Comments on: Unorthodox Ideas in Education http://www.cansar.com/2009/02/15/unorthodox-ideas-in-education/ Entrepreneurship. Innovation. Inspiration. Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:20:22 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: lilly http://www.cansar.com/2009/02/15/unorthodox-ideas-in-education/comment-page-1/#comment-8 lilly Mon, 16 Feb 2009 02:47:37 +0000 http://www.can-sar.com/?p=152#comment-8 What he's proposing is how my school district worked. We had general schools with a wide range of options from remedial to AP/honors courses, as well as a continuation high school for kids who really needed a lot of help, special scheduling, or whatever. One of the nice things about this is you didn't have a situation where you had to get into the magnet school to get the challenging teachers and taking AP courses wasn't an all-or-none proposition. Some took as many AP classes as possible, others focused on taking AP classes where they really enjoyed the material and didn't take every AP they were eligible for, and some who had been in mostly regular classes sometimes took the random AP here and there as they felt like it. It meant being a "good student" was more flexible than what school you went to. As someone who wasn't even in honors math until 5th grade where I sort of insisted that I be considered and did a bunch of extra work on the side, I appreciate that having flexibility is important. And I wouldn't have even known about the honors option because my previous school didn't have it. If those kids had been off in a magnet, I may never have noticed. The other nice thing about my school was that it was huge (strange to say). While this could mean big class sizes a lot of the time, good teachers had ways of managing this to keep us all engaged (small group activities, student teaching, peer mentoring). (Also, state funding kept some classes really small, like freshman english.) The nice thing about a huge school is that you have a diverse enough student body to support a lot of different activities that can achieve at a high level (drama, dance, academic decathlon, football, whatever). Isn't this one of the reasons people have magnets sometimes? What he’s proposing is how my school district worked. We had general schools with a wide range of options from remedial to AP/honors courses, as well as a continuation high school for kids who really needed a lot of help, special scheduling, or whatever. One of the nice things about this is you didn’t have a situation where you had to get into the magnet school to get the challenging teachers and taking AP courses wasn’t an all-or-none proposition. Some took as many AP classes as possible, others focused on taking AP classes where they really enjoyed the material and didn’t take every AP they were eligible for, and some who had been in mostly regular classes sometimes took the random AP here and there as they felt like it. It meant being a “good student” was more flexible than what school you went to. As someone who wasn’t even in honors math until 5th grade where I sort of insisted that I be considered and did a bunch of extra work on the side, I appreciate that having flexibility is important. And I wouldn’t have even known about the honors option because my previous school didn’t have it. If those kids had been off in a magnet, I may never have noticed.

The other nice thing about my school was that it was huge (strange to say). While this could mean big class sizes a lot of the time, good teachers had ways of managing this to keep us all engaged (small group activities, student teaching, peer mentoring). (Also, state funding kept some classes really small, like freshman english.) The nice thing about a huge school is that you have a diverse enough student body to support a lot of different activities that can achieve at a high level (drama, dance, academic decathlon, football, whatever). Isn’t this one of the reasons people have magnets sometimes?

]]>