Thought experiment
I'll be posting on Michigan's decision to employ the ACT as their high school exit exam tomorrow. Right now, I want to get out of the theoretical and into the classroom. In checking a blog-type site for students who attend my old high school, which is consistently rated one of the top three high schools in the nation, I saw an interesting post: A student who hadn't been at school the day before asking for what had happened in her classes. The responses lead me to ask -- keeping in mind this is the creme de la creme of American public high schools -- is this what we should expect a typical day to be like? (Note: all teacher names have been taken out in deference to privacy.)
This high school is on block scheduling, which means you have four 1 and 1/2 hours classes. Especially with half of the day spent doing low-level work, this isn't exactly a picture of rigorous, critical thinking- and skill- building pedagogy. The students themselves don't seem particularly impressed. I can tell you from my own personal experience that the descriptions follow a more or less normal day at this school.
Of course, this isn't even close to a scientific analysis, but the power of anecdote (especially that of relatively unpoisoned student perceptions) suggests important questions. Combined with my previous post on the systematic TIMSS and NAEP studies, the primary question is: Do we really know what the point of K-12 education should be, and are our curriculum and structures aligned towards that goal?
1st comment: in ap psych, we just checked the test ([teacher] gave us a 7 point curve again) and we're going to the computer lab thursday. chapter 17 is due monday.
2nd comment: in french we didn't really do anything today... We pretty much just talked about what we did over the weekend and started going over the pages on francophone countries before chapter 1. [teacher]'s not going to be here on Friday, we don't have any homework, and just bring your book to class on Friday.
3rd comment: hum[Humanities; a combined english/history course]- [teacher] gives a speech about the importance in group projects, if one person is a problem for the whole group, make sure you tell [teacher] so if your presentation is screwed up then [teacher] can take into account that part of it was that one person and their issues. and then we went to a lab and worked on the canterbury tale projects the rest of the time
[teacher2] talked about different religions and the religious leaders and the importance of theocracies. and [teacher2] compared calvinists to lutherans a lot. and then just said that we have to make sure we read chapter 5.
This high school is on block scheduling, which means you have four 1 and 1/2 hours classes. Especially with half of the day spent doing low-level work, this isn't exactly a picture of rigorous, critical thinking- and skill- building pedagogy. The students themselves don't seem particularly impressed. I can tell you from my own personal experience that the descriptions follow a more or less normal day at this school.
Of course, this isn't even close to a scientific analysis, but the power of anecdote (especially that of relatively unpoisoned student perceptions) suggests important questions. Combined with my previous post on the systematic TIMSS and NAEP studies, the primary question is: Do we really know what the point of K-12 education should be, and are our curriculum and structures aligned towards that goal?
This entry was posted
on Tuesday, October 11, 2005 at 7:50 PM.
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