Difficulty paper #4

Much like John Taylor Gatto, Denise Clarke Pope sees the schooling today as having problems. In fact, she thinks that they are pretty much doing the opposite of what they should be doing, with regards to what contemporary corporations are emphasizing. That is, schools are all about rigorous standards and testing, rather than focusing on creativity and teamwork. Like the other articles I’ve read about this subject, I would also have to agree with Pope’s stance. Pope says that kids these days think they have no leeway or margin for error, and that if they don’t do well on all this crazy testing, that they will have a shitty future. I don’t particularly agree with this, but I can only speak for my own experiences. I remember when in high school I was taking those PSAT classes on Saturdays in order to prepare for the big SAT. I didn’t like this idea, at all, and soon became fed up with it and comfortable with not taking them because I knew I wanted to go to community college first then transfer somewhere. Personally, I wasn’t really ready to have to decide where I wanted to go for my higher education so I didn’t think that taking the SAT’s were necessary, and turns out they weren’t. I don’t regret it one bit and never did I think I would end up flipping burgers for the rest of my life because of it.

The only other disagreement I had with Pope was when she talks about a school in New York City, “Central Park East” that implements this portfolio review:

“...after 10th grade each student has a graduate committee composed of a student's family member, an adult from the community chosen by the student, another student, and a community adviser, as well as a faculty member. Based on the student's specific interests and talents, an individualized study program is designed. In order to graduate, each student must prepare a portfolio to demonstrate knowledge and mastery of skills before the committee.”

During my senior year, my high school did the exact same thing. I’m pretty sure my brother even did it 4 years prior. Now, in theory, this is great. However, in practice, it sucks. No one liked doing it and every year students, and faculty, would dread it. I think the main reason being because it was kind of this random assignment that every student got out of nowhere, and it seemed like we had very little time to prepare for it. Also, since it was one of those “you have to do this in order to graduate” requirements, I remember the pressure being a little more intense than I had anticipated. In the end, getting “judged” ended up just being my graphic arts teacher (who was also my adviser for this whole thing and was obviously going to pass me since my project was about screen printing) and a sophomore girl. I did all this work and had all this stress over, what seemed like, a waste of everyone’s time. No one seemed enthusiastic about the whole portfolio process and it put too much pressure on kids who weren’t ready to handle something like that. In fact, there was already talk of the school getting rid of it over the next year or two. I'm not exactly sure if they ever followed through with that though.