will be in the world and if they are spending 8 hours a day in a building that doesn't have an atmosphere that encourages freedom of ideas or freedom in general we are just going to mass-produce chunks of people and not individuals.

Although, is this not what we are doing with the world? Creating stereotypes for people to fall into in order to better classify the earth, especially in the terms of consumerism and culture.

Anyways, I have a theory on why students feel the least amount of freedom in school.

1) Too many rules. High school is filled with a bunch of useless rules that intimidates students. For example: not wearing hats in the halls. This rule is so useless and I am pretty sure the only reason it is still around is because it gives authority figures a reason to assert their authority. This leads me to my 2nd point.

2) Too much authority. Obviously for safety reasons teachers and principals need to have a degree of authority over students but when a student walks into a classroom where they are instructed lessons and not encouraged to join in conversation equally with their teacher and classmates, they are not going to be successful in thinking freely. I had an amazing teacher once who was able to do both assert her authority over the class while also encouraging class participation. How? She didn't take bullshit and had a tough exterior but was also understanding and showed a great deal of compassion. She was also passionate about her subject she was teaching. She encouraged conversation by refusing to continue until people replied to her questions. She used group-work more than once a week to encourage classroom relationships. She wouldn't force you to work but would encourage it. It was the perfect amount of authority.

Anyways. This is just what I think. We need freedom in classrooms to be able to actually learn without bias. This is the gold nugget all teachers should strive to capture in each and all of their lessons, classes, days, and in their career. It is very important that students both get the factual material but also are given the chance to speculate it freely.

What do you think? Do you agree with my theory? What do you think about freedom in schools/classrooms?

I'd love to hear in the comment section!