"Today we have gathered to see that cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty to live in balance and harmony with each other and with all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give greetings and thanks to each other as people."
~adapted from the Mohawk by John Stokes and David Kanawahienton Benedict
Thursdays are quote/question day. My students start class by reading a quote and writing about it in their journal. Today's quote (above) led to great discussions for my first three classes. The discussion even included how the quote relates to us as a school community. When we were discussing greetings, one student mentioned that sometimes we even greet people with our glances and looks. I was impressed with the conversations until my fourth class started. After I read the quote, I started with the same question I had given the other classes ("What does the quote mean? How do we connect with it?"). Silence. Did I mention this was my "honors" class? Nothing. When I tried again ("What is the quote talking about?"), I continued to get blank stares. Trying to conceal my frustration, I pointed out words and phrases. Finally I received the response that "we are all created equal." Instead of agreeing, I stated that although this sounds good, it's not true. I followed with a conversation about different abilities (strengths and weaknesses). Again I stated the important words and phrases and finally had a conversation. This is always my argument with my honors class (this class and classes over the years). These kids are pegged as honors because the can read, but they have little ability to think (let alone write). Later in the class we had a quiz (same quiz I gave all classes). One of the honors students wanted to know if it would affect his grade. "Yes, it's a quiz," I replied. This is the same student that said it didn't matter if all sentences started with the same word. My response was, "Not if you're in second grade, if you're in seventh grade it does." Why are the nice, quiet good readers in my honors class instead of the intelligent students that can actually think?
~adapted from the Mohawk by John Stokes and David Kanawahienton Benedict
Thursdays are quote/question day. My students start class by reading a quote and writing about it in their journal. Today's quote (above) led to great discussions for my first three classes. The discussion even included how the quote relates to us as a school community. When we were discussing greetings, one student mentioned that sometimes we even greet people with our glances and looks. I was impressed with the conversations until my fourth class started. After I read the quote, I started with the same question I had given the other classes ("What does the quote mean? How do we connect with it?"). Silence. Did I mention this was my "honors" class? Nothing. When I tried again ("What is the quote talking about?"), I continued to get blank stares. Trying to conceal my frustration, I pointed out words and phrases. Finally I received the response that "we are all created equal." Instead of agreeing, I stated that although this sounds good, it's not true. I followed with a conversation about different abilities (strengths and weaknesses). Again I stated the important words and phrases and finally had a conversation. This is always my argument with my honors class (this class and classes over the years). These kids are pegged as honors because the can read, but they have little ability to think (let alone write). Later in the class we had a quiz (same quiz I gave all classes). One of the honors students wanted to know if it would affect his grade. "Yes, it's a quiz," I replied. This is the same student that said it didn't matter if all sentences started with the same word. My response was, "Not if you're in second grade, if you're in seventh grade it does." Why are the nice, quiet good readers in my honors class instead of the intelligent students that can actually think?
Comments
By 1960, however, big business, government civil service, and the Ivy League universities were becoming disillusioned with these petty bourgeois recruits. The difficulty was that these new recruits were rigid, unimaginative, narrow and, above all, illiberal at a time when liberalism (in the sense of reaching tentative and approximate decisions through flexible community interaction) was coming to be regarded as the proper approach to large organization problems. In his farewell report the Chairman of Harvard Admissions Committee, Wilbur Bender, summed up the problem this way:
‘The student who ranks first in his class may be genuinely brilliant or he may be a compulsive worker or the instrument of domineering parents’ ambitions or a conformist or a self-centered careerist who has shrewdly calculated his teachers’ prejudices and expectations and discovered how to regurgitate efficiently what they want. Or he may have focused narrowly on grade-getting as compensation for his inadequacies in other areas because he lacks other interests or talents or lacks passion and warmth or normal healthy instincts or is afraid of life. The top high school student is often, frankly, a pretty dull and bloodless, or peculiar fellow. The adolescent with wide-ranging curiosity and stubborn independence, with a vivid imagination and desire to explore fascinating bypaths, to follow his own interests, to contemplate, to read the unrequired books, the boy filled with sheer love of life and exuberance, may well seem to his teachers troublesome, undisciplined, a rebel, may not conform to their stereotype, and may not get the top grades and the highest rank in class. He may not even score at the highest level in the standard multiple choice admissions tests, which may well reward the glib, facile mind at the expense of the questioning, independent, or slower but more powerful, more subtle, and more interesting and original mind.’