School Stress

Today I will keep writing again. At this point it's the only reason why I write in here anymore. My fingers and my mind just need to be busy so that I don't think about the razor blade just a few feet away from me on the shelf in the box that beckons me.  It's interesting to look back at what I wrote years ago in this book, before I started writing in it again a few months ago. I was concerned with... Well, I wasn't concerned. I barely even wrote, mostly just drew pen dogs and cats shoddily filled-in with crayon. That was before all this happened. So many things. This school system is just so corrupt.  You have these tests that impact your future: what colleges you can go to, if you will progress to the next grade... they just keep coming up with new things to test. The tests are just becoming more important than the education. Teachers are being forced to give up their successful curriculums to teach how to take the test instead of the actual topic that they are supposed to teach. It only gets worse when everything is standardized. Every teacher has to make up new ways to make their teaching interesting but still teach what they are supposed to according to the curriculum. Schools that were formerly great are forced into the curriculum changes and coming out worse. The same thing has been happening with teachers. Of course, the fault was in them and not the system. Because the executive decisions made by uninformed people long past school age are obviously better for kids in school than the decisions that are made by the experienced teachers who have been churning out successful students for years, some even decades. The standardization completely ignores how people are different and learn in different ways. Whenever someone can't fit into their mold, they are considered dumb, lazy, unsuccessful. We are expected to make decisions at such young ages that impact the rest of our life, but we are still patronized and restricted from doing everything else. Aren't tattoos exactly like this? It's highly frowned upon in professional society to have tattoos, but if anything they are less permanent than the choices that we make for our future in high school and college. Almost everyone I've talked to either has no idea what they're gonna do after they've finished school, and everyone else wants to be a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or some other money with high pay that they might not even like. The entire point of school has been forsaken for false values that were imposed by trying to find a shortcut. Everyone is really stressed. I'm especially worried about Quinn. Her parents don't offer any support whatsoever from what I've heard, but with much stress to do well in school. They don't seem to understand the concept of different learning styles and they trust the curriculum to know what it's doing when it doesn't at all. It just makes me so pissed off how they can ignore who she is like this. She hates school because of this, and I think I might be one of her only friends. Also I feel like she might be doing drugs or something by the way she's been kind of secretive recently. With what she has to deal with, I wouldn't be entirely surprised. I need to write so much more... but I have homework to get to. My point exactly. 

The genre of journal entry was used to get into the head of a student immersed in the situation. The narrator refers to self-harm, and it is implied that it is because of school-related stress. The narrator is writing to relieve stress, but they don't have time to finish because they have to do more schoolwork.