The Piedmont Highlander

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The Piedmont Highlander

The Piedmont Highlander

Dear English Department, Stop scaring us out of Honors and AP English

Dear+English+Department%2C+Stop+scaring+us+out+of+Honors+and+AP+English

smilesBy now, it’s obvious to most of us that school is not about learning. School is about squeezing the life out of us. School is about culling the student population down to a few bright-eyed, bushy-tailed souls and funnelling them into AP classes, and it’s about making sure these students are more than happy to be doing more than double the work. School is about exclusivity, not education.

And if the English Department wants to keep it this way, it will continue to discourage students into Honors and AP English through scare tactics, testing and otherwise “strongly recommending.”

Of course, exclusivity has its silver lining. Students benefit from being separated into those who are talented and motivated and those who are not. Teachers are afraid that unmotivated students will lower the level of their classes. It is a valid fear for teachers who are accustomed to apathetic students breezing half-heartedly through their weighted classes for the GPA boost.

But as the recent AP English cheating incident demonstrates, making students test into higher level classes doesn’t stop certain individuals from treating the class with disrespect. If anything, it encourages it.

English teachers take issue in the fact that more students apply for Honors and AP English than the standard level English classes. But either way, all of the students have to be accommodated, and every current English teacher is certified to teach at the AP level. If the AP course presents enough difficulty to those unqualified, students will talk amongst themselves and, in time, the problem of class imbalance will sort itself out. Let us decide on our own capabilities.

The teachers are not barring students from their class; rather, they are making strong recommendations on the students’ path. But the truth is that scaring them is equally unjustified. The lunch meeting where the AP English teachers outlined the course material wasn’t a syllabus, it was a warning. It was a scare tactic, a failed one at that.

Besides, English is an art. Students should not be separated by talent but by passion. If a few students are in it for their transcript, so be it, but to frighten students out of what they love is to go against the very nature of education. It is more than an annoyance, it is hypocrisy.

Students’ readiness should be based off of an combination of self-assessment and desire to experience what the course has to offer. For teachers to preach the value of learning, not grades, and then use testing and grades as a determination for class readiness is flawed logic at best, deception at worst. Unfortunately, this has become an all too common theme among teachers. Have they given up on their high-minded thesis, or is learning for learning’s sake too cliché?

This is made all the more heinous by the nature of the subject. English is a form of expression that changes from time to time and from person to person; it should be taught as such, not as a science. I recognize that a major difference between AP English and English 7-8 is an stricter curriculum, but students should be able to take their own additional value from the class. Basing readiness for the more rigorous English classes off of test scores and numbers from grade level assessments amounts to going to a museum and rating the paintings one through ten.

What of the emotions the paintings stir up in the viewer’s soul? What of the social issues they mock, or, on the contrary, what of their simplicity? What of the feeling of ethereal awe from gazing into other worlds, into the minds of artists?

The same must be applied to writing. A work of language is not good or bad, and while, for the sake of improvement, teachers assign papers qualitative grades, it is up to the tastes and motivations of the writers whether or not they take the criticisms to heart.

What the teachers in the English Department have done is substantially different: they are “recommending” certain students away from Honors and AP English based on their own calculations.

To make matters worse, the entrance exam was a copy of a portion of the AP test from a previous year. In other words, we were tested on what we would learn in the class, considering we got into the class, considering we passed the test on what we would learn in the class. Talk about teaching to the test.

English remains one of the few subjects that I enjoy because of the exact flexibility and artistic freedom that standardized testing threatens to deface. Testing students into AP History or math course is acceptable, but our artistic expression should be free from numerical judgement. There are enough people looking at us and giving us a nod or a shake of the head based on an immediate notion and a few numbers. There’s enough bureaucracy in education and in our lives, but please, please, please keep it out of our English classes.

I ask the PHS English Department, not to give up. Don’t give up on students, and, more importantly, don’t give up on the idea that school is for learning, not selection. I want to be a part of a school that understands this.

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