Erica Goldson Valedictorian Speech Analysis

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Erica Goldson Valedictorian Speech Response Erica Goldson brought up a very controversial and very interesting topic about our current education system in the US. She states that students are so focused at memorizing data and getting good grades, that they miss out on the whole idea of learning and being educated. I agree with her, students should be learning and absorbing the material, instead of memorizing for the next big test and just forgetting about it later on. Graduating seems like the top priority in students nowadays, and to me that is just upsetting. And the students who are very talented and are very motivated to learn and be driven in a non-academic subject seem to have a more negative image than the people who are driven by academics. Overall we have a problem in our society’s image of academics that will be very difficult to reverse. You could memorize lists of vocabulary words, different equations, and maybe even the periodic table of elements. Is…show more content…
I mean, sure, grades are very motivational, but they are also very harming. Countless suicides are caused by grades and pressure, and I think it just really isn’t necessary to put a student on the spot like that. Let’s say a student makes straight A’s. That’s great in most cases, but does it really self-motivate the student into learning more, or does it give them a little lee-way to slack off and maybe not study as much? Or let’s say that a student gets straight C’s. That would just destroy him, he would think of himself as stupid, not diligent, and not like his peers. But also, that student could be performing at Carnegie Hall. Nowadays, academics is such a huge portion of our lives, it overrides the positives. It seems like everything is evolved around getting that A, or doing well on that test, when really you should be happy that you won a piano
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