Edward's School Page

Doesn't everyone love school? This is my web page about it. All sorts of stuff about school.

The MACAT Program

Last year, I finished my second and final year in the MACAT program at Frost Middle School. This was at the same time both good and bad. MACAT, which stands for Middle school Alternative Classrooms for the Academically Talented and translates as "Super Nerd" in street-talk, is a core-classes accelerated program that allowed me to do work that's actually interesting and challenging. The teachers actually understood me as a person and not just "student #31," and presented activities/lessons that are meaningful, useful, and have some relevence later in the school career or in real life. This is something I have never seen before in school -- especially meaningful assignments. My homework in language arts included such things as writing stories, analyzing poems and prose, and researching Norse mythology -- all activities that would be completely unheard-of to the standard by-the-book general-ed teacher.

On the other hand, MACAT also assigned, in general, an insane amount of homework. You get less homework as a freshman in high school than you do in 7th grade if you're in MACAT. This is true even if you are in MSC -- I can now verify it from personal experience. Although MSC is also an accelerated program, the teachers there are mostly sane, according to several interviewed MSC students and my own experience with the three 9th grade MSC teachers. The teachers in MACAT, however, evidently expect you to have no personal life and to spend your entire non-school time doing homework, because they assign 3-5 hours of homework a night and 20 hours each weekend. The problem seems to lie in the fact that each MACAT teacher assigns homework as if they're the only MACAT teacher: the assignments may not be particularly arduous by themselves, but combined with similar assignments from three other teachers (and maybe an elective or two, but they usually don't give homework) they really add up.

Livonia Public Schools

Unfortunately, even though I'll move to high school next year, I'll still be within the accursed district of Livonia Public Schools. This means that for four more years, I'll be helplessly trapped in the clutches of conservatism, tyranny, bureaucracy, and intolerance to difference. The myriad layers of administration in this school system seem determined to squash the rights of any minority, be that smart students, disabled students, or special-needs students (e.g. those with autism). Some of LPS's recent actions include:

Instituting a new "Technology Donation Policy" that essentially forbids any and all charitable donation of computers and electronic equipment to the school system by requiring ridiculous amounts of needless documentation and bureaucratic procedure. For example, to donate an old 1995 Gateway computer running Windows 98, you would now be required to provide the original recipt from the store where you bought it, a certificate of authenticity from Gateway, a certificate of authenticity and original paper licence agreement for Windows, and the original manuals and documentation for everything -- and that's if you don't have any software on it.
Allowing an anti-copyright-infringement committee to remain active even though they are there only by LPS invitation and are no longer useful because they repeatedly sue schools on the most minor of infractions (e.g. burning a copy of a Windows 2000 CD).
Refusing to acknowledge that MACAT students are smarter and require more computing ability than mainstream students, and blocking all attempts to procure more computers (from within LPS -- not donations) for the MACAT classrooms.
Forcing MACAT students to take district-only (NOT state-mandated) basic competency assessments on a regular basis, wasting valuable class time with tests intended for the lowest tier of mainstream students.

The State of Education in Michigan and the US

Yes, I might complain a lot about my school and my school system, but considering where American education is right now I'm actually pretty well off. Our president said something once in his campaign about being the "education president." He seems to have forgotton this promise however, as the education system in the US has steadily worsened during his years in office. Schools are closing, programs are being cut, teachers are being laid off, technology is lagging behind, and all sorts of problems. Nearly all of them are related in some way to a major lack of funding. This is the central issue in Michigan right now: how to keep a school system functioning when the state is deep in a recession and national-government funding is being redirected toward the war in Iraq. Detroit, most noticably, is having serious budget problems with its school system and the quality and avaliability of education there has consequently declined. Luckily for me, I live in Livonia, where the school board has managed to keep the quality of education essentially the same over the past several years despite an ongoing multimillion-dollar budget deficit. Yes, our school administration might be exceedingly annoying at times, but at least they've kept the ACAT/MACAT/MSC program alive despite a 98% budget decrease over the past 5 years.