I began doing some research on the topic of AP after reading a column by a Hillcrest High School student in the Dallas Morning News. Rebecca is 17 years old and lives a miserable life by her own account. She gets up at 6:00 each morning, has a full round of school and extracurricular stuff until 9:30 at night, and then begins her “small mountain of homework.” Why is she running herself into the ground? She thinks a student needs five, six, or even seven AP classes every year in order to have a good enough resume for college.
But the problem isn’t just lack of sleep. She doesn’t feel she’s learned anything in the last three years. As Rebecca says, “AP classes are notorious for cramming information rather than conceptualizing it. . . . On paper, I have learned a lot in the past three years, but most of the concepts are too abstract and inapplicable in the real world.”
In the same day’s paper another student, Matt, a senior at FlowerMound High School, wrote about a real-world educational experience—a school trip to Germany where he visited the Dachau concentration camp. He wrote, “Being confronted by the buildings, standing and smelling and seeing and feeling the claustrophobia of the shower” gave him a connection to the
human aspect of the sweep of history. . . . Before Dachau, the Holocaust, as I had learned it within the four walls of a classroom, was a part of World War II, one aspect of a brutal regime that could have destroyed democracy, a textbook example of genocide, and so on. I learned the facts of the Holocaust without ever learning its soul.
This made me wonder if trips or other personal experiences are necessary for students to connect to the facts they learn in school, that would otherwise be lifeless and boring, something to memorize and forget. I have been to Dachau and it does confront you as Matt says, but so did reading the Diary of Anne Frank, maybe even more. Taking the time to read a personal account like that in a history class would be a great thing. I wonder if the rigorous pace of the AP curriculum would allow for it. I’m sure many of you took AP classes—do you think they prepared you for understanding the world or just understanding the test?
I think I learned the most on going on trips in all honesty. Not only did I get real life experience but I learned so much about history. I went to New Zealand for an extra curricular club I participated in. Before we left for the trip we needed to learn about the culture. I learned so much about the maori culture before I left for my trip. When we finally got to New Zealand I was able to make visual connections with the items I learned about the maori people. I also feel I learn a lot more when I go to historical sites because the information is usually written out in handouts and are pretty easy to read. Finally, our bus driver who drove us around actually really hated maori people and I did my research to figure out this racisim that exisited in NZ that I had no idea about. I learned a lot.
ReplyDeleteI stongly agree with your argument. If anything the AP course I took during my senior year taught me how to condition myself to pulling all nighters and memorizing and regurgitationg information I had put on flashcards. The curriculum is difficult, and the information is overwhelming . On hands learning and experiences defintly should be integrated more into the curriculum.
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