WA 4 draft 2

Dear Mr. Obama,
If I were the president of the United States of America, I would make sure that I focused on some very important points. Most importantly, I would really like to address the issue of our education. I am from a well, not so rich school, in fact a lot of the students in my school have to buy free or reduced lunches, live in foster homes, or even live on the streets. I hear about these kids who have one parent, or none at all, they sneak away from their houses go to parties and get drunk, and mess up their lives forever. Well school is supposed to be a place where you can escape from all of this. At school you are supposed to feel safe and gain knowledge. At my school I constantly feel threatened. There are fights going on all the time, so much drama and rumors being spread, and with all this, not even a good education to come out of it with. I know that being a teenager comes with all of this drama, but I think that if schools really buckled down, and started disciplining us, that we would have a much better environment to learn in, and we would actually get the kind of education that we need. I feel like sometimes it’s not even just that the kids aren’t cooperating and trying to learn, but that the teachers are very impatient with us, and sometimes don’t even put forth the effort to teach us. I think that the teachers’ “quality” is really not good, and that the kids are getting blamed for not learning the information, when their not even being taught it in the first place.
Another big issue about our education is that we are required to take the S.O.L.’s. I think that these standardized tests are not a good judgment of the knowledge that we have gained throughout the courses that we’ve taken. One test can not prove that we have learned anything, and it can not show what we have learned. Some people are just really bad test takers, and actually know what we have learned just completely blank when a one hundred multiple choice question test is placed in front of them. And some kids just completely guess on the whole test, because they don’t even want to try because they think it’s stupid. I think that in order to see if the child has retained the information that he or she has learned, you should just look at their over all grades in all of the subjects. That way it shows that the student has in fact learned the material, or hasn’t learned it at all.
My mom is a middle school teacher. She will come home most days from work, talking about how the kids were so disrespectful and were very disruptive. One kid cut an electrical cord in her room. Another kid choked another guy. Both of these kids? They came back to the school in a matter of weeks. Yes, she wrote them up, gave them a referral, and everything. The principal just sends them back after a few days of out of school suspension. The discipline needs to be stricter and less tolerable. They need to stick to rules and not let anyone push them around.
Anyways, I’m so happy for you, that you got elected president, and I hope that you make our country proud to have you as our first African American president, and I’m sure you will.

Kelli Wisbauer