Approximately 700 kids per class, of which maybe 350 are from families who are super competitive about education, are all fighting to get into the advanced track in all academic fields by high school. Making it in middle school isn’t that hard, but smart, capable kids do get shut out going into high school. Then freshman honors English, which has 4 sections, is an absolute killer since it has to whittle down those 4 sections to only 2 for sophomore year. The freshman class is so difficult that parents hire tutors to work with their kids all 8th grade summer on just their summer homework assignment for the class. My older kids who both scored 800 on the SAT and went on to an Ivy and Stanford did not get A’s at first. So there’s a huge push to just get a B- or C, which will signals the kids who will improve to an A- by the final quarter, and then be approved to advance to the sophomore year honors class. Complex, mature papers that would have gotten an A at my decent college got C’s. So some kids really are great writers after years of tutoring, but even they struggle to survive the weed out. The longest line at conferences is always at the door of the honors English teacher. Bottom line is, the work for that class needs to be the best paper the parent/student can write or you won’t advance. So yeah, parents and/or tutors get very involved. Unfortunately, the kids have to be so good that there’s not much room for them to make mistakes. When they should be able to make them, which is freshman year, there’s too much pressure so they can’t. That then prolongs the parental involvement IMO. My D is fully weaned from any parental input, but since then her grades have dropped some. I refuse to send her to college dependent.
PS, the workload is so intense that I don’t think the tutoring and parental input is as instructional vs. corrective as it should be.
This HS environment you describe is sick. If 6 sections of kids are good enough for honors English you create 6 sections that year. There shouldn’t be any weed out in HS - you should be encouraging and allowing kids to succeed. In my daughter’s HS, they would have as many sections of BC calc as they needed depending upon the level of that year’s students.
Well, apparently the teachers think the workload is much greater for the higher level classes (more and longer essays to grade) and are not willing to do it.
I live in New Jersey too, and I have always been so glad we stayed in the supposedly barely adequate, non-competitive school system we did. My kids experienced none of what you describe. They both write exceptionally well, and both excelled in freshman comp (I never saw any of those papers; there was no need to), in competitive colleges.
I have to take issue with the idea that the top kids from “those” school systems need remediation when they get to selective colleges. Maybe that’s true for the really challenged school systems, but my run on the mill kids were doing just fine (in fact my S got an A+ in freshman comp at an Ivy, and A’s on pretty much every paper he ever wrote, and my D was the go-to for her English-major friends from fancy schools to ask to look over their papers at a top LAC.)
I say that not to brag, but to point out that probably the mutually assured destruction you’re describing does students much more disservice than helps them. I sympathize enormously with you for having to negotiate that labyrinth and stay sane.
I said that more in reference to the fact that my D from a competitive high school, having only taking regular Calc as a junior and then AP Stat as a senior, was still definitely behind in math compared to most of her peers in college and had to take a sort of remedial class freshman year. So I assume something similar might occur for English. Also, I know kids from less competitive districts who had to do that summer thing at Penn, despite having all A’s in high school. A’s at some high schools correspond to much higher SAT’s than at others.
Well, except for very low income students from severely challenged systems, schools like Penn are not going to take all A students with mediocre SAT scores. So yeah, a student with a very challenged background might need help, but there is a huge sea of regular ol’ schools that are not that, but also not what your kids attended.
Everytime you post about your school district, @TheGFG I am grateful not to live in your area!
Only a few more weeks to go! I am doing a happy dance! That said, I hope D is not jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Judging by this thread, in college she will apparently be amidst students who are all receiving parental assistance with their writing.
I feel exactly the same way about @TheGFG’s school district and some other places we couldn’t afford. Didn’t know how we lucked out by having to live on one professor’s salary!
I don’t know what the right answer is - I’d love to throw out grades all together so that we could just all concentrate on teaching kids what they need to know instead of comparing them with each other.
FWIW the Tufts Writing Center did teach my kid about comma splices which no one else managed to.
TheGFC: I do remember some of your threads now, and am also very sorry for your family’s experience. It sounds awful.
In a college writing class, or any college class requiring papers, are students competing with each other for a limited number of As? Or is there a standard the professor is looking for, which maybe all the students are capable of achieving? If a student cheats on a paper, does it impact the grade of any other student in the class? I wouldn’t have thought so in the sort of writing, literature, history, classes my kids took in college. Science classes, graded on a curve, I can see the potential negative impact of cheating on classmates.
I’m only familiar with a very limited number of colleges.
Having taught first year comp in several colleges, sent my own kids to several more, and knowing something about the field as a whole, it was be very unlikely that students would be graded in comparison to each other. programs have benchmarks for different grades, not curves on graphs.
Edited to add: I’ve taught sections where five students get A’s, and sections where no students get A’s. So they’re not competing; they’re working toward a level of attainment.
^ IMO science should be the same way.
Students aren’t competing against other students for a limited number of As in first-year composition.
They are, however, expected to develop a baseline of knowledge and ability that instructors in later courses can rely on them having—so the harm isn’t to the other students,* but there is a probability of harm to the smooth running of other courses.
- Except at schools where Latin honors are based on a top *X*% basis rather than strictly on GPAs, but that's well down the line.
My daughter’s college does it by %.
Garland: Two students we knew who had to attend the Penn summer program came from St. John Vianney and South Brunswick–neither of which have many students from severely challenged backgrounds. They had good grades but weak rigor and SATs. Presumably Penn wanted them for some reason like athletics or diversity.
So is the parental involvement in editing due to the high stakes of college admissions? Do moms and dads feel they need to help junior get perfect grades so he can get into a top college? Because I’ve explained why parents in a competitive school district like mine do it–to ensure access to the top tracks, which in turn is related to college admissions. But why the need in all your kinder and gentler places?
I mean, I couldn’t tell you. We just didn’t have all that involvement here–maybe it’s different now, but honestly, most people did and do not have the money for extensive tutoring, summer classes, etc. If a kid want to be in AP, they’re in. So I’m not sure how to answer your question. I just don’t see that level of involvement here–sure parents are concerned, but in a different way, not so competitively.
I mean, only a handful of students are aiming at tippy top schools to start with, and they tend to be the ones who’d be at the top anywhere. I felt with my kids that not getting all that extra pushing in HS actually made them stronger college students because they got there with less supports–sort of like my H starts taking his seedlings outside on nice days before it’s warm enough to actually plant them, to “harden them off” so that when planting time comes, they’re ready to grow.
I agree with that philosophy, which is why we played the game only a little. That said, I am asking why parents in less competitive districts are nevertheless still editing their children’s papers. Why not let the English teacher do it when she grades it? And if they’re kids “who’d be at the top anywhere,” then not getting involved shouldn’t hurt their grades much, if at all. And besides, why would kids like that even need editing help after age 14 in the age of spellcheck and grammar checking programs?
If you’re talking about me–like I said, I rarely looked at them, but when I did, it would be to throw around ideas. If I aw a there/their mistake which anyone, including this here writer and teacher, can still make when typing fast, I’d certainly mention it.
But their grammar is as good as mine, so speaking only for myself, any paper I looked at was in the spirit of colleagues running what they say by another pair of eyes. I’ve asked them to read and look over something I’ve written at times, too. I can’t speak for others here.