<p>I was using that term facetiously, Tarhunt.</p>
<p>I assume that by assigning topics like the above, that is what you are trying to avoid; at least, that is what I’ve been told by school administrators. </p>
<p>The slam at my son is uncalled for, btw. It was not my point, as you well know.</p>
<p>Curious also whom “our” refers to in “not our fault.” The royal “our” as in the “education establishment” (of which you are somehow a part, I presume)?</p>
<p>I would say that this thread pretty much sums up the controversy around American education. You get all these letters to the editor about how it used to be in the good 'ol days, and how the kids these days don’t have to work in school and so the American school system is going to hell.</p>
<p>But just TRY to actually put together a challenging class, and many of those same parents will scream and cry that THEIR kids can’t keep up. It’s not FAIR!!! After all, Johnny has to spend all that time playing video games and hanging out. It’s not HIS fault that other kids have better skills than he has.</p>
<p>My friends at the school district tell me that they deal with this stuff every day.</p>
<p>Are you part of the education establishment, tar? You seem pretty passionate on this subject.</p>
<p>My point has nothing to do with kids who “can’t keep up.” Maybe you could use a little critical reading refresher course yourself, tar.</p>
<p>It’s all about bad parenting. Because one parent decides it’s perfectly OK to let the kids camp out in front of video games and watch TV 'til they can recite every line of “CSI” by heart, my kids, and every other kid who reads and loves learning, have to suffer. They have to sit through classes dumbed down for Video Lad, the newest in the Legion of Superheroes. Actually, it’s not even that promising. At least reading DC comics would be READING.</p>
<p>Tar: It is your (the royal “your”) job to teach the kids AP European History. I have a sneaky feeling that the kids at the OP’s school are not required to take the AP exam. There is no such requirement at our public school, for example, though my son’s present school requires it.</p>
<p>My son is presently taking the heaviest honors courseload possible at his school and is scheduled to take APCalc, APUSH, APLanguage and Comp., as well as Honors Spanish three and Honors Physics (school does not offer AP Physics) next year as a junior (plus religion and music theory).</p>
<p>He does musical theatre, jazz band, concert band, tennis and community service.</p>
<p>I am more than pleased that he can fit in some time to spend with friends. In fact, I encourage it.</p>
<p>I really don’t expect him to teach himself history in his spare time in order to demonstrate depth and breadth of European history on the assignment in question; but, as I said, perhaps others more brilliant (as your own children), are able to do so.</p>
<p>My job is to take half-educated kids like yours once they get to college and attempt to get them to close their mouths long enough to stop drooling so that they can learn to breathe through their noses. That’s where I have to start, because so many of them are so incapable of anything else.</p>
<p>The school district my children attend does an exceptional job of preparing kids for college, but it is plagued with parents like you. Every time there is some assignment that requires a kid to actually think or put those “boring facts” as you call them into some kind of context, parents crawl out of the woodwork to protest how HAAAAARRRRRRD the assignment is.</p>
<p>“Oh, my precious little Lucinda will break her nails trying to type a paper that long!” “Oh dear, dear me. Little Johnny is incapable of going to a library and looking up the rise and fall of organized crime in Europe. He’s been too busy playing video games at my request!!!”</p>
<p>Parent like you allow your kids to slow all the other kids down.</p>
<p>I do recommend a critical reading course for you, tar. I explained what I meant about the “boring” facts. You are a college professor??</p>
<p>Perhaps you can explain how my kid is slowing all the other kids down when he has an A average in the above courses? My kid, in fact, loves to learn. No one is holding a gun to his head to do the excellent work he has always done, and which, I expect, he will continue to do. He is, and always has been, intrinsically motivated.</p>
<p>I disagree with you about the value of the assignment. You seem to be having trouble dealing with that.</p>
<p>hereshoping: You still haven’t come close to giving a coherent account of what you think is wrong with the assignment. Tarhunt misread you considerably, since I don’t think you were saying any of the things he mocked, but that doesn’t get me any closer to understanding what you MEANT to say. </p>
<p>I remain curious – I saw what I thought was a great assignment, one I wish my children’s teacher had been sophisticated and creative enough to give, and you are trashing it. You seem to think a kid at the end of what is supposed to be a college-level European History course should not be expected to know enough to do a decent job. Huh? That makes no sense to me.</p>
<p>And, just like Tarhunt, you have been awfully free with unjustified speculation: that this was a public school (I’d bet you $10 it wasn’t, and I’d be thrilled to lose the bet), that the kids in this class were not expected to take the exam . . . . Something got your goat here. What in the world was it?</p>
<p>Thanks, JHS; I was just rereading the exchange, as a matter of fact, and I was having trouble understanding the willful misrepresentations of tarhunt.</p>
<p>I believe that it is assignments such as the one in the OP which are causing the dumbing down that tarhunt is complaining about–not the opposite, as tarhunt claims. I took my son out of public school, in part, because of assignments like these. Did you catch the thread on “projects” in public school by any chance from a few weeks ago? These are given for the purpose of “critical thinking.” However, in my opinion, it is more often than not that the kids have been given no foundation to “critically think” about!</p>
<p>I actually work in the public schools–full disclosure–and year after year the kids are more and more confident about knowing nothing. In our district, the assignment given in the OP would be typical: if anyone can explain how a kid can demonstrate depth and breadth of European history after having studied only three school quarters of European history in their lifetime, without going far beyond typical assignments on their own time, I’d be astonished. Instead kids write about how “cats have been perceived as having sexual connotations through history” and this is supposed to be deep understanding. I’m not buying it–and I can’t be any clearer as to why.</p>
<p>Perhaps I don’t see this as a college-level history course. How can it be, if the kid never had European history before? This is actually an introductory modern European history course for my son, as far as I’m concerned.</p>
<p>Thanks, hereshoping. As happens with some frequency, I disagree with you, but I knew you weren’t supporting “dumbing down” anything.</p>
<p>As I have mentioned many times, four years ago my kids switched from a very prestigious private school to a large public academic magnet. There were lots of reasons for that, but they didn’t include confidence that the public school was a better school. As it happens, the public school was a better school in some respects, and not in others.</p>
<p>One of the ways in which the public school falls short, for me, is in humanities classes, including history. My son has had one fabulous history teacher in both 9th and 12th grade, and she has done extremely well by him, but his Euro AP teacher was nowhere near as sophisticated or skilled. He learned a lot of names and dates in Euro, but not a whole lot of History. My attitude towards names and dates is that they are extremely easy to look up. (One of my most loved possessions is my Harvard Book Prize book, which is essentially a chronological outline of world history to about 1950, and which is unbelievably useful for figuring out when wars began or treaties got made, and who was running what when.) I never even took a European History course, ever in my life (although I had a pretty good Spanish History course in 10th grade that certainly dragged a lot of general European history in), and that didn’t ever slow me down much, because I knew how to figure out what I needed to know.</p>
<p>The public school relies a lot on APs, and I get grumpy about that, because I think they are often a second-rate curriculum, especially in the humanities. Not that the courses are useless, but more that they do not offer what I think a good college course should, and therefore that the idea of “advanced placement” on the basis of those courses is hollow. What’s often missing is precisely what I saw as the strengths of the OP’s assignment: original research, understanding what it is that real historians do original research about, and the ability to connect big themes of history to actual day-to-day details.</p>
<p>As for “critical thinking”, I agree with you that it is often a faddish slogan. But I’ll offer this as well: My mother taught philosophy at various prep schools into her 50s, then went to graduate school in Education, getting her PhD at age 61. Along the way, she developed a course in critical thinking for college students essentially replicating what she had done as a high school teacher, which turned into a mini-empire at her state university (about 800 students/semester) that she ran for 14 years. Her data on the course is really impressive: 80% of the kids who take the course have a GPA improvement of .5 or more following the course, and retention/degree completion rates are much higher for students who take the course vs. similar students who don’t. She is retired, now, but she is involved with her successors in a project to adapt her critical thinking teaching methods for middle school and high school teachers in a public school system. She certainly believes, and I think the numbers bear her out, that kids learn a lot more, and learn more effectively, when they learn as “critical thinkers.”</p>
<p>A bit tangential: S1 learned a lot of about writing and about critical thinking, not in his AP-class which, unfortunately, was very geared toward passing the exam and had no end of the year project, but in a 10th grade honors history class where he was expected to write several papers, including one on a topic of his own that involved substantial research. The teacher happened to have a Ph.D.
S2 had an AP-USH class that did involve an end of the year project. It was by no means frivolous. I think the paper was expected to be about 15 pages and to involve substantial research and the use of primary sources. In other words, very typical of a college paper requirement.</p>
<p>AP-Euro tends to emphasize an awful lot of memorizing as it covers far too much ground and chronology. Still at the end of a course, a student ought to be able to trace one theme across a large swath of time.</p>
<p>As for critical thinking, I think the most important requirement is critical reading.</p>
<p>Hereshoping, maybe your kid would be taking AP Euro without any previous background, but that’s certainly not true everywhere. In NYS kids have had two years of World History in 9th and 10th grade, and in our district they had World History for a year of middle school as well.</p>