Righto

Okay so no lie, there have apparently been a few new people who have been reading this little online diary of mine, which kinda freaks me out because I tend to use this site in moments of high emotion and or points of drama. I am hoping that those of you out there reading this (you know who you are) don't take this as some deep look into my personality. Is it a new side of me you may not have seen before? Yes. Is it the whole picture? Far from it.

Alright, so to get on with the post I had a little bit of a revelation today: school is the source of the vast majority of my stress. Ta-Dah! I know most of you are looking at the screen and saying something along the lines of "Thank you Captain Obvious" and/ or "No shit Sherlock" but I don't think I truely got this point until over the break. For those of you just tuning in, I spent my break doing two-a-day practices with the rowing team, that plaus an hour of cardio and some strength trainging and I ahd a pretty busy week off. The kicker was though, I think I was happier for that stretch of time than I have been in a long while. I was litereally having moments when I would be sitting in the boat, or talking with friends or just hanign gout and this wonderful light feeling would come over me and I would just realize that I was amazingly happy. It had nothing to do with teh fact that I was keeping busy, and staying active that was the original source of my stress, but, in fact, school work and how it will effect me and my life and the things I want to do and all fo that fun stuff.

Stress is what utimatly kills most of us and yet we have set up a society that feeds and requires copious amounts of it. Don't get me wrong, I am well aware that life all in its own uninhibitated requires a certin amoung of stress in which it function and flow, but I think we, as humans (and maybe more specifically Americans) go way beyond our daily quota. We put people in an education system that tries to enfource the believe of learning and life long education yet we have grades and papers which cause most learning to be on a memorized basis that is soon lost after it has been implemented in the required fashion. I can not tell you how many teaches I have had that tell me not to "memorize things but to learn them." If you truely wanted me to learn something you would not require that I understand on some sort fo time scale.

I also understand that this woudln't function well either simply because people would then only choose to learn what they liked and believed was important, instead of becoming well rounded individuals...but wait! Isn't this what we do anyway? How many of you could actually re-take and pass all of the tests we went through in highg school? How many of us would be able to pass our college courses without studying once we have graduated? We attain broad knowledge yet only implement and retain the stuff that is useful. Why not just go with that? Why not just have people learn what they need and want to learn to further their lives? I am going to continue this rant a little bit later because I need to sleep now, but I hope that was at least a little something for your mind to snack on.

Happy Almost Saint Patrick's Day
~The Singing Ginger