For High School Teachers
Brief excerpts taken from a longer letter
in the book
How many really outstanding students have you taught?
One thing is certain: great students are memorable. And they are memorable not just for their individual
and personal accomplishments, but for two other very important reasons.
- These students enliven classes; their very presence makes other students more interested in
course
material and more active in daily classroom activities. These students are remarkable intellectual catalysts.
- They give you, as a teacher, a perfect tool to measure your pedagogical efforts.
But have you had classes without these great students? We all have. Perhaps too many. But then, just when
you begin to wonder if you have any teaching ability at all — because a certain class doesn’t respond to your
ultimate efforts — later in the day, you teach the same subject to a class that literally sparkles with intellectual
enthusiasm. Why? Because those particular students respond and make your efforts worthwhile.
Unfortunately, my experience tells me that while the number of exceptional students entering college these
days is as strong as ever, the number of students who have the potential but not the discipline for college
is increasing dramatically. The statistics for four-year colleges bear this out. The numbers are far worse for
students at two-year colleges: nearly 50% drop out after the first year.
What’s happening in high school classrooms is, I think, as good as ever. But it’s outside those classrooms
that many students are failing. They are studying fewer hours than pre-college students have ever studied,
and their understanding of learning as well as the effort and skill that real learning requires is unrealistic.
By that I mean far too many students conceive of learning as an event rather than a process. When you,
as a
teacher, present the material to them in class, they expect to completely grasp it in an instant. If they don’t, then
something is wrong with your teaching, or something is wrong with them — they don’t have the “genes” for math
or the instinct for language.
My book tries to bring students back to basics, and in the process, I hope that the return to fundamentals
that I promote will help you maintain that level of excitement and discovery that you would like to see in
all your students and all your classes.
View my blog at: areyoureallyreadyforcollege.blogspot.com
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