These are expanded versions of my Rising Knight Nominations for two students this quarter.

Continue reading Standout Q2 Students

Rank these high-school-English-teacher-goals in order of importance:

-develop a student’s love of literature

-develop a student’s argumentative writing skills

-develop a student’s writing voice 

Obviously your answer will reflect your priorities. For a moment, though, let’s use the Loudoun County mission statement as our guide…

The mission of the Loudoun County Public Schools is to work closely with students, families, and the community to provide a superior education, safe schools, and a climate for success. The educational programs of Loudoun County Public Schools will strive to meet or exceed federal, state, and local requirements for assessment of achievement and to promote intellectual growth, individual initiative, mutual respect, and personal responsibility for productive citizenship.

The first bullet-point for “student achievement” is then defined thusly:

“LCPS will ensure that all graduates demonstrate readiness for continuing education and entry level skills for immediate employment.”

With these priorities as our guide, I think the ordering of the above goals becomes a little less subjective. A love of literature and the development of a distinct writing voice are often needed for an enriched life, and they should never be discarded from the curriculum. But the most valuable skill that will serve all students immediately upon graduation is an ability to maturely and persuasively argue.  

When I say “argue”, I don’t mean fighting, ranting, or complaining, and I don’t mean using MLA format. I mean the conscious application of rhetorical choices, which is a needed skill in getting what you want in high school and beyond, to say nothing of being a “productive citizen”. 

Post-high school self-advocacy takes many forms. It could involve creating resumes and cover letters or participating in job interviews or managing workplace dynamics, to say nothing of the social and intellectual obstacles of college life.

Whatever the setting, the majority of post high school writing and communication is rooted in rhetoric, language that is made to achieve a purpose. The more logically sound this communication is, the better. The more coherent, the better. To master this skill requires meaningful practice, with consistent feedback from an instructor. It’s not easy for students, as I’ve learned. I’ve spent eleven years preparing students for the end-of-course SOL persuasive essay, and three years teaching the rhetoric-centric AP Language and Composition.     

In contrast, a comprehensive understanding and appreciation of literature, while enriching, pays small dividends when compared to the ability to compose a thesis that is backed with evidence and a well-developed line of reasoning (to use College Board’s phrasing). 

As for developing a distinct writing voice, I’d place that on the very top of the high school student’s hierarchy of needs. I’ve read hundreds of college application essays over the years, and the most common issue is when the student places too much focus on fussy details in syntax and diction instead of focusing on presenting original evidence to build a compelling case for why the student is a worthy candidate for admission. The value of credible evidence and logical reasoning can’t be taught enough in high school classrooms.    

LCPS wants its students to be skilled at composing persuasive writing. (So does VDOE, although the SOLs are almost equally divided between literary and rhetorical standards.) 

One of the ways Loudoun attempts to hold students and teachers to this standard is the Big Question Project, an essay which is to be completed by honors English students freshman to junior year.

I have two years experience leading students through the process of writing the BQE, as well as scores of hours spent trying to alleviate student neuroses around the paper. It’s traditionally not a pleasant experience for most students, for a few reasons. 

• The project is worth one hundred points, which usually makes the paper a huge determining factor in a student’s score for the quarter and the course itself. 
• The paper is often one of the first times the student has written argumentatively that year. 
• The paper topics themselves students find difficult to grasp. 

A lot of this I knew from observation, but it was confirmed in December when I surveyed thirty three Champe junior and seniors about their past BQE experience. (For this group I asked only for freshman memories because the project was cancelled when we went to online learning this spring.) 

I will allow that this is a small sample, and I will also allow that most students would much rather complain about a county-mandated project than offer it praise.

Even so, what a shame that such is a well-intentioned project appears to have such unintended negative effects on students. 

And while students all reported earning good to excellent scores on the project, I’m not sure the skills stuck. As an AP Lang teacher, students often arrive having completed freshman and sophomore BQEs, but having very little control of persuasive writing that is backed with credible evidence and a line of reasoning. This is not surprising, since many students surveyed claimed that the BQE was the only argumentative writing they completed that year.  

The county has recently introduced some revisions to the assignment. 

I have an additional revision I’d like to submit for your approval: Do more BQEs per year.

By “more”, I mean two — two Big Question Essays, per grade, per year. Let’s say English honors students must complete a fall and spring BQE. (Also, if we agree with the premise that this skill is valuable to all students, not just the honors kids, it seems wrong that academic students aren’t asked to do it?) 

The first effect of multiple BQEs in a school year would be a reduction in grade dread. If each essay were worth fifty points instead of the county-mandated 100, the paper no longer looms as large over a student’s GPA. A reduction in student stress also makes for a more productive classroom environment for the teacher, who probably doesn’t enjoy the student stress over the writing and the subsequent complaints about the grades they earn.  

Students will also feel less dread because they will have more consistent experience practicing the skill. If your only experience writing a persuasive MLA essay occurs once a year, how confident can you feel? Practice and meaningful feedback from the instructor will give students a shot at correcting their mistakes. Assuming the instructor is providing careful feedback, how can a well intentioned student not make significant improvement from the first essay the fall of their freshman year to the sixth essay in the spring of their junior year? 

It will also give students and instructors a chance to learn to love Turintin, a useful tool that has been maddenly shuffled around the LCPS interface like the pill in a shell game, from website to Vision to Schoology, where it now resides behind a series of clicks in the “add-on external tool” feature. 

It requires practice to get there, but it’s worth the effort.

After experiencing the program’s plagiarism tracking, students would feel accountable for the product they submit. After experiencing the program’s handy feedback options, teachers would hopefully start using it for all their assignments that have the risk of academic dishonesty.   

More preparation writing rhetorically could potentially also translate to greater success on the reading and essay portions of the SATs, both of which rely on an understanding of rhetorical writing. Until colleges stop relying on these scores as an admission standard, why not examine these concepts in greater depth in the classroom and reduce the extra the stress students face of taking after-school classes to prepare for the exam?

Two BQEs per school year will also help teachers become more effective at providing quality feedback and releasing sores in a timely manner. Speaking from experience, it’s a little nerve-wracking to score an essay worth so much, and the grading process can be time-consuming. Teachers rightly take the grading process seriously when so much is at stake. 

This isn’t entirely helpful for the students, though. It’s tough to learn from your mistakes when feedback is released up to a month later…

If teachers are grading these essays twice a year, they have more familiarity with the genre itself, and with the reduced grade they won’t feel the anxiety about each point. (And hopefully the students will be better at writing, so it won’t be so arduous to offer feedback.) 

Students should also be encouraged, maybe even required, to develop their own questions. It was a consistent answer in the survey: students appreciated teachers who encouraged them to craft their own questions… 

It’s been almost a year since we switched to online learning, and the value of self-advocacy has become even greater. In this setting, where there is limited contact with the instructor, students who have the confidence and skill to communicate logically and maturely stand a better chance of to succeed in such a challenging learning environment. Beyond such immediate rewards, they will also stand out in a world often dominated by incoherent discourse.

It’s not easy to ask students to write rhetorically. For the teacher, it involves careful instruction, feedback, time to grade, and developing ways to get buy-in from the class. For the student, it involves deliberation over sources, and time spent crafting a logical progression of ideas.

It’s worth the effort though, and it should be given the highest priority in high school English classrooms of all levels, if we’re actually serious about achieving the county’s goals to prepare our students.  

Is a social critique successful if the audience leaves the work invigorated for the lifestyle it purports to critique? 

I think of fans of The Wolf of Wall Street. Scorsese in 2013, defending the film’s debauchery and depiction of white collar crime: “This is something that’s not going to go away if you don’t talk about it.” 

But there are different ways of “talking about” something. The frat bros who thrill to that three-hour flick are not watching with their hands soberly at their chin, saying, “Yes, that Jordan sure does make a mess of things, the poor guy. I shall not behave like him.”

What made the HBO crime drama The Sopranos so popular? David Chase, the show’s creator, was always adamant that he meant for the audience to be revolted by the behavior of mob boss Tony Soprano. Assuming he’s being sincere, I think he overestimates the perceptiveness of his audience. Or, more charitably, he underestimates the seductiveness of his product. The show didn’t win a pork-store worth of awards because viewers were piqued by some trenchant exploration of capitalism and the erosion of family values. The show was a hit because it was fun — and it is fun, I think we can all agree, because beyond being well acted and well scripted, it offers a voyeuristic look into the lives of monstrous people doing monstrous things.    

I don’t think all art requires a moral binary, nor do I think all art should have a life-affirming message. but I do think that if a movie or a TV show or a novel claims to critique a certain type of living, and instead leaves its audience jazzed by the lifestyle it depicts, it has failed. 

And if a work fails should it be canonized and forced in front of students every year?  

The answer is no. Get The Great Gatsby out of the canon of high school texts. It’s crimes against young minds are numerous.  

Let me step back from morals for a moment. When is the last time you tried reading those opening pages of The Great Gatsby? 

The prose is tedious. It confirms every preconceived notion students have about old literature: it’s incomprehensible, and when comprehended, it’s a let down.

Compare it to the opening of Huckleberry Finn. 

Compare it to the opening of O Pioneers! 

These classic novels begin with characters who share emotions with which we can still identify decades later, and it is shared in a way that is direct and even establishes drama. None of that is there in Gatsby.

Read these opening pages to a teenager and see how interested they are. It’s not the windy syntax or the elevated diction. It’s the dusty WASP-yness of the message. What student in a classroom a hundred years later is going to be hooked by this stilted father-son dynamic? 

Gatsby is always heralded as an example of a first person narrator observer, and I’ve heard the argument plenty of times that, in fact, it’s intentionally dry, indirectly characterizing Nick as a wet blanket. To that, I must again appeal to the minds of our nation’s youth, who are at an impressionable age when they are forced to read this book. Is it responsible to make these young minds listen to a wet blanket pontificate about the American Dream? 

It doesn’t matter that it’s iambic pentameter, and it doesn’t matter that it’s the most famous closing line in all of literature. It’s lame and self-indulgent. Why are we devoting precious time with formative minds asking them to read a humorless Ivy League soap opera? If teachers claim this is the peak of American literature, can we blame students for then being skeptical of literature in general (if they weren’t already), skeptical of reading and the utility of reading? Can we blame them for being skeptical of our judgement as educators? 

Or, even worse, the student actually thinks this prose is good, and uses it as a model for their own writing as they enter those critical years of college applications. 

It’s as irresponsible as coaching a gifted high school baseball pitcher with techniques from a hundred years prior… 

The pitcher’s talent will be squandered and they will look like a fool in the process, just like the student in 2020 who spends her formative years imitating Fitzgerald’s florid writing. 

Again, the worse scenario is if students actually like the book! Because the entire social critique of The Great Gatsby is heavy-handed and insincere. It’s a celebration of the Jazz Age. Any attempt to claim otherwise relies on a plot that is heavy on melodrama and light on substantive exploration of the degradation of values. Watch the trailer for the 2013 adaptation and tell me if this looks like anything but a romp through the Jazz Age. What are students really saying they like if they like this? The drunk driving? The abusive relationships? The nihilist lifestyle of the Roaring Twenties?  

Surely it isn’t the symbolism, which is heavy-handed, again acting as a discouragement to students to take literature seriously. The green light? The eyes? The Valley of Ashes? Fitzgerald writes metaphor as deftly as Daisy drives a car. Metaphoric language — which should only be used to simplify difficult ideas or unearth hidden concepts — doesn’t serve much of a purpose if the characters are caricatures and the plot is heavy melodrama.     

What Gatsby is not light on is casual racism. While the segregationist drivel spouted by Tom is meant to establish him as the antagonist, it can’t be ignored that the only non-Anglo character is a Jewish caricature. Wolfsheim is not complex enough to serve as an examination of America’s complex relationship with Jewish culture in the 20s. Like all the characters, he’s one note.

Unlike Twain or Melville or O’Connor, Fitzgerald is presented a chance to explore the continuing problem of race relations in America, and sidesteps it. Instead he reinforces hateful views. 

You can argue that the book is more racially complex that it appears on the surface. But these interpretations do not make up the majority of readings in the high school classroom. 

So again, why are we so devoted to pushing this book on our youth? 

Because it’s short. That’s why it took off in the first place. It was short enough for American soldiers to read in their barracks during World War II. After they were done fighting the war, some of them came home and became English teachers, and they decided this was worth adding to the curriculum. It’s tough to blame them: it’s under two hundred pages, the symbolism is simple enough for a teacher of any experience, it’s set in a vibrant time in American, where the country reached its zenith in music, literature, and baseball. It was an easy choice to make in a post-war American classroom, and it’s easy to see how it was preferable to some of the other important novels of the same era (Sinclair Lewis’s satirical Main Street; Hemingway’s opaque The Sun Also Rises; the aforementioned O Pioneers, Huckleberry Finn, Moby Dick), which have since faded from high school syllabi, and are now mostly read in college or college-level AP classes, if at all. 

Just because Gatsby was an easy choice doesn’t mean it was correct. Just because it has maintained pedagogical inertia (from, let’s face it, mostly white teachers) doesn’t mean Fitzgerald’s little book deserves a vaunted place in the canon.  

You can argue that it should continue to be taught so that students won’t be blind to all the cultural references. In that case, I’d be happy to offer it as a book club option for my students who prioritize these things. 

Passionate fans of Gatsby’s might also argue that one single book can’t be all that bad, and who am I to criticize it? Well, I just really like it, and I want to share my love of that with my students. 

Fine, I guess. There are a lot of famous novels I really like, too, that I don’t choose to force my students to read. Shouldn’t every book that we force our students to read advance two goals: get students to appreciate good literature and expand their minds; challenge their skills in reading? There are works that students need to read to become better people and need a strong teacher to lead them through it. Shakespeare. Homer. Any modern poetry. Shouldn’t we be a little more careful in what we force our students to consume? 

I’ve read it three or four times at different points in my life, including high school. I’ve never hated it as a book. And I’m not advocating for Gatsby to be banned from the classroom (I wouldn’t be against it, though). However, I am adamant that it should not be held up as a great work of fiction deserving any more reverence and attention than a young adult novel. 

To give it anything more sends the wrong message to students, the message being that this is an amazing and important book. Which it’s not, ol’ sport.  

Instead of teaching a class unit on Gatsby, consider these alternatives…

Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathaniel West (A hilarious short little caustic tale by a contemporary of Fitzgerald) 

Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry (A more realist and diverse look at the American Dream)

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (Like, Gatsby, but with complex characters!) 

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh (A British misanthrope’s examination of the Roaring Twenties) 

Babe: The Legend Comes to Life

O Pioneers 

Main Street

I was excited last week to hear that Loudoun County Superintendent Eric Williams will be leaving soon for a new job in Texas. Not because I’m a glutton for LCPS drama, and not that I have anything against Mr. Williams. But I sensed a potential mini-unit in the surprising news, which would provide a fantastic resource of texts to use in my AP Language and Composition classes: press releases, newspaper editorials, statements from parents, and all of it centered around an issue that was relevant to my students. Most importantly, I deemed it a fine opportunity to examine the carefully wrought language of a public figure who has chosen a moment of extremely trying circumstances to make a job switch. It seemed like a genuine gold-plated Teachable Moment.

These expectations were somewhat modified when I brought up the matter with my students and learned how truly uninterested they were in the Superintendent’s departure. I gave an informal poll to both my Lang classes,  where they could choose three different stances on his departure: shame on you, good for you, and who cares? The latter two options were the overwhelming favorites. Many students in the who cares? camp claimed to not even know who Eric Williams was. In both my classes, a number of students voiced a similar desire to defect to a distant and potentially less-stressful county.  

Tiptoeing past that emotional abyss, I pressed forward with the mini-lesson. I asked students to read the statement from Eric Williams to the Clear Creek Independent School District and then analyze its rhetoric, taking into account the rhetorical situation (speaker, purpose, audience, context, exigence) and the strategies used to accomplish this purpose (choices, appeals, tone).   

While students may not have cared about Williams’s decision to leave, I was pleased at the great pains they took in completing the assignment, carefully picking apart the choices Williams made to make a good impression with his new district deep in the heart of Texas. That actually was the biggest comment I found myself making on the assignment: many students failed to see that this statement was actively trying to cultivate a positive relationship between a new Superintendent and the residents of the community. It is indeed rhetorical, as this student from my fourth block class made perfectly clear…

After discussing the analysis homework, we used the whole situation to continue our investigation of complex situations, the type of issues that are often examined on the Q1 synthesis prompt on the AP Lang test. Students are asked thorny questions such as what should be the role of public libraries moving forward? or to what extent is imminent domain beneficial?

We’ve been discussing qualified vs binary stances, how most big issues often cannot be reduced to a simple binary. Even though my students were overwhelming on Eric Williams’s side, it did not take them long to acknowledge the validity of other perspectives from certain people (teachers and parents especially) who might not feel the same good will at his abrupt departure.

And for the final assignment in this mini-unit, I have attempted to game-ify rhetorical choices… 

 

I put students in breakout rooms at the end of class and let them work together for ten minutes, the idea being that they could complete their bingo cards much faster if they brain-stormed different rhetorical choices as a group. I’ve been stressing a rhetorical-verb-driven method of analysis (as opposed to device-driven), and this gives us a meaningful application of this concept, predicting different ways Williams could accomplish his goal of mollifying LCPS as he leaves.  

I’ve been pleased with the results so far…

Click here if you’d like your own copy. 

 

I just finished the audiobook of Adrian Goldsworthy’s Caesar, Life of a Collosus, and by far my biggest takeaway was how modern many of Caesar’s behaviors seem even from the distance of over two thousand years. A lot of that is because Caesar has set the standard against which all effective leaders (well, dictators) are judged. But Caesar wore many hats in addition to being a dictator. In fact, his time as a dictator took up only a few brief years before his life was literally cut short one morning in mid-March BC 54. His formative years were spent training as a religious cleric; he then transitioned to lawyering and politics during his twenties, and it was only when he headed north for an eight-year campaign against the Gauls that he became a full-time military leader, methodically winning glory for himself and Rome, presiding over the killing of an estimated one million enemy soldiers/civilians, and causing me to wonder….would Caesar have been a good high school English teacher in the twenty first century? 

Let’s define “good” as “competent enough to make a career out of it.” 

With that established, I do think Caesar, unlike many of his fellow Romans, would have very likely made a highly effective high school teacher. After listening to the twenty-four hour biography, I feel that I learned enough about ol’ Gaius to infer that, were he to be transported to a classroom setting in the twenty first century, he would be celebrated by his students, if occasionally cursed by his principals. That’s because much of the skills needed to succeed in education are as enduring as Caesar himself. He understood the value of goals, he knew how to treat his soldiers, and he understood how to publicize his achievement.  

Every day a teacher must make dozens of decisions that will in some way affect their subordinates (students). In college and at the beginning of every school year we are reminded of the value of fair, firm, and consistent actions. I’m not sure whether the mantra could be fully applied to Caesar, but he certainly showed a rigid pragmatism in his dealings with his army, his fellow Roman leaders, and his enemies. Goldsworthy consistently describes him as “amoral” in his decision-making. Raw emotions never played a part in deciding whether the citizens of a captured city were given clemency or massacred. The decision to spare captured Romans during the civil was always a matter of optics, not humanity. A less positive description of this mindset might be “cold blooded.” However, I think the positive way to look at it is “goal-oriented”. Caesar always did what he felt would best for himself (and, arguably, Rome) in the long-term. In education, it’s easy to get side-tracked by frustrations that affect your decision-making, whether it’s a failure in technology, a class unreceptive to a lesson, or an unproductive interaction with a student. While most effective educators have more egalitarian goals than Caesar, we could all use his attention to the big picture in making our day-to-day decisions, never letting the frustrations of the present control our actions in achieving our desired future.  

Decision-making is one thing, but what about how you treat the people who work under you? Enduring an arduous experience over an extended time period with a group of young adults — the Roman general and the high school teacher work with a similar clientele. Caesar was progressive in his treatment of soldiers, and I saw many parallels that translate to classroom management. Caesar did not just miraculously inspire devotion from his men — he understood that it was a process that requires meaningful leadership, and put the work in to earn that loyalty. Throughout his campaign in Gaul he made it a point to learn his soldiers’s names and throughout their adventures richly rewarded those who did well, often paying soldiers far more than what was expected at the time, pushing his own bank account into the red to do so. Caesar also made it a point to personally participate in the army’s training exercises, never asking them to do something he couldn’t do himself. In battle he was one of the few Roman generals who would (occasionally) fight on the front lines alongside his legions. In doing so he sacrificed the tactical view from his horse in the rear of the army but gained a huge morale boost for his army by swinging a sword alongside them. Caesar also rarely chose to employ the method of discipline by decimation, whereby one of every ten soldiers is chosen at random to be beaten to death by his cohort (talk about negative reinforcement!). It’s no surprise that by the time the eight-year campaign concluded in Gaul, most of the army was more loyal to their general than to their country and ready to stand alongside their general in the civil war against Pompey. As a teacher, Caesar would understand the value of learning student names as quickly as possible, the value of showing praise and publicly honoring achievement, the value of sparingly using negative reinforcement, and the value of suffering alongside your class, never asking them to show mastery of a skill that you aren’t able to model for them. I think there are analogous scenarios to decimation that take place in the classroom (punishing the entire class for the malfeasance of a few), and I think Caesar would have the sense enough to avoid it whenever possible.   

Leadership and achievement is all well good, but it’s not that valuable unless everyone knows about. While I was already familiar enough with Caesar’s genius at leadership before reading the book, I was not aware of his valuable skill in publicizing these achievements. During his campaigns he was consistently writing letters to his friends in Rome, as well as composing a detailed narrative of each year’s success, which were eagerly read back by his friends and political enemies at home each spring. In doing so Caesar always controlled the narrative of his time away from the city, and he made sure no one forgot about the glory he was winning for Rome. It’s hard to imagine being away from home for eight years while still being a notable person. Was Caesar bragging in writing these dispatches? For sure. Was it effective? It was. As teachers I think we are always more apt to reflect on what doesn’t work than publicly share our triumphs. As self-aggrandizing as it may feel, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with writing about what works in your classroom. If shared publicly, it not only makes you look good (or at least proud of your work), but it also raises the public image of the school and its students. It could also spark ideas in fellow teachers (I see this a lot with my wife’s teacher Instagram, where other music teachers borrow her ideas and activities). And, as Caesar proved when he was able to illegally march back into Rome with his army and meet no resistance, there’s nothing more valuable than controlling the narrative.   

While I do think Caesar would make a fantastic high school teacher, there would obviously be areas in which he would need to adapt. For example, when he was interacting with people he viewed as wasting his time, his temper sometimes got the best of him. Patience is a vital skill in education. Indeed, much of Caesar’s risk-taking behavior embodies the adage “do first, ask forgiveness later” (or simply conquer the people from whom you would ask forgiveness). Caesar would have to quickly learn the limits of that principle if he wanted a long career as an educator. Also, on a more mundane note, he would need to make sure his classes were always prepared to handle him in the event he suffered a seizure…soft mats and wooden spoons and whatnot. With all that being said, I am indeed confident that Caesar would make a phenomenal teacher. He would be pleased to teach a diverse student body (he was in the process of diversifying the Senate when he was assassinated) and he would be delighted that during the month named after him, he would not have to work at all.   

After attending some online professional development workshops this summer, I quickly realized the (short) scope of my (brief) attention span during online learning. That’s not a knock on the professional development. The workshops were well-run and thoughtfully planned. But still. It’s tough, paying attention in your own home, with all its attendant distraction. 

This self-knowledge was instructive for me as I began to plan my curriculum for the fall. It was my AP Language and Composition classes in particular I was worried about. One was scheduled for fourth block (the final class of A day) and one was scheduled for eighth block (the final class of B day). After my own experience working online all day, I had a pretty good idea of how my students would feel by the time they made it to my digital classroom, and I was worried. There’s a lot to cover in Lang, and there’s barely enough time to cover it all during a conventional 90-class school year. How could I come close to effectively preparing my students for the exam when I would only see them twice a week? Would I really try to go bell-to-bell and use all ninety minutes every time, an hour of instruction and learning lab? It seemed unproductive and unrealistic. 

As the summer ended I made a resolution: I would record my most important lessons, the lessons that had the core skills needed to succeed in Lang, and make them available for students to watch on their own time. I would make them easy to access and as easy to understand as possible.

This is different from a flipped classroom, since I would still be teaching these lessons in class. In a flipped classroom, as I understand it, students are required to watch the notes for homework, and class time is devoted to applying the skills. I wanted to have both in my class — notes and application. There’s so little time with them, though, that I knew there would be a need for students to consult the notes again. I didn’t want my students to experience the frustration of needing clarification on how to write a body paragraph of rhetorical analysis, searching for the answer on my notes, and not finding it, or maybe needing to hear me explain the notes. 

I briefly considered just posting my class recordings after each session. I’ve got a few problems with that practice. First of all, unless you somehow provide time stamps, it’s difficult for students to navigate an hour and a half of video. And unless you label each recording with the content of each class, it becomes a total mess to find specific lessons on specific skills. Then there is the video and audio quality, which is often sub-par. As a teacher, who wants to carefully catalogue bad recordings for students who will probably not watch them in the first place because of the bad quality? And on a more social level, if you are consistently providing students with recordings of the entire session, what incentive is there to show up — both literally and spiritually?  From what I’ve observed, for some students the knowledge that a class is being recorded and being posted is an excuse NOT to participate. 

My solution has been Youtube. I created a channel in August and have posted recordings of my lessons — meaning, lectures on content and skills, the stuff you need to understand to succeed. I only slightly tweak the notes so that hypothetically any student who is taking Lang could potentially benefit from the videos. (I still record my classes as required, but I never share them with my students unless requested — which has happened a grand total of two times so far.)

So far I average about a video a week. The longest has been by my most recent video, in which I go off for forty five minutes about how to prepare for a rhetorical analysis essay — a very important skill that I don’t want to feel pressured to rush into a single lesson, which may have all sorts of distractions and unexpected complications. I try to have a driving question or skill featured in each video, although deviated from that plan already in the video in which I talk with my colleague Erin Procopchat about the rhetoric of ancient Rome.  

What’s great is that it’s not that much work to make a video. My first videos I recorded myself solo on Google Meet (booo!), until the scales fell from my eyes I saw before me the celestial visage of WeVideo (yayyyy!). 

Here’s how you record a lecture. First, go to WeVideo on LCPS go. 

Hit the record button.   

Next, choose the “screen and webcam” option. (I think you could also record yourself with just the screen option, but I’ve never tried it that way.)  

Then you record your lecture. You hit the stop recording button when you’re done. 

You can then edit the video to your satisfaction. The biggest change I make is to reduce the size of my talking head over the notes.

Then you click finish in the right hand corner, have it delivered to your Google Drive, and you’re done. WeVideo sends you an email when the video is processed (time can vary, but usually it only takes as long as the length of the video). 

This video I then post to my Youtube Channel, which I can then link in my notes and share with students as needed.  

To be clear, these videos are meant to supplement students’ in-class experience, not act as a substitute for my class, which I try to make as interactive as possible. After almost two months, I believe the channel has made my life easier in a number of ways. Students who made use of my notes on how to structure a rhetorical analysis essay did exceptionally well on their out-of-class paper, and they credited the ease of following along with the notes as they worked through their own essay. The channel can also help with remediation. If I have a student struggling with analysis, I first discuss the skill with them, then I can also offer them the fifteen-minute video on that exact skill for them to watch as they work on their next assignment. 

Do I think these notes are going to go viral and make me rich with YouTube ad money?

Yes. 

Do I think I’m going to become a new form of online influencer from my YouTube channel, a rhetoric-pedagogy influencer?

Yes, I do. 

Has my extended time in front of the computer warped my perception of reality? 

Possibly.    

The following grades are formative, meant to monitor effectiveness, provide feedback, and encourage goals both personal and in some cases corporate. These grades are not final, and can go up or down as the year progresses. 

Flipgrid: I’ve known about it for three years, but every year I always found an excuse not to try it out. Beyond the puzzling name (what’s being flipped here exactly?) I just didn’t feel comfortable asking students to record themselves trying to answer scholarly questions for all their peers to watch. And if students weren’t recording scholarly responses…what was the point of using it? Was I really going to watch all that content? I didn’t feel comfortable asking my students to do something I wouldn’t feel comfortable doing myself, and it only seemed fair to devote those type of discussion-based activity to in-class time. 

This fall, however, I’ve set aside any of those reservations. In a month of complete distance-learning, Flipgrid has been a great way to get to know my students. One of the first activities I do with them every year is to have each student bring to class a significant object and discuss why they brought it, what it means to them. It was an activity that transferred seamlessly to Flipgrid. Students talked charmingly about their objects. I allowed pets to be featured this year, and am I ever glad to have made that choice. Fiona the cat, Smokey the horse, Evan the dog were all memorably put on display. The students seemed to enjoy it as well, with most videos racking up close to a hundred views in each class without any direction from me. The students are experts at talking to a camera, and Flipgrid relieves the on-spot pressure of a synchronous Google Meet session. It’s easy to set up an account and create assignments. Overall, top marks for Flipgrid, with only a few points deducted for the name, which remains unappealing. A-    

Remind: Students were automatically enrolled at the beginning of the year in my sections, only to find out that not all of them were. That’s been the only noteworthy update in my use of this very helpful student-to-teacher client. I require that my students write their messages to me politely (salutation, thank yous, good grammar, etc) if they want me to respond outside of contract hours. This year, either the word has spread or students are becoming better at their electronic etiquette, because even before I went over that rule in my syllabus all student correspondence had reflected the height of manners. This boomer was happy. Remind is good, if sometimes tough to navigate on iPhone. B+  

WeVideo: Don’t let the name and the interface, both of which scream mid-2000s, fool you. This browser video-editing program has functionality to burn, and is fast enough enough to keep up with any modern educator’s go-go pandemic lifestyle. My wife, a careerlong user of iMovie, is even thinking of making the switch, after hearing me brag like a proud papa about the speed at which my videos are processed and made available in Drive (generally speaking, it takes as long as the length of the video). It was an invaluable tool last week when I edited together the SCA/PEER video, never once crashing even though I had several gigs of two-minute video submissions in the que. 

While there are plenty of video-editing programs that can produce a more polished product, WeVideo satisfies the needs of most educators have right now, and it does it with an easy-to-use interface that almost never crashes*.   

You can also use WeVideo to record lectures. It has the option of recording both your camera and the screen at the same time, producing two separate video files that can then be manipulated after recording. I finally tried this out a few nights ago and was overall pleased with the results. Anything was better than what I had been dealing with, which was two bad weeks with Google Meets trying to record lectures and getting back videos with choppy audio. 

*WeVideo did crash in the middle of recording a section of my lecture, which did not auto-save and I was forced to re-record. I will allow that this may have been more a problem with my internet speed and less a problem with the program itself. 

Overall, a strong first month for this overachiever. A

Outlook: The search feature is terrible, the calendar is difficult to manage. I can literally feel it making my phone heavier.  C-        

PearDeck: My experience with PearDeck is currently linked to my Google Meet experience, for better or worse — currently worse. I want to use it for formative feedback during class, but I don’t want it to come at the expense of getting booted out of my own class every time I try to present my screen to the class, which has been the experience thus far. I’m going to figure out how to make it work.  N/A  

Google Meet: Without it, we wouldn’t have any online instruction, so I shouldn’t complain too much. It wasn’t designed for this amount of heavy use, and credit to Google for consistently seeking feedback and updating the interface on a weekly basis. 

That said, it became clear after the first week that using Google Meets for class was going to require at least two computers: one to host the class, and one to do everything else. My internet in Winchester can just barely keep up with thirty students in the room. Occasionally I get booted out, especially if I’m trying to present slides. So I direct students to follow along with the slides on their own devices, which has worked well so far, and frankly it keeps the students that much more engaged during a lecture, since they’re tasked with following along.  

One day last week my voice started becoming glitchy, according to the students. This issue was resolved when I stopped using my school-issued device. I’ve heard of similar problems stemming from the school-issued device. 

My Lang kids have been fantastic about keeping their cameras on and participating in discussions. Not so much my English 12 students, but I’m still pleased at them for showing up, sticking to business, asking questions, and even participating in the chat when prompted…and prompted some more…and me awkwardly waiting for a response in the chat.  

A few students have blanks in their Phoenix picture and never turn on their cameras, so I have been engaging with them for almost a month without knowing anything about them other than their name and what they produce in class. It’s almost a throwback to the snail mail correspondence classes I’ve heard mentioned by old timers. 

All told, Google Meets gets the job done, as long as you have some deep patient breaths to spare. B-

Schoology: We can be hyperbolic, us teachers. We can be very protective of our tools with which we use to teach. Take away Google Classroom and replace it with some ersatz mashup of Classroom, Facebook, and Blackboard, and you have to expect a certain amount of protest. Combine that with the unfortunate timing of the roll out, and…well. 

Working with Schoology over the summer and over the past month with students, I am reminded of the D.L. Moody quote: “The best way to show that a stick is crooked is not to argue about it or to spend time denouncing it, but to lay a straight stick alongside it.” It’s only when it’s gone that you appreciate how Google Classroom got so many little things right. I’m sure Schoology makes life easier for a certain percentage of individuals at the macro level, but down here in the trenches, I miss the ease with which you could post, schedule, and critique assignments. I miss how you could post an assignment in multiple classes without having to go into each class and re-attach the materials. I didn’t bother creating custom buttons for my sections, but I felt bad for those who did and then had to deal with them not working the first week of class, which at the elementary level was more than just a superficial problem: it meant students couldn’t see where they needed to go for their next class.   

I don’t know the whole story behind why Schoology was purchased, or really any of the story, other than it happened. I believe most issues are multifaceted and deserve as much context as possible. That said, it’s never a good sign when you have to resort to that logic. 

Personally, I haven’t asked a lot out of Schoology, and my own gripes have been pretty limited in comparison to some of my colleagues. Next week, though, I’ll be using Schoology’s Turnitin add-on, which, by the way, is the third different iteration of that program in as many years. (Technology!) But for now, my grade reflects my own somewhat limited experience with Schoology. C+   

 

This summer — in place of weddings, dinner parties and large family gatherings — I surrounded myself in the company of over a dozen authors, some of whom I found more pleasant than others.

Today, for your future reading purposes, I have summoned these fifteen authors to one long table, at which I am seated at the head. With great care and subjectivity, I have arranged my guests at the table based on the amount of pleasure their books brought me. 

Sitting to my right in the seat of honor is Deborah Feldman, author of my favorite pandemic read: her memoir Unorthodox. Ms. Feldman began her writing career in 2009, publishing a sensational blog that detailed her repressed life as a woman in the NYC Hasidic community. This book is the finished product of that blog, chronicling her Dickensian upbringing as a quasi-orphan living with her put-upon extended family. The language is raw and evocative. Her outrage at the mistreatment she experienced at the hands of her family is unqualified and unyielding, an interesting contrast to the trend of empathy and rationalization in memoirs these days. It’s also funny and dryly ironic in parts. Don’t bother with the “inspired-by” Netflix series.

Seated across from Deborah is a man at the other end of the privilege spectrum who looks like Santa Clause’s fine-arts brother: Bill Buford, erstwhile New Yorker editor and author of the excellent 2003 memoir about Italian cooking, Heat. Buford’s new book, Dirt, chronicles his adventures in Léon, France, where he moved with his young family to try his hand in the kitchens of the country’s gastronomic capital. In less capable hands this would be a tedious reading experience. But Buford brings entertainment and enlightenment to the premise, largely through self-deprecation, boundless enthusiasm, and a love-hate relationship with Léon, a city filled with beautiful women and ugly men, all of whom are vividly portrayed as unwelcoming hedonists.      

A trio of equally interesting authors sit farther down the table. First there is Jane Austen, looking coy and refined despite two centuries in the grave. For a book club this summer I reread her masterwork Emma, a fine calibration of characterization and plotting. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around what specific questions of the 18th century her novel is now answering. Next to her is that smug but useful weasel Gabriel Wyner, author of Fluent Forever, which I praised in my previous blog post about Anki. Rounding out this top tier is an equally shifty man with a salesman’s smile and sincerity: Michael Finel, author of the fascinating Stranger in the Woods, which chronicles the adventures of Christopher Thomas Knight, aka the Maine hermit, a man who lived in isolation for almost three decades in the Maine wilderness, keeping himself supplied with food by breaking into hundreds of (usually) unoccupied vacation homes. While the hermit himself is a fascinating subject, equally worthy of examination is Mr. Finel, a disgraced reporter who was able to start a letter correspondence with the hermit immediately after his arrest, and was subsequently able to strongarm his eccentric friend into talking long enough to parlay the experience into a book deal.   

Farther down the table sit a group of authors whose books I enjoyed but would only recommend with qualifications. That’s Michelle McNamera with her face buried in her phone. Her gripping I’ll be Gone in the Dark is the story of the horrifying Golden State Killer, who terrorized Sacramento and Southern California during the 70s and 80s. It’s a book I can see high schoolers really enjoying: McNamera has that efficient journalist’s ability to characterize with a few phrases. The graphic descriptions and the general terrified tenor of the book itself was a little much for me, to say nothing of the slapped together construction of the text itself (McNamera died before the book was complete or the GSK was finally apprehended in 2018). But if that’s what you want in your life, then by all means. Speaking of unnerving, that’s journalist Caroline Knapp looking miserable as she sips her fourth iced water and lemon of the evening. Her memoir Drinking, a Love Story is a very 90s memoir about alcoholism and finally sobering up. Knapp would die of lung cancer only a few years after publishing this memoir, which is similar to Feldman’s Unorthodox in its uncompromising depictions of those surrounding her. Unfortunately, in Knapp the book has a much less sympathetic center figure. I personally didn’t mind Knapp’s self-centered and often self-pitying attitude (horrors included wearing an unflattering dress at her sister’s wedding, and her bottoming out was slightly injuring her knee) but the rest of my book club found her WASP-y upbringing and blithe yuppie values enraging. While we’re on the subject of yuppies, Chris Nashawaty wrote a book about that favorite comedy film of the baby boomers: Caddyshack. Contrary to the title, the story about the creation of the movie only takes up the final third, with the rest recounting the life and times of comedy wunderkind and Caddyshack writer Doug Kenney, a “counterculture icon” who doesn’t come across as particularly genius or relevant despite Nashawaty’s best attempts.    

We also have authors of more edifying content present in this grouping. There’s Gustave Flaubert of Madame Bovary fame, over there le mot-ing his justes before he will consent to say anything to his fellow partygoers. His influential novel left my book club perplexed. The writing was fantastic, but the characters themselves were so unpleasant. My edition, incidentally, was translated from the French by Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl, so perhaps that had something to do with the bleak depiction of the bourgeoisie life. On the other hand, I found the ferocious historical fiction of Hilary Mantel unexpectedly inspiring. Her Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies are the first two parts of a trilogy depicting the rise and fall of Henry VIII’s powerful personal lawyer: Thomas Cromwell. A man with a common background largely slandered by history books over the past five centuries, Cromwell is depicted by Mantel as a worldy and kind man, educated but empathetic to those around him, able to return favors as well as hold a grudge for years, resourceful if at times practical to a fault. Enjoying the books requires a very basic understanding of Henry VIII’s reign, as well as a little patience: Wolf Hall in particular has three main characters with the first name Thomas. Mantel makes the journey rewarding though. I found equally rewarding experience listening to two audiobooks by James Shapiro: The Year of Lear & A Year in the Life of Shakespeare. The latter audiobook is read by the author, whose Bronx accent rattles against the stately Elizabethan subject matter. Both books have similar premises as they examine Shakespeare’s two most artistically productive years (1599 and 1606) and provide lots of fascinating historical context that may have inspired Shakespeare as he was writing Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Anthony and Cleopatra, and King Lear. They’re excellent books that appear to be meant for general consumption, but not books I would recommend to a casual reader, unless that casual reader had a deep knowledge of and interest in Shakespeare.  

At the back of the table we have a group of authors from whom I choose to keep my distance. There’s When in French author Laura Collins, whose memoir about marrying a Frenchman and learning his language falls into many of the cloying pits that Buford’s book avoids. Next to her sits stoic Agatha Christie, author of  Five Little Pigs and The ABC Murders. Plenty of people enjoy her books and the adventures of old Poirot. I’ve tried my best and I find it as boring and rote as a Law and Order rerun. Same goes for one-hit wonder Bram Stoker, whose Dracula has a thrilling opening that is never topped in this tedious epistolary novel, which probably was much more gripping when it was first published and the reader did not know exactly what was coming next. Yeah, it’s my table and I’ll decide where these legendary authors sit! And rounding out this group, I’m sad to say, is Gabriel Garcia Marquez, glaring from across the table, outraged to be seated with the dregs. Sorry, man. Nobel Prize or not, Love in the Time of Cholera just didn’t have enough love — or cholera, for that matter.

After ten years in the show, there’s one topic I have never explored sufficiently in my classes: what’s the most effective way to study and retain what we learn? I think the failure to discuss this topic with students is probably true for most of us in secondary education. No matter the subject, the pattern is similar: introduce and lecture about concepts, ask the students to apply the content, then assess knowledge. Students devote some amount of time studying and devoting the concepts to their memory as best they can. Why haven’t I spent more time explaining to students the best way to learn? Part of reason is apathy. After all, you don’t need to cram facts in order to do well on a rhetorical analysis essay, which takes a more holistic assessment of skills. But, then again, I do teach plenty of content that requires memory retention (comma rules, important authors, grammatical function). So what’s my problem? 

The real reason has been ignorance. I wasn’t sure what was the best way to retain a large amount of information. That’s changed recently, though. A few months ago I started brushing up on my Spanish. I had forgotten the majority of the vocabulary and grammar rules I learned in college, and for all intents and purposes, I starting from the beginning. I picked up a copy of Gabriel Wyner’s Fluent Forever, a valuable read in that it exposed me to an incredibly useful tool for permanently retaining large amounts of information: Anki.       

In college I studied Spanish with flashcards. By the time I graduated, an entire desk drawer was packed with decks and decks of Spanish vocabulary. They were the rough building blocks to my brute-force study method: look at the word on the front, try to know the answer on the back. Difficult cards were saved for future, intermittent study sessions. Everyone else I knew had a similar method. It’s time-consuming, ungainly to transport, and not conducive for long-term retention. Who has time to organize so many cards, let alone review them consistently?  

Anki has taken the flash-card method and given it a peer-reviewed jolt of efficiency. Developed in 2006, it’s a software program that allows the user to create decks of digital flashcards. But this isn’t another form of Quizlet. Anki uses spaced repetition to make the most efficient use of your time. Spaced repetition controls when the user will review the card again, based on how well the user knows the content. For example…

 

First I think about whether I know the answer. Then I click the show answer button. 

 

 

If I was wrong, I choose the button on the far left, which will review the card again this study session. If I was right, then I choose one of the options to push the card for a review in the future. You can adjust the scale of these features to your preference, but the default setting is to review in four days in the future, then a week, then a month, and so forth, in increasingly large time intervals. If you get it wrong at any of those checkpoints, the card is pushed back to one day, and the process starts again. Thanks to the principles of brain plasticity and memory-retrieval, as the card is correctly answered and pushed to greater distance in the future, the information has been committed to your long term memory and can be easily retrieved. Study sessions vary based on the amount of cards that you input (there are entire decks that can be downloaded online, but it is heavily encouraged that you create your own, as it increases the level of engagement and, by extension, retention). In my free time each day I input an average of twenty or so cards as I study and read Spanish. As of this writing, I have almost 2000 flashcards of Spanish vocabulary and grammar concepts, and on average I spend 23 minutes per day reviewing an average of 143 cards. Anki, by the way, offers you personal progress data, lots and lots of glorious personal progress data. 

Over the past decade, Anki has become extremely popular in fields that require the retention of huge amounts of information, such as medicine, law, and language learning. So why isn’t it more popular in high school? It isn’t the price. Anki is free on all platforms except iOS, where it is a reasonable $25. When I asked around, some students were familiar with the program, but only in passing. From my observation, though, the most popular form of studying in high school is still late-night, last-minute cramming. While that may get the job done in the short-term, cramming has few long-term benefits in knowledge retention, and also robs students of valuable sleep time, which carries its own risks in poor physical and mental health. And for the most part, students know and accept that. The decision to cram is a prioritization of a dozen other life factors. 

That’s what presents the biggest hangup with Anki’s use by high school students: for it to be effective, you have to use it every day. You have to have the discipline to show up every day, either on your computer or the mobile app, and complete your flashcard reviews, otherwise the benefits of spaced repetition won’t be effective. Compared with cramming, the instant benefits are much less immediate. It’s the ultimate long game. A student could start using Anki at the beginning of AP US History and over the course of the school year, assuming the student is consistently inputting notes, be fully prepared to crush the exam in May, and then move forward in his/her life with a comprehensive understanding of our country. But Anki is not meant for a rush study session to prepare for Thursday’s quiz on chapter four. For that, there’s the effective (but ephemeral) Quizlet, or paper flash cards. For high schoolers — again, this is just from my observation — the long-term enrichment of their course’s content runs a very distant second to the more immediate: get a good grade. If that can be done with bursts of cramming, why wouldn’t they choose that route? That may point to a larger question about the priorities of our education system.         

Despite all this, I do believe there is a large population of students who would take advantage of Anki and have the discipline to use it effectively. I think the only reason these students aren’t using it in high school is purely from ignorance. This fall, I plan on encouraging its use with all my students this year, because — to go full evangelist here — it truly is possible for all students to make use of it. Every single student at Champe has thirty minutes in their day that could be borrowed from time normally spent texting, watching Netflix, Tik Toking, or Instagramming.        

And Anki doesn’t have to be used for school or language. Some use it to learn trivia, such as famous paintings, dates, and capitals of countries. While most of my flashcards are Spanish, I have a deck devoted to notable numbers, such as the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) and the amount of square feet in an acre (43,560), both of which I now know by heart, not to brag. 

Why devote time to learn this? Well…why not? Would the half hour I set aside for Anki in the evening be more productively spent using social media or watching TV? Is there not enough evidence that speaks to the health benefits of challenging the brain? Is knowledge not power???? 

F

On Thursday, I will reach one hundred straight days of Anki, helpfully tracked by an add-on that provides a level of game-ification to the experience (kinda like SnapChat streaks, kids!!).

To be clear, it’s not a magic learning hack that makes you remember everything overnight; it’s simply a very helpful tool in the journey of self-improvement, a journey we should all take part in whether we are students or adults. Anki has been indispensable in my Spanish crash course, which in turn has offered me a productive use of my time at home this summer. As we begin the fall semester in a few weeks, I look forward to continuing using Anki and spreading its gospel to my students.   

In March, as schools began to operate virtually, College Board announced its intention to administer online exams to the many thousands of students enrolled in their courses around the world.

 

On May 20th AP Language and Composition students completed an at-home, truncated version of an exam that, under non-pandemic circumstances, they would have taken at school. Where the normal exam is a three-hour and-fifteen-minute marathon of close reading, analysis, and rhetorical invention, the at-home exam was a sprint, consisting of a single essay of rhetorical analysis. AP applied this testing style to most of the other subjects, requiring students to answer one or two free-responses questions within 45 minutes. 

College Board has maintained the legitimacy of the test the scores students earn this year, despite this drastically reduced sample size, abbreviated curriculum, and a lack of equity in student preparation.

A few days ago I asked Champe students to complete a brief, anonymous survey to help get a sense of how they felt about the experience. It was completed by 51 students: 39 juniors, 7 seniors, and 5 sophomores. Those who bothered to take this survey could be fairly described in the parlance of College Board as “stakeholders.” The majority of them took two or more exams this May. As such, they were ready to share their thoughts, positive and negative.  

What they shared reflected much of the criticism and defense that has surrounded College Board’s decision to offer the exams online. 

The first opinion-based question I asked was whether the test should have been given at all. College Board claimed that when they gave a survey of students “91% indicated they want to complete this important step, urging us not to cancel this opportunity they’ve been working towards.”

My survey did not find students as overwhelmingly in favor of the test: 

 

After each question I asked students to explain why they chose that answer. Students in favor of giving the test had this to say:

Students registered, paid, and studied for these tests expecting the chance to be able to earn credit. It would have been extremely unfair for this group of students to be unable to take the exams when previous students have always been able to.

They needed to give us AP credit somehow, and we obviously could not take them in person

Many students were afraid that the whole year’s work would go to waste if there was no option to take the exam.

Those who were not in favor of testing pointed to issues of technology, parity, and reduced curriculum:   

We paid for a holistic exam that would test multiple skills not just our writing ability. The test we received seemed like a watered down version, which doesn’t make me feel comfortable with the idea that I’m getting credit for a class I barely finished. 

[…] it took a whole years worth of learning and crammed it into just 2 questions (math) or just 1 RA essay, which simply is not a fair or accurate way to judge their knowledge in the subjects. There was also a whole issue with submissions- something they handled very horribly. 

If a student decided he/she didn’t want to take the test, College Board did offer the opportunity for the student to get a refund for the exam. I do empathize though with the students who griped about the mental energy invested in the courses, which would now be measured in a drastically different way. The unusual circumstances (at-home, unmonitored) lead me to ask students the next question on the survey…

 

Students were divided on whether College Board had successfully reduced academic dishonesty. Teen Vogue recently published a detailed account of online cheating methods. While students taking this survey didn’t have anything as scandalous to recount (and, granted, I wasn’t asking them to report cheating), they did make some interesting points about how College Board succeeded…

Making the tests open book pretty much eliminated the need/want to cheat and the timing of the amount of time we were given to answer the questions was so tight that there wasn’t a whole lot of time for in depth research anyway 

They basically said if you do anything slightly wrong you’re entire academic life is over. It was a pretty bold threat so it definitely scared people who were on the fence, as many people most likely considered it since it would be hard to be caught. They also said before any of the exams that they found a ring of students who were planning on cheating, so regardless of whether that was true or not (most likely wasn’t), it showed that they were prepared to catch cheaters.

They made sure to use anti-plagiarism software, send our answers to our teachers, and make the tests 45 min which meant there was barely even time to look at notes let alone cheat

…or, on the other hand, may have failed… 

There was no way to do it well, but somehow they did an even worse job, with [Dinosauce313] baiting, and the lack of time being used to motivated people not to cheat just backfired on them. Also, tests that have short answers that are hard to differentiate, like Ap maths litteraly have no chance of being not similar.

(“Dinosauce” refers a Reddit account purporting to be a high school student that was believed to be phishing for potential cheaters.)

Students were similarly split on the next question…

 

Some students felt College Board did an adequate job providing an equitable environment: 

They did say that students could request electronics if they didn’t have one at home, and they created youtube videos so all students could watch and learn. 

They cut out the units that we didn’t learn in school.

While some students observed areas where equity was not feasible…

Many factors including internet connection was affecting the testing environment for students

A lot of students faced technical difficulties which to some extent were beyond their reach and they worked really hard to take the exam only to have to take it again in June or not receive a score at all.

I just think like most things low income students are disproportionately affected, not to mention so many curriculums vary drastically; I was told by many Psych students nationwide they hadn’t even gotten to writing FRQs yet

As I mentioned before, some international students did not get an equal opportunity because they had to take their exams in the middle of the night. Some students were forced to take makeup exams because of technological errors on College Board’s behalf, which is very unfair.

I was curious whether the shortened exam length made the experience more or less stressful. The majority said that it was less stressful.  Similarly, in the following question, the majority indicated that they felt adequately prepared for the exams. 

 

 

This level of comfort speaks to the ambition, grind, and relative stable home environments of Champe’s many AP students. I think it also positively reflects the efforts of the instructors at Champe who worked to provide online instruction in the weeks leading to the exam. That said, the comments in the survey were not universally glowing… 

I did a lot of prep for the exams. My teachers provided a lot of resources to practice with, which were helpful. What made me feel unprepared was the online format because we were all unsure of exactly how that would look. Content-wise I felt ready.

I felt that I did everything I could do to prepare for the exam, but there was no way to prepare for possible technology issues.

Some classes did not cover the topics that were on the exam at all, so it had to be self teaching to learn it. Also, classes such as econ and gov that have two different classes split into the two semesters made it very hard to take an exam on the second semester material when we didn’t learn a single bit of it.

In the next question I asked if students made use of College Board’s online resources.

 

The final part of the survey offered students a chance to offer any comments they might have about the testing experience. Most of these final comments were from the students who were critical of the experience… 

I think they should have refunded at least half of our money because we only took half the test.

I know that they tried to find a solution to give student’s credit for their work, and the online tests were their solution. I appreciate the effort they put into creating these tests so quickly, but I do not believe they made the best decision for a majority of students. Once again, in these unprecedented times, I think they should have done something unprecedented and awarded a 5 to AP students with an A, a 4 to kids with a B, and a 3 to kids with a C

They were good about releasing information and updates, but just in general I don’t think this could necessarily be considered a “fair” testing administration.

They should’ve been prepared for the technical errors and should’ve been more accommodating of international students. Many students were forced to retake exams due to errors on College Board’s which created an unfair situation. International students were forced to take exams at 2 am or 4 am. And although College Board did this to prevent cheating and because they couldn’t make new tests, they should have been more considerate and listened to these students.

College Board’s decision to move forward will continue to be a source of debate. In July scores will be released. Class action lawsuits have been filed as a result of online testing snafus. College Board, for better or for worse, is perched at the top of standardized testing, a position which has become increasingly precarious. Like many organizations, it has found itself defending its legitimacy in the midst of the pandemic. Thousands of students committed months of their lives to AP curriculum. Students at Champe have handled the experience with empathy and diligence.

I know that they tried to find a solution to give student’s credit for their work, and the online tests were their solution. I appreciate the effort they put into creating these tests so quickly, but I do not believe they made the best decision for a majority of students. Once again, in these unprecedented times, I think they should have done something unprecedented and awarded a 5 to AP students with an A, a 4 to kids with a B, and a 3 to kids with a C.

But some students are fed up.

College board has a monopoly on education. Abolish college board 😎