Testing really hurting the kids(including AP)

Parents Forum
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<p>My youngest D is currently a college freshman. The thing she was most nervous about upon entering college was having to write a research paper. She was in honors English in 9th and 10th grades and in AP English Language in 11th grade and she took Shakespeare/British Literature senior year. The only “research” paper she had to write was for her culminating project (a state high school graduation requirement) and she had to do all that work outside of class (they have to put in over 50 hours of work for a top grade on their project and they do it on their own, not in class). The teacher supervising her was her accounting teacher so there was no good help with writing her paper but my D didn’t even consider that a research paper.</p>

<p>She did write quite a few papers each year in various classes but she didn’t feel she was prepared for college writing. She did a lot of writing practice for AP tests though. I can’t wait to see her over Christmas to find out what she thought about her college writing class this semester. I know she is enjoying it but it will be interesting to find out if she felt prepared for it.</p>

<p>Regarding testing: yes, it has ruined our education system. Teaching to a test (or many tests) and not having time to teach what students need to know to be successful in the future does not result in a good education system. As a parent, I could see how my kids were doing in classes by looking at their grades on assignments and talking with them and their teachers about their classes. The mandatory state tests, SAT/ACT, and AP tests did not give me an accurate picture of how my kids could potentially do in their future education endeavors. I read this somewhere recently: expecting a state exam and/or the SAT/ACT tests to predict future educational success is like looking at the score on a driving exam and prediciting which drivers would become speeders and/or crash in the future.</p>

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<p>My kids’ OH public school requires a significant term/research paper each year of every student, AP or not. AP kids may have a few pages added, I forget. But from 8th grade on, they research and write a paper that is well supervised in the earlier grades - turn in topic, turn in sources, turn in outline, turn in 1st draft, etc…, then they are basically left to their own junior and senior year for those.</p>

<p>I don’t recall the length but I am fairly certain the senior paper is 20ish pages. These papers are given as part of English class which all students must take, so they all get it. It counts for a decent bit of a quarter’s grade.</p>

<p>S went to college and had no problem with English at all, FWIW he said many kids “freaked out” at 5+ page papers.</p>

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<p>@arabrab, I agree about the PE teachers, but all classes have grading to do, and it’s not like a calculus teacher can just quickly read through a paper; figuring out where the student went wrong can take much longer than reading through a few pages of prose. Our teacher workload was recently increased from 3.75 to 4.5 hours of actual teaching per day. To say there is no time for planning or grading is simply not true, unless you consider 4.5 hours per day, 180 days per year to be a full-time job. Even with 12 hours of grading per week (and I doubt most teachers are assigning lengthy papers due every single week–it was more like every 3 weeks for papers about 5 pages long when I was in school, and only once a year for the long research papers) that would still be do-able with a reasonable workload–maybe 5 hours per week of grading these papers. Yet it wasn’t happening even when our teachers only had 3.75 hours of class time. From this thread I see that evidently teachers at many other schools are managing to do this, and I doubt they teach much less than 3.75 hours a day. </p>

<p>Teachers of the upper level classes may have to write a lot of college recommendations and that also takes time, but the lower grade level teachers don’t have so much of this to do. The upper level teachers could schedule more writing in the spring semester.</p>

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<p>Have her write in a journal at least three times a week. The best way to improve writing is to write (and read great novels.) Best of luck!</p>

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<p>As a current PhD student in English lit who spent high school writing quite a lot of five paragraph essays, I’m going to dissent somewhat. </p>

<p>I don’t think the 5P essays ruins student writing. I don’t think it should be held up as or presented to students as the be all and end all of academic writing, but it serves a purpose. Writing a good five paragraph essay requires developing a thesis statement, backing it up with multiple examples, introducing a topic in a coherent manner, and writing clear transitions. These are all skills that are going to be good to have in college, and can all be extrapolated to more sophisticated writing assignments.</p>

<p>A 5P essay can be written maturely and clearly, or it can be written childishly and ungrammatically. It can have complex thoughts and take account of complications and difficulties, or it can be simplistic and consist largely of “I think x because a, b, and c.” The former kind of essay is going to leave a student reasonably well equipped for taking that next step in college, the latter is not. A good teacher is going to know the difference and expect students to know the difference as well. </p>

<p>I do think that a high school English class should include SOME assignments that break out of the mold, but having a curriculum made up largely of 5P essays isn’t, IMO, a problem. Also consider that most English teachers will have more than 100 students, and are expected to have far more grades in a marking period than a college professor does in an equivalent time period. They can’t possibly assign 8-10 page papers on a regular basis. </p>

<p>I’ve spent the last several years in grad school writing 20-25 page papers. Now I have to write a dissertation. Being trained in writing the shorter papers isn’t holding me back.</p>

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<p>I go to a Texas school and can confirm that English classes don’t teach things of much value in the real world. English is my second language and I’ve never liked it (I’m more of math and tech guy) and I literally learned NOTHING my junior year. It was a regular class but all I got were completion grades. This year I’ve already written a research paper and an essay which is good, but the fact I didn’t learn anything last year hurt me tremendously. I seriously can’t believe how mediocre the level of regular classes are. I regret taking them to be honest. I had the (I don’t like/I’m not good at X subject and it has nothing to do with my major so I’ll take the regular class) mindset.</p>

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<p>Like reading, I fail to see much in the way of “value added” in the teaching of writing. The level of functional illiteracy in this country is a testament to the “success” of teaching reading in schools - adults don’t read books; college students avoid books if they can help; and libraries are now thought of as unnecessary and expensive frills in many communities.</p>

<p>Next comes writing: sometimes I can hardly believe the written quality of simply three-line thank you notes I get in the mail, mostly from college educated folks. Five paragraph essays? How about three sentence thank-you notes? This is the result of 12+ years of writing education?</p>

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<p>I think OP is onto something. This focus on the 5 paragraph essay at the expense of all other writing forms clearly makes it difficult for students to do anything else after a while. My D opted out of AP English this her senior year and is taking College Composition at the local JC. The instructor is requiring a long research paper in addition to essays that are outside of the box. It’s been very good for her to be be out of the HS straight jacket. Your D will adapt eventually. It may take awhile though.</p>

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<p>Mini, the problems in the US K-12 system are, as you know, numerous. I don’t think that means that the formal teaching of writing (or literary analysis) is intrinsically useless.</p>

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<p>Learning extended writing is definitely an important skill, and I’m glad that I learned that in high school. I did IB, not AP, which I think has a much greater focus on writing; most of the courses require essay format tests. I didn’t have a single multiple choice test in my last two years of high school. We also got a variety of writing experiences, and I think that was really helpful: multiple short essays for a history test, full-scale lab reports in science classes, a research-paper for psychology, a combined critical-creative essay in English (the most fun I’ve ever had writing a school paper), the Extended Essay - even math had a written report component to it. I was very well prepared for writing in college. I took my junior-level writing class my freshman year and got a 99% in the class, while I saw a lot of my classmates struggle with that class, and with the expectations of freshman college English.</p>

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<p>Well, writing is about thinking. No one teacher can teach you to think any more than they can claim total credit for a love of reading. Much of that does have to come from family. If you didn’t require writing in their curriculum, mini, but they are fantastic writers, that’s first a testament to how you taught them to think. And had them practice that in interactions with you. After that, comes laying out those thoughts on paper, to make a point or send a message. </p>

<p>It seems glido is the first one to change the focus from teachers to how we can influence them, at home. Which is also, imo, where they should learn to write good thank you notes.</p>

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<p>I didn’t see this in either of the two high schools my daughter attended. The first was a competitive public school and the second, a Christian school. She had to do long papers in almost every class, including one in geometry her freshman year.</p>

<p>What she couldn’t seem to do was master the style of writing required for the SAT writing section. She took it once, and her essay only scored a 7 (still got a 770 on that section overall, so I assume the 30 pt deduction was because of the low essay score.) </p>

<p>Now in her first semester in college, she is getting As on her research papers, so I’m not sure what the SAT essay is supposed to measure, but I sure hate to see schools teaching to that particular test.</p>

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<p>" If you didn’t require writing in their curriculum, mini, but they are fantastic writers, that’s first a testament to how you taught them to think."</p>

<p>I’ve actually done writing coaching for executives. I teach 1) that bad writing is first and foremost a problem of unclear thinking. When you don’t what you want to say, one means of expression is as good as any other; and 2) Bad teaching, where relentless focus on the mechanics of writing (actually, editing) gets in the way of thinking straight. I have been well-paid to undo the damage.</p>

<p>If teachers can’t teach reading or writing well in 12 years (and the evidence is pretty overwhelming that they can’t), and what happens at home is critical, then why not take away the reading and writing funds from schools, and find good ways to impact where the learning really happens.</p>

<p>“Mini, the problems in the US K-12 system are, as you know, numerous. I don’t think that means that the formal teaching of writing (or literary analysis) is intrinsically useless.”</p>

<p>You can think what you like, but the evidence is staring you in the face.</p>

<p>I’m for universal, unconditional, full-day recess. ;)</p>

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<p>Recess only works in families committed to education- in a very big way, well beyond whether the parents show up at school or monitor the homework. I distinctly remember the specific day when I realized D1 was reaching our goals. It involved an argument.</p>

<p>Most families think inside the box, same as school kids. They measure performance (if they even do) in grades, the kid’s willingness to tackle homework, and how he develops some academic interests or strengths. They miss, well, the holistic.</p>

<p>If you toss out the schools’ efforts, there has to be something to replace it that is proven effective for kids from a variety of homes, with a variety of their own strengths- and parent skills. I would say your experience, mini, is your experience. And mine is mine. I often wonder if we could take in another kid and expect the same results.</p>

<p>And, btw, the monster English teacher D2 had (silly kid elected his classes 3 times,) did teach her.</p>

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<p>Well, this isn’t clear…</p>

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<p>The writing tasks that are assigned to my high school student seem to be limited to the length the teacher is willing to read. I’m all for being clear and concise, and admit I could learn to be less wordy myself. Still, D had a writing assignment this weekend for which there was no way to cover the topics with any depth without surpassing the given page limit. Writing as few words as required would have meant saying nothing of substance–just vague generalizations. D went over the limit and will be penalized. I care, because she needs a good grade, but don’t care because I think being thorough and detailed is a better virtue in research.</p>

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<p>Sigh. Yes. Testing and test prep does hurt many of the kids. But not going the route has its ramifications too. Unfortunately, most of the time, writing has its rules, and it doesn’t mean wonderful creative writing the way you want to write. That’s in college and at jobs. So it is in many endeavors in life. </p>

<p>I think, differentiating the two might be in order. Writing for the essays, the tests, for assignments, is a subject unto itself. Like math or French or whatever. Creative writing for self, is just that. No rules needed. </p>

<p>With computer apps these days, you can’t go over the word limits, or you will simply get cut off, so it’s important to learn the best way to get the quesitions answered, an argument featured in the required number of words or letters. It’s again a skill to learn to be used when needed.</p>

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<p>cpt–have to disagree here. Writing for college essays is entirely different from the type of essays students are taught to write in many high schools. Ours are typically 4 or 5 pages, longer of course for research papers, and do not follow formulas. It’s not a matter of “creative writing” vs. essay. I do expect my students to show an individual voice in their essays. And yes, students need to respect the computer app rules. That is of no help to them in college. We expect a sustained exercise of reasonable, well-argued, well-written thought, ideally expressed in a lively voice.</p>

<p>Not:
introduction including thesis consisting of list of 3 reasons.
reason one explained
reason two explained
reason three explained.
Conclusion reiterating the above.</p>

<p>Too many of my students are dismayed to learn that that won’t cut it in college. It always did before.</p>

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<p>“I often wonder if we could take in another kid and expect the same results.”</p>

<p>Had six foster kids, plus my other two (one of whom was adopted.)</p>

<p>What we know DOESN’T work is 12 years of teaching. I think we likely have more functionally illiterate people with 12 years of teaching behind them than at any time in our history. </p>

<p>I used to read the entrance writing samples for the community college of Philadelphia - for placement purposes, 5,000 Open admission, but only for high school graduates (the top 40% of the school population.) The average came in at the 7th grade level. We had them come in as low as (and provided classes for) 2nd grade level. We hoped that, by the time they graduated, we’d have them up to 11th grade level. </p>

<p>Now what is interesting to me about this is that in 1906, Maria Montessori worked with the waifs of Rome. Kids often without ANY parents, living on the streets, five year olds taking care of three year olds. The little desks, chairs, and cubbies that I often make fun of were the only “homes” the children had. She had no intention of teaching them to read. But a four-year-old asked, and then they all wanted to learn, and within a year, AND WITHOUT ANY TEACHING, every child -ages 3-5 was reading. No special ed, no learning disabilities, no dyslexia. None. They all read. As noted, many of them had no parents, so there were no interventions in the home, and no doting parents helping out. </p>

<p>We’ve known of this technology for more than a 100 years. It’s no great secret. We choose not to adopt it, because, we assume (without any evidence), it can’t happen without “teaching”.</p>

<p>“When you don’t what you want to say, one means of expression is as good as any other…”</p>

<p>Old brain syndrome. Sorry. I promise it will happen again.</p>

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<p>What I mean to convey is that it is important for students to learn to write to fit the requirements. You need the grade for the class, You need the test scores. You need the job. Or want, might be the better word. Learning to write for different purposes and audiences can be extremely useful. Not sure where you disagree with me, Garland. I agree with what you had to say there. </p>

<p>One of my first jobs out of college was supposedly writing, but it was really so formula driven that it stuck in my craw to even call it that. It was piecing together form letter language. Had to learn to toe the line. It’s the same thing when one gets a teacher or prof that wants a certain format. Or if you want a shot at a selective college and are taking the writing tests. You have to switch gears in writing rules and styles quite often. </p>

<p>I put all of my children in Montessori programs when they were little. It was a wonderful experience fo rmost of them. But I had one who did not learn to read, write, or do much of anything in terms of academics. I had to work with him myself and force the issues. He was two years behind, age wise as a result. He really had no interest in a lot of things that one should be learning, and simply did not learn through osmosis. </p>

<p>I think the adaptations we have made in the Montessori way are quite different from what Maria Montessori was doin gin the early 20th century. My friend’s son was turned down from such a program because he has some learning impediments. Made my eyebrows go up, given what I know about the origins of this environment.</p>