Reforms to Ease Students’ Stress Divide a New Jersey School District

Parents Forum
841

I didn’t mean to derail but at least at the colleges we’ve explored, education minors are not available. To teacher secondary science (or whatever subject) you major in (Subject) Education. For Physics - about 30 credit hours in Physics as well as Calc 1-3 and Chemistry are required in addition to education courses and a semester of student teacher. DS was surprised as well. Some schools call it a BS Physics with and Education emphasis, some a BS Physics Education but both are primarily the same courses. A standard BS Physics would not allow time to take courses towards teacher certification and student teaching would not be permitted.

As far as prereqs, I think he’ll be fine since he attends an IB school (HLs Physics, English, History, SLs Chemistry, Spanish and Mathematics)

842

My D18 came home last night and said that they have been told that all pre-ap/honors classes will no longer be available next year it is either regular or AP…will be interested to see how that shakes out.

843

That’s ridiculous. There are lots of people that belong in honors classes rather than regular or AP.

844

@delilahxc I totally agree…my kids being are in that middle place. I am hoping that D18 is wrong, although D16 confirmed that is what her teachers are saying too. I fear they are probably right the school has been cutting the honors classes a little every year. D16 had signed up for Honors Physics last year, but when the class schedule came out in the fall she had automatically been placed in AP Physics because the school got rid of Honors Physics. She stuck with in and ended up pulling a B and a 3 on the AP exam. Those of her friends who dropped back to regular physics said it moved way to slow.

845

That’s also slowly happening in my school district and I’m a bit panicked. Last year, they did away with 12th grade Honors English so the choices were either regular English or AP Lit for all 12th graders. Now, D15 loved English and did well, so it was an easy choice for her. But my S21? I don’t know.

846

@deliahxc - if you want you could PM me for more details, but the short of it is - your DS should ideally major (even also get an MS) in his subject or subjects. Yes, a double with Chem or Math would make him more employable, also CS. Then he will be able to do the Ed coursework after the fact. This is much easier than the reverse.

Regarding Education coursework/degrees - first of all, if he starts teaching in private schools, he may not need this at all (though I agree he will have a rough time of it learning 100% on the job, so a practicum or two would be awesome if possible). Even if he teaches in public schools, unless he knows which state he wants to work in, he might be chasing the wrong credential if he does an Education major. I’m sure I also don’t need to tell you that the “good” districts seek candidates in HS teaching who have subject area expertise preferentially over Education majors. If he wanted to do Elementary Ed, it would be a different conversation.

You mention that some teachers come with their Physics degree and have a hard time translating to kids - yes, this happens sometimes, but it’s also not true a lot of the time. It’s partly the correlation of strong STEM interest with (sometimes) a tendency to other nerdly aspects socially. So if your son relates well to kids younger than he is, and if he does additional tutoring, volunteering, practicum, etc., I don’t see this being a problem.

847

labegg, that is a real problem So sorry to hear that.

848

@labegg - our school district is like this. It is unfortunate. My daughter opted out of a few AP classes and it is just a different experience. It’s unfortunate, since there are enough kids to justify an honors section. There is a lot of space between AP and regular.

849

A lab update for those interested and following the drama. D reports that 25 kids were doing make-up labs after school today, and there were other, different students there during her lunch doing make-ups. She couldn’t tell exactly how many there were during lunch since they were mingled in with the kids who had their bio lab class that block. On one hand I feel better knowing D is not alone. On the other hand, I feel sickened because the school is trying to make the narrative about kids “not taking it seriously,” or my D not being smart enough. Are there really that many AP level kids failing the pre-lab quiz due to laziness and failure to prepare for it, despite being warned of the consequences? Note that the kids are coming from different sections, not just D’s. So the numbers don’t mitigate the embarrassment to her of having to sit out in her particular section.

850

Also, D has no way of tracking if and how many students came in during the other lunch period of the day. But I think we can safely assume a minimum of 35 kids total.

851

@CardinalFang, “If your school didn’t allow students to take a zillion APs, then the students who could no longer take the zillion APs, but who previously had taken a zillion APs, would be in non-AP classes with your child, mathyone.”

All, right let’s go through the math you evidently didn’t understand. Our honors track leads into APs, generally in the junior year. You are proposing that if only we would limit the number of APs the kids can take, that everything would be so much better, and the regular classes would now be wonderful because they would be filled with AP kids. Suppose we have 500 kids in the total class, and the top 20% of students are taking the bulk of the APs. Now let’s force them to take regular history or regular English because we know better than they do and we know it would be too much for them to take both. So, of those 100 kids in APUSH or AP English, 50 of them now choose to take regular history. Let’s put those 50 AP kids into regular history classes with 400 other kids. 450 kids, spread over 16 sections of history. Yes, probably 2 of those other AP kids would be in the same class with my snowflake, along with 25 other kids–some of whom aren’t even reading at grade level. That is a very different class make-up than an AP class. The fact that there are now 3 kids in the class who should be placed in AP will have zero effect on the level of that class.

I will grant you that I don’t know the details of what our regular classes are like. None of my kids’ friends are/have been in them. However, my own school had the same AP or regular system and I know from personal experience that regular was awful.

"If your school system is so terrible, so weak, so impoverished, that the choices are a 12th AP, or a middle school level class, then your school system needs to create some classes in the middle. Thousands of other high school systems in the US manage to find a class level in between a class that is insultingly easy and a class that has two hours of homework each and every night. Your school system can do it too. "

I am not the one on this thread complaining about too many APs and overstressed kids. Yes, our kids work hard and there is some stress but there is nothing like what has been described on this thread. Kids are not pre-taking classes, there is no culture of summer school or tutoring, no suicides I’m aware of. We don’t guard our train crossings and I’ve not heard of kids popping pills to study either. And yet, our students do pretty well, not quite as well as TheGFG’s school, but considering the difference in culture, I think it’s clear that all that extra prep and stress is not accomplishing that much for those students in TheGFG’s school. In some ways, mostly writing, our school comes up short. But if you simply ask, can kids handle a lot of APs and have a high pass rate on the AP exams without devoting their summers to school, without parents paying for tutors or other outside schooling, while maintaining a very good extracurricular program, the answer is yes.

Of course I can’t speak to the additional material they learn over and above the AP requirements. But I have to wonder how well they learn the more advanced material considering that some of them haven’t even mastered the AP level enough to get a 5–and on some AP tests, that’s only about 60% correct, not a very high bar. Does it make sense to push students with this level of mastery to the next material?

Yes, I think it would be a good idea if the school offered an honors curriculum parallel to the AP curriculum. I suspect that it would not be too popular (why take honors if you can take AP for not much more work?) and I know that it would introduce a lot of scheduling issues and inefficient class sizes. it could well be a budget issue.

852

I see that several posts on the past page or two are backing up my opinion that regular classes are way below the level of AP and not appropriate for kids who can handle AP without too much difficulty.

853

Why parallel? When I was in high school, there was, for some types of courses, a regular track and an honors track. The honors track included the AP courses at the appropriate level. For example, AP English literature was the 12th grade honors English course, and AP calculus BC was the math course that followed honors precalculus. This seems to be the same setup that the high school uses now.

854

@ucbalumnus, did you read my entire post? @“Cardinal Fang” was saying that our school must be terrible if we don’t have a parallel honors track. I agree that in the best of all possible worlds, it would be nice to have this option. It would be the best option for some kids, but not for my kids. Cardinal Fang knows better, apparently. And Cardinal Fang can’t envision a world where extra sections would have to be taught in order to offer this many different levels. As it is, we have maybe 3 well-filled sections of many of the AP classes. Splitting off some of those kids could well require hiring more teachers.

855

I don’t see why a parent who has s child who has learning disabilities and struggles in math would even consent to said child taking AP Cslc as a junior - which is advanced by anybody 's lights. Why wouldn’t she have been taken off an accelerated math track and put on an average or remedial one? There’s no shame, unless one’s ambitions get in the way. This “learning disabled” child sure takes a lot of high end courses and is considering high end schools. Why?

856

TheGFG has said that her daughter is NOT taking AP Calc. She’s not even taking “college calculus,” which in this school district is a lower level of calculus. She’s taking “regular calculus,” which is two or three levels below AP calculus in her school district. I say, calculus super-lite for high school juniors is a class that is right for nobody.

857

I wonder if part of the reason our school’s AP curriculum is not as stressful is that all but the top ten to twenty kids are applying to state schools and less selective privates. I don’t live in the Northeast. Very few people here covet the Ivies or the big name LACs.

Because of that, no one at our school except those few feel any shame at making a 4. A 4 is celebrated. Heck even some 3s are celebrated. We don’t have a culture of “we must make a 5” therefore we must stress everyone out all year to maximize the 5s. Taking APUSH, making high As and making a 3 on the test doesn’t result in a rejection when you are aiming for Ole Miss, Alabama, Oklahoma, Baylor the way it does at Harvard. A lot of kids make 4s and 5s, but not everyone does.

The district is doing away with that middle track and maybe that is because they have decided that exposing a kid to AP where the material is taught well, the workload is not insane and there is no pressure to make a 5 is better than having that kid make a high A in honors track.

858

Agree that four levels of high school calculus makes no sense.

859

I don’t understand what the syllabus of this calculus lite class would be. Are the students just blindly learning recipes to differentiate and integrate polynomials and trig functions, without understanding what they are doing? Why would this be of use or value to anyone? If you need to perform that function, Wolfram Alpha will do it better and more accurately than you can.

860

I think the fact our school offers many levels is fantastic. However, the politics and practices that surround how and when children are placed on a certain track are fraught with problems. Also, IMO it is too difficult for a late bloomer to move from a lower track to a higher one. The official school stance that movement up is not only possible but encouraged, is pure hogwash. In reality, a jump up to a higher track is strongly discouraged by many teachers behind the scenes. I know of several cases where friends’ kids were advised in an unfriendly way by sophomore honors teachers that they would really struggle in the class because they hadn’t been in honors the previous year, and the teachers would say “Good luck!” with a tone. D has heard those comments being made by her sophomore English teacher, and says she thinks the teachers are prejudiced from the start against those students, believing them to be unprepared and inferior.