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Pushing students toward college
Ohanian Comment: Moby Dick in 6th grade is on the horizon. I am sure what this push from the College Board will mean is kids reading books inappropriate for their age. Why wait until high school to turn kids off great literature? Introduce "rigor" and turn them off in sixth grade!
I first encountered Moby Dick as a college senior. Although I admired the professor and this book was the love of his life, I hated it. At age 42, I tried again--and I loved the book. Some books are best read by mature people. If I were in charge of the world, some books would be withheld until readers could appreciate them.
So in Memphis, we see a college model of rigor being pushed down to elementary school. As a teacher, I always felt the primary grade model should be pushed upward, meaning attention should be paid to developmentally appropriate practices. As a participant in a special National Endowment for the Humanities grant through New York University, I taught an honors class at the high school before my regular school day started teaching disaffected students at the middle school. (NYU professors felt that their exalted model for teaching literature was inappropriate for disaffected remedial readers, but that's another story.)
When I first walked into the honors classroom, I was shocked by the bare walls. No student work on display.
We changed that in a hurry. Yes, we read a novel, but instead of lengthy classroom probes of plot, setting, climax, etc., I got the students engaged in hands-on projects, interviews in the community, and so on. I definitely wasn't adding "rigor" to the curriculum; I was adding, dare I admit it? Fun.
I was trying to get students to realize that what the novelist was writing about related to their own lives. The theme of the novel was not some abstract issue on which to write a five-paragraph theme but the very fabric of peoples' lives (including their own). My NYU training helped me guide the students in approaching the novels theme through diverse art forms, but primary in the whole process was my experience as an elementary teacher: get student out of their chairs and doing things, display their work, look the other way when they goof off, and so on.
There were no vocabulary quizzes.
Unsolicited feedback from parents was overwhelmingly positive.
And when the regular teacher returned, kids insisted on keeping their projects up on the walls.
By Dakarai I. Aarons
English teacher Joyce Pacente would like to fill her big classroom at Craigmont High School with Advanced Placement students.
While she enjoys the students she has now, Pacente looks forward to the day her class of just over a dozen students becomes 30 or more.
Memphis City Schools' push for more Advanced Placement pupils is "an attempt to get students ready to look below the surface at an earlier age," says English teacher Joyce Pacente.
Using a grant from the College Board, which administers the Advanced Placement program, Pacente and other Memphis teachers are preparing students to tackle more challenging material earlier in their school careers.
It's part of a larger initiative in Memphis City Schools to increase the number of students who are taking honors and Advanced Placement classes.
The work began in November, when a group of teachers from the high schools and the middle schools got together to begin what is called "vertical teaming."
The ninth-grade teachers talk to eighth-grade teachers about aligning the curriculum between middle and high school to ensure a seamless transition. The goal is to start telling students in middle school what content they will need to know to take honors and AP classes.
In the process, teachers and administrators hope to have more students taking advanced classes much earlier in their high school careers.
"It's an attempt to get students ready to look below the surface at an early age," Pacente said.
Sherilyn Brown, Craigmont High's principal, has been a leading advocate of the new efforts.
"We are adding rigor to all of our classes to prepare all of our kids for college," Brown said. "We want them to be successful and have a career where they can be productive citizens."
The work has been done in partnership with the College Board, which launched a national effort to ensure consistency in Advanced Placement classes, said Myra Whitney, associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction.
A three-year grant from the College Board is paying for the course expansion and teacher training, which has included summer institutes.
Teachers submitted their plans for the AP program and had them reviewed by college professors who teach the same courses.
Those professors provided direct feedback to the teachers on how to improve their courses, said Sandra Lewis, the district's Advanced Placement incentive grant coordinator.
The district has also added honors classes and some high school courses into every Memphis middle school.
And in the process, the district is making sure the classes labeled as such live up to their name.
Memphis City Schools is requiring schools to use benchmarks set for honors classes citywide.
"It helps us ensure that an honors class in one demographic area of the city would have the same standard to meet as another demographic area of the city," Whitney said.
Memphis students can take advantage of about 400 AP and 900 honors courses, but administrators and board members have made it a priority that those classes be offered to a wider group of students than in years past.
The end goal, said secondary literacy director Ric Potts, is to make sure these students can attend and complete college.
"Just because you've taken that class, your chances of being successful go up more," he said.
Craigmont's Pacente, a former University of Memphis instructor, agreed. "They are so much more prepared for college," she said.
A consistent complaint among Tennessee colleges and universities has been the lack of preparation among undergraduates. Students often take remedial courses to fill in gaps in their learning.
Potts and the others hope to reverse this trend, and send students who are much better prepared on to the next level.
Alfred Hall, the district's chief academic officer, acknowledges it will take a few years before the entire plan comes to fruition.
"This is our expectation," he said. "It is a matter of formalizing the application and being consistent over time in identifying those students who can be successful," he said "As we build the courses, I think it will become a trend."
— Dakarai I. Aarons
Commercial Appeal
2007-12-27
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2007/dec/27/pushing-students-toward-college/
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