I feel that I may come back to this issue in one form or another, so I've labelled it as part one of a possible series. Anyway, this first segment of this series will be about looking past the overachievers to make sure that the underachievers and simply the achievers will get the work done that they need to.
My inspiration stems from the assignment we've been given for AP Spanish over the summer. We're to read El Alquimista (the Spanish translation of The Alchemist, which was actually originally written in Portuguese). That's fine. We're also to keep a "diary" about it was well. Also fine. The entries must consist of ten to fifteen sentences of summary, and we're to have at least ten of them by the end of the 112 page book. Not fine.
I find it ridiculous to ask for ten summaries from a hundred page book. That's a summary every ten pages, which interrupts the flow of the book and will leave students with a disjointed view of the story of the book. It's excessive, and students won't have a better idea of what's going on throughout the book. Sure, it proves that they're reading it, but if they feel that detriments will aid them, that's their choice.
I personally don't believe that I need the excess of this assignment, as I'm already fairly adept at Spanish, and summarizing a plot line every few minutes is busywork for me. I get nothing more out of doing it ten times that I would four. I know this from experience, as it's happened frequently.
For example, when writing essays in Sophomore Accelerated English, we were told that each body paragraph of a five paragraph essay should contain around twelve sentences. I tend to write long, winding, and possibly confusing sentences, and writing twelve of them for each paragraph will yield a lot more work for me and a paper that's much longer than that of the rest of the class.
It's this kind of one-size-fits-all mentality that is failing us. Some classes, even though they're accelerated or AP are, for me, easy. So easy, in fact, that I overanalyze things to the extreme, which actually makes it hard. In the AP Language and Composition that I took my junior year, I would search and search and search to find something that I thought would be correct, only to have someone volunteer an answer that was perfectly acceptable, good, and was on the surface that I dove right past. It seemed that I was beyond the ceiling of that class.
Each class has a floor and a ceiling. Most people in the class will fall into the room, and not be above or below it. However, it's necessary to tailor the class to those who fall through the floor or rise above the ceiling. The tailoring to those beneath the floor actually exists. It's called tutoring. But what exists for those who are above the ceiling? We seem to get swept under the rug, as if we're supposed to figure it out for ourselves. But our minds don't work like that. We'll overanalyze things yet again, and miss the problem entirely.
There's a reason that Gifted and Talented Education existed in elementary school: to nurture the minds of the "gifted" and "talented." Why then, does that not exist in the years beyond elementary school? Accelerated and AP classes exist, sure. But they still contain, as mentioned before, a floor and a ceiling, and we appear to be doing nothing to fix the ceiling and raise it up. And that is, certainly, a huge problem.
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