More on Rigor

Hello everyone,

Happy winter break to all the middle school teachers. I'll see you sometime when you get back in January.

Good luck on finals to the high schoolers.

You will all forgive me for creating a non-sequitur with today's subject. It's just that it's been on my mind lately, for a variety of reasons.

When I first started teaching, I was given the warning, "Just remember, these are junior high school students, not college students. Don't try to give them college level work." That was good advice, and I commend it to all of you.

But I got other advice, both spoken and implied, that has troubled me.

I was taught that the students in East LA were not up to the sort of rigor I had been accustomed to when I was growing up. It was taught that I should not expect too much from them, and that it was unfair for me to demand things from them that were "beyond" them. I even had a teacher suggest to me once--suggest? nay, I was forcefully told--that it was racist to expect very much from the students of East LA.

I shake with anger as I write this.

I had a student in my honors English class at Belvedere who was accepted to a very prestigious university after high school graduation. The student failed out of the university because, I learned to my shame, my colleagues and I had not provided an education that was adequate preparation for the post-high school experience. (I have many students, by the way, who went on to fine universities and succeeded. I can't help but feel that many of them succeeded despite me. They would have succeeded anywhere.)

In post-year interviews with my students (something I always did, and something I recommend), after grades were in and there were no consequences for telling the truth, many of my early students confessed to me that I was too easy and my class was too light.

I resolved that I would never allow those things to happen again.

And in response to the teacher (long gone, by the way) that it is racist to demand too much, I say that it is racist to demand too little. I grew up in a state that was notoriously underfunded, and I believed that my education was inferior, yet I cannot in good conscience give an education that is less than I received without being able to answer for it before a fair tribunal.

I am not advocating a return to all the practices of the 1960s and 1970s, by any means. Still, I can't help but feel that, if I learned so much in classes that were not designated honors or gifted or AP, my students can learn as least as much in their regular classes if I commit myself to teach them.

And we all know that this generation of student is different from the generations before. They have more tools and information available to them than we ever dreamed. They are wealthier and better protected than we ever were. They are able to gain more with less effort than we could ever imagine.

And we all know that there were things that the previous generation was taught that are not important now. No one needs to waste time teaching slide rules. Key punch operators are a trove of useless knowledge. Communism is not a serious threat.

And we know that they are inclined to give more than their share of adolescent resistance to work.

But it is wrong to be anything less than rigorous.

We should not teach honors and AP classes as if they were well behaved regular classes. We should not teach our regular classes as if they needed to repeat elementary school. We should not waste their time. They are college bound middle and high school students. They must be ready or we condemn them to lives of poverty and difficulty.

Resolve to do it. For the New Year, resolve to teach them.

Jeff Combe