C.A.L.M 2

So, yesterday was the very last day of classes and I am pleased to say that I am done with CALM forever.

As a conclusion to my previous CALM post, which was written when I first started the class, this is what actually happened all year.

Turns out, I was completely right.

I have not come out of the class knowing anything I did not know before going in. Which, to me, is a failure of a curriculum.

I go to school to learn. If you’re going to waste both my time, and the teacher’s, well, I think we need to reorganize things.

Essentially, the redundancy of it is the downfall. CALM is about sex ed, and financial health and making good choices. In math class, we do a finances unit, which I thought was much better than the CALM version since you actually dealt with taxes etc. and made you really simulate the real financial thing. Since the Math version was better, we can take it out of CALM altogether.

So what are we left with? sex ed and good choices.

Oh, but wait, bio kids get sex ed anyway. and they are the ones who actually signed up for bio. I’m more of a physics guy, so I never took bio. Why? because I don’t care/need to know those things. We’ve taken “health” classes since grade 5 on the subject, we know the diagrams (they’re the same every year) why do we need to beat the dead horse?

Okay, so we’ve taken out half of the CALM curriculum because they’ve been done better otherwise in the classes they’re meant for.

This leaves making good choices.

This leaves common sense.

How many posters did I do in that class that were about “Don’t drink and drive” and “Don’t smoke”. I mean, really, by the time you get to grade 11, if you’re already doing these things, you’re going to continue them with or without CALM.

I understand the DARE program in grade 6. When kids are clueless about these things. That is education. They are learning something new.

We’ve known it forever. Why should we be subject to this repeating redundancy.

So, CALM can be abolished, since it doesn’t teach us anything new/could be done better in the classes that are meant for that subject (Math, bio, as above.)