My time at school changed tremendously over years and not so much for the best. In the earlier years of my schooling I attended a school where standards and expectation were high. The atmosphere of the classroom was positive for facilitating higher learning. These factors pushed me to strive for my highest potential. The best was expected from me and all students no matter what.This gave me strong foundation and prepared me for education to come.But as time went by and when I reached high school, students began fall short of the standards so the standards were lowered. Students no longer had to make threes on the FCAT but just a minimum of a two. Teachers began to focus their lessons on the FCAT rather than students actually learning the materials for that class. In all, it did not help or prepare the student or I for success. When I came to UF it was a drastic change for me. In high school they never really forced you to learn anything but were just satisfied if you turned in your work.
Another change occurred when the whole argument over whether God or any sort of religion should be in the school system had started an uproar between parents, people who were not even parents and the school board. People were saying that the two should be separated and not to mix such affairs. Parents did not want their children to be influenced by the Christianity religion in school, especially if they were of different religions. The "others," as mentioned in blog 5, wanted to be taken into consideration for so often they are not. They wanted to be equally represented in the community and shown that they matter. They felt that freedom of religion was not implanted in school because Christianity was the only religion integrated into the school system. On the other hand, some parents felt like Christianity in school was a tradition and historically important. The word “God” in the Pledge of Allegiance was unique to the United State’s history and culture along with other texts in history books and so forth. They believed that taking God out of the school system would have a negative effect and that people would slowly but surely forget about what America is about and originally stood for. 
Sadly it was decided to take religion out of school which I feel made a big difference. America was slowly taking away its identity but I was in the process of forming my own. Religion might have been taken out of school but it was not taken out of my life. If anything this circumstance helped me to grow stronger in my faith and strong about my opinions. The Pledge of Allegiance was recited by many students across America in the morning during class where they would stand up out of their chair, then face the United States flag, and put their right hand over their heart. Since the Pledge of Allegiance did make a religious reference it was one of the first things to go. The schools I went to stopped reciting the Pledge of Allegiance when I was in middle school and very little still do it today. Instead they chose to replace it with such things as motivational speeches that the whole class would recite every morning. These motivational speeches did not make a difference in my life or seem to "motivate" me. Saying the Pledge of Allegiance would just start the day off good for me and make me feel motivated to do work knowing that there was that kind of structure there. Even though people might have not noticed it, I feel like religious factors helped keep things in order at school.
The History books changed what designated their years on their time lines. The time lines once referred to the years of life as either Before Christ (B.C.) or Anno Domini (A.D.) which is Latin for “year of our Lord” and means the number of years since the time of Jesus Christ. To avoid Christian reference a new system was created where B.C. became Before the Common Era (B.C.E.) and A.D. became the Common Era (C.E.). I was not going to let these worldly changes have an effect on my Christianity. The changes drove me to seek God more and discover what life was all about. I am part of the strong Christian I am today because of it.
