I Wanna...Put an End to the Idea that Americans are Slackers.

How many high school students do you know that look like this?

Honestly.
 Two Million Minutes. Great movie, but terrible, terrible hasty generalizations. I enjoyed it. It was inspiring. But at the same time a huge blow to the self-esteem of a wannabe engineer. The goal of this movie is respectable. Rah! for patriotism. We will always be the world’s greatest super power! Blah, Blah, Blah. But just like every documentary, I can’t help from thinking every aspect of that film was staged. The indifferent American genius, the Grey’s Anatomy Genetics study party, everything led to the director’s point. American’s are lazy, but fortunate in that we still can be very successful. It’s more competitive for Asians, but even making room to study twenty-five hours a day may not be enough to get what they want. This film was very successful in using scare tactics, to argue one underlying point. With increased globalization these past few decades, competition is transglobal, and America is falling behind. And I totally agree, after seeing the work ethic of some high school students from the viewpoint of one of their peers. Wayzata High School has 26 AP classes to offer. The cheapest way to get college credits. So why do students choose to slide by with a schedule of History of Film, Personal Family Issues 1, Personal Family Issues 2, and Marine Biology? (I don’t mean to bash these classes, I have just heard some things about the effort they require).

But I also see American high school students hard at work, involved in everything, truly seizing every opportunity presented to them. Whites, African-Americans and Asian-Americans all living in their studies. I don’t have a problem with socializing, and in so many career opportunities people-smarts is just as important as book-smarts. I refuse to believe we are going to loose influence in the future years just because we’re graduating fewer engineers.

From my understanding of I Wanna be Average, the reason many students aren't succeeding is because the bobber isn't being thrown out far enough off the shore. Rose uses this metaphor to describe a specific time of his life when vocational education students weren't succeeding because teachers weren't setting the bar high enough. A counterargument to this thought is presented by Patrick Welsh in his article For Once Blame the Students. Welsh stresses student self-initiative, and I think he really respects students that posses a desire to learn. But from my personal experience, I think both are flaws in the American education system. I think it’s ridiculous that some teachers don’t assign work just because they don’t want to grade it. I think it’s even more ridiculous that some students just choose not to do their homework some nights. To be honest, I don’t have a proposal, but the attention these literary works are bringing to these issues are the first steps to changing our system for the better.