Posted on 12/07/2008 6:13:07 AM PST by reaganaut1
SCARSDALE, N.Y. — The Advanced Placement English class at Scarsdale High School used to race through four centuries of literature to prepare students for the A.P. exam in May. But in this year’s class, renamed Advanced Topics, students spent a week studying Calder, Pissarro and Monet to digest the meaning of form and digressed to read essays by Virginia Woolf and Francis Bacon — items not covered by the exam.
A similarly slowed-down pace came at a cost for some students in one of Scarsdale’s Advanced Topics classes in United States history; it was still in the 1950s at the time of the exam, whose main essay question was on the Vietnam War.
Sarah Benowich, a senior, said that the A.T. approach had improved her writing but that she would have liked more dates and facts worked in. Despite studying Advanced Placement exam review books on her own, she still felt “shaky on some of the more concrete details,” she said.
A year after Scarsdale became the most prominent school district in the nation to phase out the College Board’s Advanced Placement courses — and make A.P. exams optional — most students and teachers here praise the change for replacing mountains of memorization with more sophisticated and creative curriculums.
More objective measurements have been mixed, with fewer students taking A.P. exams, and average scores rising in five Advanced Topics courses but dropping in two: United States history slipped to 4.2 out of 5 from 4.4 the year before (Sarah got a 4) and United States government fell to 3.4 from 3.8.
...
Physics students now study string theory — a hot topic in some college courses that is absent from the Advanced Placement exam.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I bought a home where I did because the public schools have a good reputation and the high school offers many Advanced Placement courses. If they scrap the AP courses and scores on the exams suffer, I will complain.
I would be in favor of allowing smart teens who plan to go to college to transfer to Community College in their junior or senior year. (The public school unions will kill that idea real quick).
String theory in high school? Maybe on the level of some of B. Greene’s books that are purely qualitative discussions. Sounds like marketing to me. If they really want to prep them for college physics, teach them out of the Feynman series.
At least physics has an agreed core set of knowledge.
In English lit, you could teach Spenser or the Pisan Cantos, or maybe the plays of Henry Fielding.
High school students here can start community college part time at 16 (tuition-free). If they want to attend full time, they can either take the GED, or have their families register as homeschools and declare them graduates. My oldest daughter started c.c. full time this fall, instead of doing a senior year of high school. High-school graduates have to pay tuition, unlike “dual-enrollment” students, but it’s not expensive.
It’s not a matter of ‘focusing on their pet topics’. It is a replacement of measureable learning with objective testing with unmeasureable learning with subjective evaluations. The teachers unions love this replacement since it is no longer possible to measure teaching with objective testing. The teachers unions hate any kind of measureable assessments of the value of their work.
I spent my last two years of high school at the community college (our program allows Jr’s and Sr’s to go full-time). Best thing I ever did in my entire education. I picked up my high school diploma and my AAS (with honors) the same week. I will encourage my children to do the same.
Teaching out of the Feynman series-now that would be a rigorous education. I wonder how many high school science teachers would be comfortable with those lectures.
Yep. Replace facts and figures with BS. A lot easier, and good for your self-esteem. But look at the drop in AP scores. I guess it takes a certain kind of "special" community to buy into this rubbish.
ping
“Our local community college offers a program for HS seniors, where they can spend their senior year full-time at the college taking college courses which are transferable to most 4 year colleges. Juniors can also participate, but part time. My daughter took advantage of the program and entered her 4 year college as a sophomore.”
That is so common now that secondary school should now probably end after the 10th grade. Underperforming kids don’t appear to show measurable improvement in the last two years of HS according to some research so why waste the money (with so many kids taking college classes anyway?
Sounds to me like a slow descent into the nether world of the liberals. If a class cannot be completed in one year (as history, geography, etc), then it should be taught in two years.
One of the mysteries to me is why when we teach US History we do not teach enough World History to explain the correlation between the two. What was going on in England and France when the US was fighting the French and Indian War? What happened in Europe just prior to the US Civil War that influenced it? Instead of teaching US History in 11th grade and World History in 12th, combine the two and teach History 1 in 11th and History 2 in the 12th.
Remember, it's all about FEELINGS!!
And dumbing down the class so you can find a teacher qualified to teach it!!
High school in its current form should be abolished. I would be in favor of a new "high school" consisting of grades 8 thru 10. At the completion of 10th grade, a student would either go to junior college (if qualified), trade school, or out into the work force. In junior college, the student could get a better idea of what he wants to major in, and what college he wants to get his Bachelors from (and senior college would thus be reduced to 2 or 3 years, depending on whether the student wanted a masters)
It's essentially a jobs program for unionized teachers, which is why change will be so difficult. I would also be in favor of abolishing any need for an "Education" degree to teach high school, preferring instead people who actually majored in the subject. It's absurd to think that a grad student who taught college freshmen is unqualified to teach HS seniors.
“Advanced Topics.” Oh, I do love it. We no longer have any problems, only “issues.” Issues are so much easier to handle than problems. Now students no longer have to delve into subjects, but can breeze through “topics.” Life just gets better and better.
This is similar to the German model, although they start the division younger and have a few options. My mom was on a middle track- she was going to school from her early to mid-teens to be a pharmacist (learning latin, chemistry, botany, etc), including an apprenticeship in her late teens.
My daughter went to one of the best Catholic HSs on Long Island. It did not offer a single AP course. She took a classical curriculum of four years of English, Math, History, Bio, Earth Sci, Chem, and Physics, and three years of French. She took Computer, Art, Music, theory and history, and PE. She went to college as well prepped as anyone who took AP course could have been. Scarsdale is going in the right direction.
Depends on your state. In Virginia, high school seniors can and do spend part or a huge portion of their day at community college on a dual enrollment type of set up. My kids didn’t do it, one wasnt driving at the time and the other focused her time on AP credits. She transferred enough credits that she entered college a 2nd semester sophomore. Pretty sweet - she can finish in 3 years
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