I have to say that I watched a documentary today and I confess. I thoroughly enjoyed it.
I am not much of a documentary watcher. But since I have moved out of my house, into a different state, into a new apartment, and somehow come to a point where Netflix sits on a television and you have hundreds of options to watch whatever you want. For today, I chose to watch Waiting for Superman and it changed things when I saw this film about children and their journey for education across the United States.
To understand a brief snippet of this documentary, here's a trailer to see what type of tone and idea the director David Guggenheim, a name you might be familiar with from his previous film, An Inconvenient Truth.
To understand a brief snippet of this documentary, here's a trailer to see what type of tone and idea the director David Guggenheim, a name you might be familiar with from his previous film, An Inconvenient Truth.
Waiting for Superman is a film that focuses on several kids across the nation and their family's odyssey to getting education in their city. From New York to Washington D.C, this film exposes an age-old system where the field of education has its many flaws and halts which ultimately affects the kids who have to go to them. The film follows these kids in their pursuit to have the best education that is offered to them and do what they have to do for it.
This only scratches the surface of the documentary. It is also the un-scathed process surrounding teachers and the way school districts, committees, and communities treat problems that hide within the schools that affect everyone. It treats a very round about reminder that these problems do escalate and hurt our whole society eventually when left untreated. When it comes to give the best education for children, America does not hold the highest interest because this intricate system leaves many people stumped to solve the problem when they cannot change the ways the schools have operated, which have stayed and worked for years, and make them relevant to the rest of the world.
But one thing that struck me the hardest was how it allowed me to re-evaluate my life when it came to education. Education for me was pretty good. I came from California from a reasonable suburban town. I was able to get the best that I could in a middle class setting. In my fourteen year old mind, I remember thinking that I was the poorest school in town because I was in a band program of fifty and was lucky to even think of competing against other schools who were bigger and had better instruments available to them. They were usually bands that were bigger than us but now that I am"more" grown up, I think that I was still lucky with what was handed to me. From band to honors programs, I think that I was able to get the education I needed to be able to be accepted into a four year college and graduate with a degree. For most students , this is a dream that they have and I was able to achieve it.
When I watched this film, this is what almost all the kids talked about and inspired to do. They all had problems where they had to be put in lotteries to have the opportunity to go to these charter schools because these were the best, most valuable options available to them. The reason students and families turn to these charter schools in the first place was that they do not measure against school standards that could stunt their growth. Another reason to turn to them is for things that are way beyond their control and give the best instead of having the best education for all.
To have all your hopes, your parent's, you family's hopes into a big drawing was the most disappointing thing for me to witness. Getting an education should not be a contest in the year 2012. Yet in this film, from various schools, at a school with thirty spots for a charter school, over seven hundred families will put their names in hope that they will be chosen and have the best chance for their children's education. It was very disheartening to watch children's faces have to be scarred in fear and worry, wanting to have their dreams come true when it came a lottery. That was the hardest to stomach. Because all the adults halt their chances for true education, how does that look for adults who want to fix it and make it better? What do we have to do to make it stop? When we try to put efforts into solving these problems to a system, identify the problems, assuage it, and still have problems, how do we keep going?
The only result from fighting and trying to help is that it all comes down to the children. The students are always the ones who suffer and have to face the problems thirty years from now. One conclusion that will still haunt us, reflect on what happened when we were in the classroom ,learning from a teacher, and ask ourselves: why are we still stuck this way?
