I didn’t read Moby Dick. That’s when I knew something was wrong.
I’ve read every single other book assigned to me in high school. I felt horribly guilty writing an essay for summer homework about a book I hadn’t read.
Then I looked at my time at Albany High. Since I’ve been here, there have been a suicide, a murder, stabbings and a drinking problem so extreme that it’s been on the front page of the Bay Area section of the San Francisco Chronicle twice.
We are an academically affluent community. Students are under a ridiculous amount of pressure. In this day and age, these facts are not unrelated.
AHS is in a weird place. On the one hand, it’s like a private school. Students who go to AHS end up attending the same colleges that students from private high schools attend. Students who go to AHS do about as well on standardized tests as students from private schools.
On the other hand, AHS is a public school. AHS has far fewer vacations than private schools do, it doesn’t have the same name recognition as private schools do on college applications and AHS parents can’t afford to pay $27,000 a year for four years of high school.
So AHS is in this conundrum. It compensates for lacking the credibility of a private school by giving its students a private school mindset and assigning mountains of summer homework.
However, the private school AP English and AP Biology teachers I contacted who responded assigned overwhelmingly less summer homework than AHS does. Head Royce assigned the most of any of the private schools, and it was still far less homework than was expected of AHS AP English and AP Biology students. If these students go to the same “good” colleges that AHS students go to, why does AHS assign so much more homework?
Some public schools, like Piedmont High, assigned a comparable amount of summer homework to AHS. Others, like El Cerrito High, did not. At El Cerrito High, AP Biology students were supposed to read and outline the first five chapters of their textbook, but the assignment was not due until two weeks after school started because the district does not permit teachers to assign summer homework.
I’m not sure what this means, but I see students drawn to cutting corners and approaching work dishonestly. Smart students. Especially on summer homework.
The summer is supposed to be a break. Or at least it was supposed to be a break.
We spend so much time focusing on AP/Honors students, that we sometimes forget the growing achievement gap. Studies show that more black men are going to prison than to college. Black and Latino students at Albany High score significantly lower than Asian and Caucasians on STAR tests. The gap between the academically prepared and unprepared is growing larger and larger.
I was disheartened by the number of students who responded to the question, “Why are you taking this AP/Honors class?” on the anonymous survey by saying, “to raise my GPA” or “to get into a good college.” I guess I should have expected it, but it defeats the purpose of learning if students are only in a class for an external result. Assigning summer homework gives those students who don’t care as much about King Lear’s tragic flaw as they do about their own tragic GPA the opportunity to prove just how much busy work they can do without thinking much.
Many students say we want a “challenging” class.
We want it because we are told to want it. I simply don’t believe that all 111 students at AHS who took AP Biology last year took it for any other reason than that they wanted their transcripts to look good. They felt pressure from some outside force.
One of the books I read for AP English this summer was 1984. The whole time I was reading it I couldn’t help but notice the irony of the assignment. There I sat, reading about Big Brother and a world without individualism. A world where people are tortured into conforming. Our assignment was to write about this book as it related to two essays by liberal essayist Ernest Partridge. I felt like I was being told what to think.
Then I remembered the term “conditioning” from 1984’s partner book Brave New World. Sometimes I feel like we are “conditioned” to want certain things out of life. Like we are “conditioned” to compete against each other for college. Like we are “conditioned” to pay lots of money for private college counselors and SAT prep classes. Like we are “conditioned” to do summer homework. Like we are “conditioned” to understand literature in Sparknotes terms. Like we are “conditioned” to cheat and distrust ourselves.
So when does this end? Both 1984 and Brave New World end in destruction. Is the Big Brother of education going to control us all? Kill us all?
No. Probably not. We cannot hate individual teachers or students for falling for this mess, but we have to recognize ourselves as part of it. We have to figure out what we really want out of high school, summer and adolescence and whether the path we’re taking is the best one to get there.
here here!