Too persuasive for her own good (+full speech)

A 15-year-old Napier Girls High School student was stood down for a speech critical of schools and poor teaching. PHOTO/FILE

Student suffering thanks to "teaching failure" are some of the words leading to a 15-year-old Napier Girls High School student being stood down in a controversial speech she gave in class.
Clive orchard worker Andrew Pritchard said his Year 10 daughter Anela should not have been penalised for giving her opinion in a persuasive speech assignment.
It criticised subject content that was unrelated to the real world and said many teachers were uninterested in student needs.
He said he was asked to keep his daughter home until a meeting with principal Mary Nixon, also the Hawke's Bay Secondary Schools Principals Association president.
Mr Pritchard said there was no apology but she was free to return to school.
It was up to his daughter to decide if she would return before the school holidays, during which she will move to Australia to live with her brother.
Just 24 hours after posting her speech on her Facebook page it has attracted more than 5000 likes.
Ms Nixon did not return calls from Hawke's Bay Today.

Anela Pritchard posted her speech to Facebook - the speech she says she was suspended from school for giving:

I'm a decently smart kid, with some decently good grades.

But sometimes I believe that, with the essays, worksheets and endless amount of study assigned to me each day, that teachers secretly hate me, rather than actually wanting to help me do better.

They most likely, if anything really, just do it for the pay check. I'm not saying all teachers do, but the majority of them appear to be that way.

I always think about how I do believe school is important, however I don't believe most of the stuff taught there is.

Do I honestly need to know what a= 1+rn to the 2nd power is, go over the Treaty of Waitangi every year since I was literally 5, or memorize the periodic table in order to get somewhere in life?

Do I honestly need to know the structure of a seed and how it works and whatnot? No, I don't think so. I believe school should, instead, teach us more valuable information that we'll actually need for our futures.

In High School, we should be learning about the real world, how to pay my taxes, apply for jobs, mortgage my house, buy a car, things that we will actually use in the future.

So far, I've only learned that whatever I manage to get done in a short amount of time isn't enough.

What's that? You did your homework, but didn't do one question because you found it difficult and you were struggling? Well, there's a unsatisfactory for homework on your mid term report! Now, that's just not OK.

What my point is, we all struggle, and work, and stress our selves over things that aren't important in the long run. Two years after High School, and the majority of the students who've graduated have already forgotten anything they've learned in the last four years of their school career.

Stressing myself over end of year exams, because if I fail, I have my parents on my back, asking me why I didn't try hard enough, my teacher telling me I could have focused harder in class and my peers simply telling me that I'm stupid? Ridiculous.

I honestly used to love going to school. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it made me happy to go to school, to meet friends, to learn things that I never knew.

But the minute High School starts, it's either you fly, or you fall. Now I strongly dislike it, and want nothing to do with it.

Some teachers are nice, there are a good few who are genuinely nice and want to help us but it seems that the teachers that are not willing to encourage and help me are all teachers of the subjects I'm not good at and it also happens to be that I don't enjoy them.

It's unbelievable how some teachers play favorites.

They believe you can do better than your best? If they wanted me to do better, wouldn't they actually help me to understand? they wouldn't shove more work down my throat and expect me not to have any trouble with it.

I'm not saying to treat me special because I struggle in the subject but because I'm a student who would like to learn things by a teacher, and not a book.

Actually do the teaching that you were taught and you are paid to do. Don't just give me worksheets to do and expect me to take a test on the topic 2 days later.

You know...the school system is really screwed up...We have all these teachers that don't enjoy their jobs and are all angry about the cut backs in their paychecks. Making us feel like complete idiots and making us feel useless. Like it's our fault that we don't understand the work! Maybe some of us just don't understand it! Or maybe the teacher didn't teach it very well, but we're the ones dealing with the consequences of failure.

It's teachers like this that make us students want to skip class and not go to school because we think we aren't good enough for the certain subject. Like we are stupid and will never understand it...

Teachers are PAID to TEACH us.. not paid to hand out a piece of paper with words on it and sit around and do nothing!!!!!!! I'm not saying all teachers are bad, and I understand that us as students need to make an effort. But our teachers chose this career and need to try to cater for each individuals education.

We spend 7 hours, 5 days a week, plus extra hours on top of that going over the days work, revision, studying, completing unfinished work and also homework give, working to please every single teacher, the least the could do is have some understanding and simply teach.