Money = Happiness (?)

"If only I had more money I'd be more content and have less problems."
Within the United States, almost everyone is chasing after the illusion of "The American Dream". What once was the pursuit of happiness has now been transformed by society into the pursuit of wealth. Many people believe that their life would be better if only they made more money, or that they'd be more content. And who's to say that they're wrong for thinking this? Looking at today's mainstream pop culture, everything from music to television shows to influential figures show us that having more money is what makes life good. But is this true? To an extent is it, but on the whole, no it is not. Surveys and research show that once people start making that little bit of extra money, they just crave more and more. The happiness that people chase after as they make more and more money slips farther and farther away the faster they run. Having extravagant material objects doesn't fulfill people if they don't (at the tip of the iceberg) have people to enjoy this success with, and doesn't make people happy from moment to moment in life. This is a personal experience, but it's also a statistical one. Princeton University reports that men that make $20,000 spend 34.7% of their time on "passive leisure" - aka non-work related activities - compared to men who made over $100,000 spending only 19.9% of their time doing activities they enjoyed outside of their work (http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S15/15/09S18/index.xml?section=topstories).

So why does making a lot of money matter if you don't even have any time to enjoy it? My personal experience from talking to doctors and CEOs backs up my personal belief of these statistics as well. Five out of six doctors that I've talked to have expressed that the amount of time they spend at their job (and the time it takes away from their personal lives) isn't worth the money they make, and five out of five CEOs had the same responses. Making money to achieve happiness is simply not a valid reason for the chase that has consumed our nation. If you love what you do and the money comes along with it, great. But don't sacrifice what you do love for an empty pursuit of happiness; you've probably already found it where you're at.

The Five-Themed Paragraph: Helpful or Hurtful?

        What if all the things we were being taught in school were of no relative use in the real world? Would people still go to school? Would there be any point in going to school if nothing we learned would help us in life? Hopefully the answers for most would be no to the latter questions. This leads us to the five-themed paragraph. This is a structure that is commonly taught but of no practical use once we are out of school. So why are we being taught it? Furthermore, is it hurtful to us as students to have this structure be exemplified to us as the way we should write? To take it a step even further, should the citizens of the US be paying taxes for kids to go to school and be cheated of learning real/useful writing skills?

        I think it's always important to consider the other views of an argument no matter what your stance is. For this reason, let's examine the pro-five paragraph side for a moment. In defense of the structure being taught, it must be taken into consideration that most high school teachers have an enormous number of students to teach, and in turn an overload of papers that they must grade every time they assign a paper. So assigning these five-paragraph themed papers makes it easier on the teachers who are underpaid for all they do to get through more than 200 papers. Also, it is a valid point that the five-paragraph gives students a basic structure to learn to build ideas on.

         But, is it worth it to make the load easier to all students' detriment? To send them off to college unprepared to write different types of papers such as narrative or research papers? The five-paragraph can very easily constrain the writer. It's hard to fit all your ideas into, can be awkward to work with (not all subject types can fit the structure), and most significantly it doesn't teach how to write creatively and learn how to make our own structure. It limits us. When graded in a five-paragraph theme, teachers can't look at the content of our ideas. How are students supposed to know if the substance of their work is good if they are only being critiqued for if they can fill a certain structure with disregard to what that structure says about any given topic?

        The five-paragraph theme is an excellent starting point for students to learn basic writing skills. But if this idea isn't built upon, students writing can't improve writing or develop more complex ideas. This leaves many that can't conform to the structure feeling like bad or failed writers. Students should be taught this structure, but then be taught how to build upon it and learn how to create their own structure and more thoroughly delve into ideas. Real-life application and preparation for the next part of a student's life is what should be kept in mind when schools decide what to teach students. Not the easiest way to grade a paper. Please, start teaching us skills we’ll need and make our school experience worthwhile.