I have something unrelated to whine about: stupid rules and regulations. Warning labels are a legal requirement on anything that is potentially dangerous. Really? They're there for the benefit of stupid people and people who sue with little provocation, but they are generally entirely unnecessary. Of course a little kid could choke on all kinds of toys. Why must the company that makes the toys be legally required to put warning labels on them? It's incredibly stupid.
My dad's family owns a blind company (blind meaning in window coverings, the company can see just fine) and they had to discontinue some lines of blinds due to strangulation hazards. Because it's a fairly small company, switching over to a new system can have a big effect on the business. If you have thousands of blinds in stock that can no longer be legally sold, what are you supposed to do with them all? If people just used their brains, a lot of money, time, and effort would have been saved. The irony is that one type of pull-cord that had to be abandoned was far safer and less likely to strangle a child than the one that had to be used instead.
This stupid safety thing is also a problem in schools as well. When I was in elementary school (the same rules usually apply for junior high/middle school students as well though), some of the rules (my wording of course) included:
-Do not pick up snow off the ground or throw it, regardless of whether or not it is going to end up flying towards someone, because you might accidentally hit someone and there might be a piece of ice in the snowball which might hurt someone. If you don't plan on throwing it at all, that doesn't matter, because you could still cause bodily harm to another student and we don't trust you.
-Do not pick up sand--the wind could blow it away and take someone's eye out.
-Do NOT EVER climb on hills of snow. You could fall through them and get buried in the snow, or slip off of them and break your neck.
-Do not climb trees. What kind of idiot are you? You could fall off and hurt yourself. If someone is underneath the tree you could hurt them too, so it's a terrible idea overall.
-Do not play tackle football as it is far too dangerous. Do you know how many people sustain serious injuries from football? Not many, but it doesn't matter.
-No play fighting, wrestling, tackling, or doing anything else violent like that. Someone might get hurt and it will probably escalate into a real fight.
Wooden playgrounds are also considered very unsafe, due to the risk of splinters and rotten wood. Never mind that more injuries are sustained on metal playgrounds because they put silly metal bars over every slide and almost everywhere you turn, resulting in many sore heads, bruises, and in some cases, concussions.
Schools shouldn't have to be so afraid of getting sued that kids go to the principal's office for picking snow off the ground--literally. Kids learn how to be safe from experience. Don't throw snow with ice in it because you'll get hurt. Throw snow without ice in it and try not to hit people directly in the face if they don't want you to. Letting sand sift through your fingers shouldn't be against the rules, but after getting sand in one's eyes, a kid will probably learn that they shouldn't throw sand (after throwing it back at the kid who did it first, of course).
Recesses were often very boring as a result of all those silly rules. Being a boy, I had lots of energy and a tendency to be rough (and still do, of course). Of course, my teachers in elementary were all women, so I had to put up with their pacifist attitudes towards everything ("The fun part of snow forts is building them, not the snow fights, right? I think we can all agree on that." Yeah right. :P).
Another separate (mostly separate, anyway) issue is the way the school system is. Almost nothing gets done at school (I can get as much done in ten minutes homeschooling as I can in forty-five minutes at school). The teachers treat the class as a unit rather than a group of students, punishing everyone for one person's misdeed and teaching everyone a concept that only one or two people have trouble with, and punishing any students who begin working while he/she is still teaching.
The curricula are terribly designed as well. 50% of my social studies textbook does NOT need to be devoted to the native Americans when they make up less than five percent of the population and have been a minority for well over a century. The social studies curriculum is biased in their favour, never once, in most textbooks, mentioning the countless massacres by their side and painting too much of a white and black picture rather than the truth. Grade six is spent learning about government. By grade eight, most students forget just about everything they learned in grade six social studies, not being involved in the government in any way, and having been bored to death by the largely monotonous content of their textbooks. Very little history is taught besides strictly Canadian history, leaving the typical students with a confused knowledge of history, since it is neither taught chronologically nor given relevance in world history. What little history that is taught is taught out of context, without background information or knowledge of how events in Europe led to the colonization of the Americas. Canadian history can be interesting at times, but it is more often dull than not, at least compared to a lot of other history which many students would rather learn.
The math textbooks in use are often ill-suited to many students' learning styles and following them requires little advancement (a lot of time that could be spent learning new material is instead spent reviewing old material).
Science is too environmentally centred to be of real interest.
Language arts is OK, but teachers are generally too lenient with their teaching and marking of grammar and spelling, resulting in nearly illiterate teenagers who are too used to texting in abbreviated, un-punctuated, poorly constructed sentences that they are unable to write a proper essay. Books used in novel studies are only very rarely classics, and are usually very easy and dull (not to many students, but that is because those students haven't been taught well in previous years). Poetry study is retarded, with songs like Katy Perry's "Firework" being used as a study poem. It isn't poetry, it's pop music! There is no deep meaning to that song and it is not worth spending an hour analyzing! Students rarely learn how to write real poetry either. By grade 9 or so they are still writing limericks and haikus.
*sigh*
I doubt many people read that, but I needed to put that out there. That stuff irks me to no end and I need to rant about it every so often. ;)
