The Learning Curve

GENERAL MUSINGS

We're in the Winter of Modern Education and We're All Discontented

I have been an educator for the best part of my adult life and as I prepare to depart this vocation once and for all at the end of this semester, I am struck by the sense of weariness and defeat that I hear from my colleagues in both the high school and university classroom. We are all so dang tired.

The last five years have been an avalanche of circumstances and machinations and overt incompetence in the ridiculously complex and really just plain ridiculous educational institution in this country. Does anybody "in charge" have a clue what they're doing? If so, somebody please send me their email because I have questions.

Gotta go but more to come on this. See ya 🙃

Why Learning to Write Well Is Still Important in the Age of A.I. Writing teaches you to think, and you can't outsource that to a bot.

As AP Exam Prep Season is underway, maintaining motivation for tired seniors who just want to be done is a real challenge - especially since I just want to be done too. One of my tactics is to leverage that desire to reach the “next level” of their life experience: the AP Lit Exam is basically a grant application. Three hours of college Credit costs anywhere from $500 - $5,000 depending on the school and that doesn’t take into account the value of the time saved so students are basically asking the CB for money when they write their exams - metaphorical money but still.

So, someone has to approve a grant application by assessing its validity and its worthiness and that’s what the Reading is all about. The three essays are the way in which students make their case and demonstrate their competence with college level reading, writing, thinking and analyzing skills and those essays are the only basis by which the Readers will determine who has earned the “grant money.” There is something about this perspective that both relieves some of the performance anxiety some kids have about the exam and also motivates a more tangible and practical approach to the value of the experience.

One of the major life lessons we must impart to these young adults is that success requires work and that hard work is a success in its own right; that effort and achievement are co-conspirators and that being tired is not a good enough excuse to quit. Since I am from Kentucky, I use the Derby as an illustration: by the time the horses reach The Homestretch, they are all tired of running but the jockeys don’t drop the reins and let the horses stop and graze or roll on the track; instead, that is when every jockey will raise the whip to urge the horse to run even faster, work even harder in order to blaze across the finish line and win the race. We are in the Homestretch of the AP English Literature course and every Homestretch requires more of you, not less.

That lesson will stick long after their scores on the AP Lit Exam have faded from memory 😌