The first one.

My first blog...here we go. I am a student at URI and one of my classes is an education classes and we go off site into inner-city schools and into the classrooms to observe the teachers in their own environment. I was placed in Pawtucket school district...Tolman high school. I visited there today and they were not kidding about inner-city.

Not that this is a surprise to me but I saw pregnant girls only about 15-16 years old cruising down the hallway like nothing was wrong. I saw boys with jeans that if they wore them any baggier they would have been around their ankles. Now call me old fashion even though I'm not old at all but that's not acceptable to me. I don't know what it is about these kids, why do you want to wear your pants lower than your butt so that you have to hold them up and waddle down the hallway...personally that doesn't look comfortable at all and it is certainly not fashionable.

And the pregnancy thing blows my mind. I cannot for the life of me figure out what is appealing to having a kid at 15-16 years old........YOUR STILL A KID YOURSELF!!!!! and trying to take care of another life along with your own is impossible to me and I know I couldn't do it, not to mention if I came home pregnant at 15 my mother would kill me.

Tolman reminds me of home. Poughkeepsie high school that is, and I guess you could even say my high school F.D. Roosevelt. The kids that are there they just don't seem to care and I can't figure out why. It might be because I now understand the value of my education and because I have to pay for it but kids need be taught that education is a necessity just like breathing. If they have big dreams and goals than that's fantastic and they should follow them but in order to get there education is needed and it needs to be valued and not taken for advantage. I think many kids think that it's just somewhere they have to go, that they have to be there and if their contained there, they are not going to want to be there. When I was in high school I would do everything in my power to skip my class and leave to go hang out with my friends. I always had something better to do than school, and looking back now I should have stayed because half the stuff high school I don't remember.

In general not just in NY, teachers need to teach the value of education to show the kids what education will do for you right now in this time, and show they what it will do for them in the future. Kids live in the time right now, they aren't looking at the future yet, their worried about what they are doing after school not what test they have tomorrow.