Students Learning Less

So, I just got done reading the article on students learning less that in previous years, and I must say that I am not surprised. As unfortunate as it may be, teachers are cutting their students short in high schools all over America. I can personally relate to this article, as many of the teachers I had in high school were complete pushovers. I took a few AP courses as well, and in all honesty, they were a joke. For those students who were able to get into AP classes, teachers automatically assumed that they were smarter and more knowledgeable than those students who were in regular english, economics, people in government, etc...classes, that they felt that it wasn't necessary to teach all the time. Quite often (believe it or not) we would actually watch movies in class. But these weren't movies that in any way related to our course. They were just popular movies that teachers thought that we would enjoy. It was almost our reward for being "smarter" than the average student. Little did they know that they were harming us. I passed my AP english exam, but didn't receive credit for my AP government class. My government teacher harldy ever taught us anything about the topic of government, nor anything relating to gorvernment for that matter. I feel as though teachers look at AP classes as being freebee classes; rather they view them as classes that students would be better off teaching themselves.

I am also not surprised that students are not performing up to their age level in english either. I was evaluating some papers in one of my classes this morning, actually, and I honestly can say that I was shocked. These papers were so bad another reader would have assumed that they had been written by 5th graders. The sad reality is, is that these were the compositions of junior-senior college students who were ENGLISH MAJORS. I almost got up and walked out of class as the students were reading their papers aloud to the class. I don't mean to sound conceited or over-confident, but these papers were awful with a capital A. I feel that these students could easily have gone to one of the schools who were studied in the article. Just the basic elements of english, like punctuation, grammar, and spelling, were incorrect. I feel that it would be extremely beneficial for my professor to have a few classes where we just deal with the basic fundamentals of the english language. I had to give a grade for each paper that I corrected, and there was only one paper that I gave an A to. The highest grade besides the A was a C- and even that I thought was being generous.

Hall brings up a great point in this article, one that I completely agree upon. He says, "[w]hat it suggests is that we are telling students that they're being successful in these courses when, in fact, we're not teaching them any more than they were learning in the past," she said. "So we are, in effect, lying to these students." He is 100% correct. Teachers are not there to baby students, especially those at the high-school level. It it time to crack down on students and really begin to give them a run for their money before it's too late. I truly feel bad for the students' papers that I read today. They were quite obviously cheated by both their grade-school teachers, as well as their college professors. It is time to step up and help improve our students. They will never succeed any other way.