I slouch lazily and stare at the overhead covered with numbers and funny looking symbols that might as well have been from another planet. “Come on, guys,” my advanced algebra teacher urges, “This is easy stuff,” I could hardly agree, because to me, learning a new language would probably be easier than figuring out logarithms. Yet, all the time in that class has led me to question the school’s curriculum. It seems as if adults can’t come to an agreement whether high school is harder or easier than it was in their day. Yet, my math teacher insists that the curriculum has already been “dumbed down”.

The more I think about it, the more I agree with her. Why is it that on the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE), you only need a cumulative score of 55 percent to pass the math section? That’s not even passing in a regular school course! What happened to the standards? Are Americans really becoming the imbeciles we’re always accused of being?

It seems as if the more lethargic students get, the more willing teachers are to comply. Perhaps it is because a large number of failing students would look poorly on them, so they only skim the difficult material. Or perhaps when students fail, the teacher feels as if they fail, so they push students along like little, confused ducklings.

Proof is already in the media. Take “Supersize Me” for example where children were shown two pictures. All children identified the first as “Ronald McDonald”. The second was debatable. A few speculated that it was their mommy’s friend, or perhaps even George Bush. Guess who it really was? We identify the man as Jesus Christ. The situation is not cute. We are letting young minds go to waste by letting them be overly involved in the superficial world. Yet, this example is ironic because children are constantly being brainwashed by the media, thus creating the bigot Americans we have today. If anything, the media corrupts and leaves perverse minds. More than half the people reading this would probably be thinking perverse means perverted. No, it does not. Perverse is defined as contrary to what is socially acceptable or ‘wicked’, not that the media would help with that at all.

When I was a teacher’s assistant, I assisted in grading worksheets, essays, and the like. To put it kindly, they were atrocious. The most ridiculous answers were written in the most illegible writing. Yet, the teachers still passed these students. Why? The teacher reasoned that because they come to class and because they really try. Honestly, if a student was really trying, you’d think that their answers would be relevant to the questions. A student wrote that “Romeo bought Juliet a Mercedes and they drove to Hawaii.” There are major flaws with that, but it seems as if people don’t have the intelligence to identify the problem.

Also, what has happened to the English language? Nowadays, people believe that “you” is spelled “u”, “I” shouldn’t be capitalized, and writing lYkE dIs is commonplace. English papers need not to be fancy with “big words” and “pretty sentence structures.” It’s almost as if we are going backwards and all those grammar skills they taught us as children was deteriorating with every letter we type incorrectly. Is it really that hard to turn in an English paper written in simple, colloquial English?

If I were to go on an impromptu trip to Hong Kong to visit my cousin and look over her math work, she might be ahead of me despite the fact that she is a grade below me. I’m one year her senior and already in “accelerated” courses, but apparently, that’s only average in other places.

When I see students boast about their grades, I wonder if they have a teacher like mine, one who actually teaches you the material. I may not love her class, but I realize I am getting more out of it than if I had an “easy” teacher. Having a teacher like her is keeping me one step away from being an American idiot.