School Sections

Nowadays most schools in the country opt for heterogenous sectioning. That means aside from an optional "best" section where they keep the deviant overachievers and those most unlikely to get laid, the rest are spread out randomly into the rest of the blocks/classes/sections/whatever-they-want-to-call-a-group-of-students-in-a-room.

Most of them anyway, but not all.

From what I remember, the school where I spent my gradeschool and highschool in still maintains the same rank system they first implemented a hundred years ago. In the ranking system, the top fifty students get section A and the last fifty get the last section available. The school wont tell you your exact seeding in the batch, but you can get an idea from the letter of the section you have.

What does that mean? That means if you have a letter that's D or lower, you know there's a good chance there'll be a lot of mentions of "minimum wage" and "union strike" in your future.

Of course parents of the lower sections finally got tired of being asked why D is called D so they moved that this cruel system should be abolished. But then again, there are those parents in the A-B rankings that want the system maintained, because, well, there's this premise that stupidity is infectious and that you shouldn't be mixing good apples with good ones.

So the school administration reached a compromise. They changed the section labels from letters to, well, virtues, but retained the ranking system. How do I know? My classmates from the previous year were still my classmates and the room positions didn't change much (i.e. all classrooms are still arranged from A-G from the previous year)

Most astonishing is the way they named the class sections. For the best sections they gave them names like "Humility" "Courage" "Fortitude" and "Generosity". For the lower sections they gave the names "Faith", "Obedience", and funniest of all, "HOPE". Are they trying to keep the spirits of the despirited up with these words?

I can imagine a teacher speaking in front of class section Hope,

"You have two failing grades, six lines of seven grades. Your general average is enough to make the Philippine GNP look like an economic miracle, and you have a conduct rating suitable for a gang member in prison. Demographics says that in three years time you will be knocking on my door asking if I have excess bottles and newspapers. That or I'll find you mugging somebody outside for chump change. But don't worry, take heed from your section name, HOPE. Because that's all you have."

What the hell. It's not just that, the last section of fourth year highschool is named "WISDOM". Sure knowledge and wisdom are different but wisdom isn't really what will get these kids into college will it?

College Admissions guy #1: So what do we have here?
College Admissions guy #2: A guy with a lot of failing grades.
College Admissions guy #1: Shall we give him the thin envelope of rejection and shaming?
College Admissions guy #2: Uhhm, wait. Check the name of his section out.
College Admissions guy #1: IV-Wisdom eh? To have that section the guy must be smart.
College Admissions guy #2: Yeah. *sarcasms*
College Admissions guy #1: FAIL.

And since when has these section names really done anything to inspire people? Schools name their sections after Flowers, Trees, Fruits, Saints, Virtues. What the hell. Nobody cares about those anymore. It maybe only me thinking but sometime in the future, there will be sections of some obscure school being named after CANNED GOODS. How about it? IV-SPAM, III-LIGO, I-MALING and best of all II-MOBY HOTDOG. BOOM! Who wouldn't want to be in _that_ section? Just kidding. Snore.

Why not give the students the section names that they want? Names they can look up to? Like instead of names of Saints that kids rarely check out, give them names from super Heroes. Like SUPERMAN? He's got the virtues, he's got the skillz and he happens to be EMPLOYED, not like some saints I know. Spawn, Hellsing, Kenshin - you name it.

The list of possible sources is almost infinite. I mean, if you were a student, what would you rather have as a section to represent you, III-Avocado or III-Metallica? Metallica pwnz Avocado 50-0. The 2nd grade students from our school have sections named after angels. The last section's name is Uriel, though nobody recognizes it, it's the name of the Angel of Death who brought down the death of every first born in Egypt. Tit awesome. We should have more of those sections.

Why stop there? Why not name the classes after NBA Baskteball teams? That we we have something to cheer on during the season, and making up jersey's wont be as hard.

The reason why school doesn't work as well as it should is that the people running it should stop thinking like uppity adults for once and start learning from the kid's they're teaching a bit. You know, to learn a bit more from them instead of teaching them useless shit like how many times Elias got shot during the closing moments of Noli Me Tangere. In case you're wondering, here's the answer to that: NOBODY CARES!

Put the Fun back in Functional!

I18n Notes:
Sections are groupings of students in gradeschool, highschool in a batch.