MSNBC: Students Say High School is Just too Easy

[SkinsNut73]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9007694/

In surveys, pupils seek bigger challenges, better preparation for college

As they head back to classes in the next few weeks, American high school students reject the idea that they are being overburdened by homework and expectations, complaining that school isn’t challenging enough.

The findings come in two recent surveys by the National Governors Association and the Horatio Alger Association, a nonprofit education group. Combined, the surveys polled more than 11,000 high school students.

By overwhelming majorities, students said they would work harder at their studies if more was expected from them — 65 percent in the governors’ poll and 88 percent in the Alger poll.

The gap between the two results may reflect differences in how the surveys were conducted and worded. The governors association set up a Web site, where more than 10,000 students ages 16 to 18 answered questions during the past three months. The Alger poll was a more traditional telephone survey of 1,005 students ages 13 to 19 by Peter D. Hart Research Associates, which also conducts polling for NBC News.

At odds with conventional wisdom

The findings come as some education activists have started warning that strict federally imposed standards, such as President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” initiative, have piled American teenagers with too much homework and pressure to succeed on standardized tests. In a report last year, the Carrboro-Chapel Hill School District in North Carolina identified “pressure to perform” as a significant deterrent to school achievement. “High school is not a mini-university,” the report said.

But the new surveys suggest that students themselves disagree.

Only 31 percent said in the Alger poll that expectations at their schools were high or that they were being significantly challenged. The governors’ poll posed the question a different way; more then 3 in 5 students — 62 percent — said their schools had done a bad or only fair job of “holding my attention.”

Specifically, 92 percent in the Alger report said they wanted more real-world experience in the curriculum, while most endorsed standardized testing. And they said they wished they had better and earlier guidance about their futures from teachers and counselors.

“More than ever before, students set a high bar for themselves and they expect their high schools to meet the same criteria,” the Alger Association said. “Just as they expect more from themselves, students want their high schools to expect more from them as well.”

Even more striking, when the governors asked high schoolers how valuable their senior year was, half said it was a “waste of time,” or could be “much more meaningful,” and more than a third said their classes were not adequately preparing them for college.

At its annual meeting last month, the National Governors Association announced an agreement to standardize data collection on dropout rates across the states and to adopt uniform criteria for graduating.

“Students care a great deal about making high school better,” Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, who was head of the governors association when the survey closed last month, said in a statement. “We know we can’t make high school more meaningful without input from the experts.”

Other findings

The National Governors Association survey questioned 10,378 students who visited the Rate Your Future Web site from May through mid-July. The Horatio Alger Association questioned 1,005 students by telephone in May as part of its annual State of Our Nation’s Youth report, which was released last week; it reported a margin of sampling error of 3 percentage points.

As part of its larger report, the Alger Association also found that:

33 percent of students don’t think schools are doing enough to prevent bullying, and 24 percent think not enough is being done to keep weapons off campus.

42 percent think at least half of their classmates cheat on tests.

95 percent have some form of Internet access, with 7 percent getting their access only at school. By contrast, 54 percent say they read a newspaper at least a few times a week.

63 percent have cell phones; 62 percent of those students say they break school rules against using them fairly or very often.

42 percent think abuse of steroids is a fairly big or very big problem among high school athletes.

© 2005 MSNBC Interactive

[Cskin]

It will fall on deaf ears. DOE and local school administration figures have already caved to political correctness and sensitivity issues. They'll decide that changing the curriculum could adversely effect SOME students and create an atmousphere that COULD make some students uncomfortable. :doh:

See.. even the kids are starting to notice the dumbing down of America.

Oh.... and don't think that attitude hasn't permeated into the private school sector as well. My cousin is a school teacher in a private school and has a class of 16 students. He was told by the administration to slow his class down because four students were having a difficult time keeping up. So.... the other twelve suffer so as to not offend or make uncomfortable the other four. :doh:

[Chopper Dave]

High school was obscenely easy. Through the four years, I read one book, and that was only after I had taken the test. I rarely did more than an hour of homework on an average night, and that was if I had a test the next day. I had over 50 abscences senior year. When I did go, I didn't pay attention.

Now from the sound of it, I pretty much blew off high school. You know what I graduated with? A 4.5 GPA, along with college credit in European and American History, American Government, and enough English credit to never have to step foot in an English class here at UF. High school was an utter, utter joke. As long as you have half a brain you can easily graduate. You don't even have to go most of the time.

[Prosperity]

Everyone I know that went to my HS and are now in colleges say it is much easier now then back in the HS school days. I am not talking about community colleges either I am talking about UVa, William and Mary, VT etc... They say it is mostly because there is just so much more time in college. In HS students are there for 7 hours a day for 5 days a week, but in college I will spend 2.5 to 4 hours a day tops, and only 50 minutes on Fridays. I think it might be more of an anomaly though, the kids here are psychotic about grades. I wasn't even in the top quarter of students and I had a 3.7 GPA. Graduation isn't a problem, but college admissions are so cut throat that people actually have to work.

[ChocolateCitySkin]

My high school was not easy by any stretch of the imagination. I went to Maret in DC-- In fact, I'd wager my junior/senior year was tougher than my freshmen year of college.

... Of course, nothing compares to the physics class that I took over at montgomery college. That made my masters program look easy as pie. The mean old adjunct professor didn't really take to grading reasonably or curving the class... 75% of the grades he gave out a D's and F's. It kinda hurts when you spend 80 hrs in one week studying for a test and still get an F on it.

[TC4]

SON OF A B--CH!!!!

Why now, why not when I was in high school!!!!

:thud:

[Mr. S]

they didnt put me in any gt/honors classes my freshman year of high school. How did I respond, sitting there, doing nothing, and still getting straight A's, leading my counselor to say I shoulda been in gt all along. I did my work and everything, ever following the rules of procrastination. I still ended up with like a 3.65 gpa at the end of senior year. Only classes I really had troubles in were my math class (trig gt, AP Calc BC), so I stayed after a lot for those, but otherwise, I just coasted through. No offense for those who found the SOL's hard, I heard they've increased how hard they are, but they were easy for me. My AP US History teacher was like "we got 2 hours for this test, but you all better be done in 45 minutes" we were.

College I think is harder only because it is more content in less amount of time. You also have too much freedom to procrastinate things. Im not saying that ive had it too much harder in college, just that there are some crunch weeks. Also, for engineering, CS, and science related students, seems like they have it much harder.

[twa]

I had one kid just graduate and another still in HS,both in honors courses .

They both say it is way too easy,especially the testing.

[Baculus]

I am rather disappointed in some of the regional schools. My nephews, who attend school in Frederick Co., MD, seem to barely receive any homework. And their general lack of scholastic skills is rather shocking - I am not sure if that happened from their earlier years in school or what. But they seem to be lacking some basic skills, such as writing and mathematics, as well as a basic study ethic. Maybe they are just teenagers and that is normal, and I am simply becoming old. My oldest nephew has terrible grammar skills, and yet his teachers appear to rarely correct his writing assignments. I have spent time and effort in trying to remedy his writing skills; I even bought a grammar program for him to use, but it is sometimes not an easy task to get him to study it. One of his teachers, in a telephone conference, admitted to me that they have moved away from teaching some basic skills. (She didn't agree with this shift in teaching curriculum.)

I am only one or two generations before his time, and even I can see a marked difference in the school systems since I graduated from high school.

[Prosperity]

I want so add is that schools need to focus more on two key areas. One is basic reasoning skills. Schools don't care about how students come to answers they just give them a bunch of answers to a bunch of questions and just get them to memorize and regurgitate. There needs to more focus put on teahing kids how to think not what to think. Would it also kill them to have a few philosophy classes? The second thing almost goes hand in hand with the first. There needs to be much more science taught, liberal arts are fine and dandy, but what good is poetry going to do when you don't even know how the world works.

[Ignatius J.]

I think high school is as hard as you make it. If you find it to be too easy, then take all the Ap courses your high school offers. Then outside of school, spend time learning stuff for which there is no course offered. Teach yourself real math.

What you have here are lazy people who don't challenge themselves then turning around and saying, hey you were supposed to challenge me! That's not how it works. You challenge yourself.

[Baculus]

What you have here are lazy people who don't challenge themselves then turning around and saying, hey you were supposed to challenge me! That's not how it works. You challenge yourself

That is probably also true. If school is so easy, then these kids should be getting excellent grades. Of course, on the other hand, for whatever psychological reason, a lack of challenge can sometimes lead to boredom, and then a lack of effort. I know my nephew can't blame his grades on merely a lack of a challenge: he sometimes does not know or understand the material, and doesn't make the effort to understand it. He really needs to improve his study ethics, and maybe that is a big part of a problem for high school students. They do not learn to develop one early enough in school.

[tlk2rn]

Yes kids do have it easy. It seemed very challenging when I was in high school from 90-93. Teachers were alot more strict because they were allowed

to be. Many students from my mentors program tell me that high school is almost a cake walk and they are not sure if they are prepared for college life. Less time may be spent in college but the work is rigorus and the time spent studying is long. Also we are talking about 250-400 students in one class. Yes high school should do a better job of keeping our kids smart and preparing them for the future.

[mhd24]

High School was pretty easy for me. I went to Ealeanor Roosevelt in Maryland. (I was in the Science and Tech Program). Basically, one could easily go in and get straight A's if they worked enough at it. I did however take zero period which meant an extra class every day in the morning. English was a cake in high school because one could follow a certain standard format after reading a novel and writing an essay about it. The only hard classes I took were the AP sciences, of which Physics was the only one to require serious effort. I studied more for the SAT than I did for high school during my four years.

[Ancalagon the Black]

I think high school is as hard as you make it. If you find it to be too easy, then take all the Ap courses your high school offers. Then outside of school, spend time learning stuff for which there is no course offered. Teach yourself real math.

What you have here are lazy people who don't challenge themselves then turning around and saying, hey you were supposed to challenge me! That's not how it works. You challenge yourself.

I would disagree. Teenagers shouldn't automatically be expected to demonstrate the initiative of an adult. As with parents, teachers should push schoolchildren to excel. Otherwise, they will excel in nonacademic aspects (sometimes constructive hobbies, more often destructive pastimes).

I'm a bit disappointed with the article, which doesn't see how "too much homework" and "not enough challenge" can go together. It's entirely possible that students receive too much busy-work while never being forced to think at all.

[twa]

I agree...Developing reasoning skills and study habits should never be replaced with busy-work. When you challenge and stimulate some of these kids the results are amazing.

[Ignatius J.]

So you think most kids know the difference between busy work and real work? I don't.

And for whoever mentioned the dumbing down stuff, you might want to check out how much more students are learning today than twenty years ago. Right now, if you don't take calculus in high school you will not be considered a "good" student. That wasn't true twenty years ago.

[Ancalagon the Black]

I think that kids do know the difference. I certainly did. Doing fifty thousand different integrals in a night's assignment was qualitatively different from spending a whole weekend trying to prove the solution to the Fibonacci series. Writing a "composition" on light and dark imagery in Macbeth was qualitatively different from conducting a psychological analysis of its characters. Memorizing the names of the train lines in the American West was qualitatively different from examining broad historical themes and trends. I believe that kids intuitively understand the difference between things that make them think and things that make them just do stuff. The latter feels like punishment.

[DjTj]

I think that kids do know the difference. I certainly did. Doing fifty thousand different integrals in a night's assignment was qualitatively different from spending a whole weekend trying to prove the solution to the Fibonacci series. Writing a "composition" on light and dark imagery in Macbeth was qualitatively different from conducting a psychological analysis of its characters. Memorizing the names of the train lines in the American West was qualitatively different from examining broad historical themes and trends. I believe that kids intuitively understand the difference between things that make them think and things that make them just do stuff. The latter feels like punishment.

I don't think the line between busy work and real work is that clear. Almost everything in elementary school is "busy work," but learning your multiplication tables and the names of the states is essential. The first two problem sets in every college math class feel like busy work, but they are usually building a foundation. Oftentimes the student isn't in the best position to evaluate what is and is not important. Every academic subject requires learning a required set of facts and basic concepts.

The reality is you simply aren't going to see a high school class in number theory - the number of people that will need to know it is extremely low. If you want to learn number theory, join the math team, take the AHSME, join an ARML team ... If you want to learn more science, join a science bowl team or enter a science fair. If you want liberal arts kind of challenges, there is debate team, forensics, Model UN, It's Academic ... and schools today are very open to students starting their own clubs.

Serious academic challenges are often rather specialized and many simply aren't appropriate for the classroom. Maybe teachers should do a better job of selling some of the less *cool* extracurriculars, but I don't think there's any shortage of challenges that are ready and available.

That said, I found that my AP classes in high school were pretty challenging. Anyone who thinks high school today is dumbed down should try to take a sample AP English, Calculus, Statistics, Computer Science, Economics, Physics, or Psychology exam ... The challenges are there if students are willing to take them.

[Ancalagon the Black]

I don't think the line between busy work and real work is that clear. Almost everything in elementary school is "busy work," but learning your multiplication tables and the names of the states is essential. The first two problem sets in every college math class feel like busy work, but they are usually building a foundation. Oftentimes the student isn't in the best position to evaluate what is and is not important. Every academic subject requires learning a required set of facts and basic concepts.

Implicit in the article, I think, is the fact that we're talking about high-school students, not elementary-school students. I agree that there are some basic things that need to be taught and learned by rote; however, we should start giving "16- to 18-year-olds" a bit more credit. By then a lot of the foundation is built, and challenging thinking can be presented. I'm not saying that they should teach real analysis to sophomores in high school, but I am saying that many high schoolers are perfectly capable of second-year calculus. For example.

The reality is you simply aren't going to see a high school class in number theory - the number of people that will need to know it is extremely low. If you want to learn number theory, join the math team, take the AHSME, join an ARML team ... If you want to learn more science, join a science bowl team or enter a science fair. If you want liberal arts kind of challenges, there is debate team, forensics, Model UN, It's Academic ... and schools today are very open to students starting their own clubs.

This is a fantastic, free-market-style theory, but in reality most teens do the minimum expected of them and devote more of their free time to other pursuits, such as the opposite sex. Raising the minimum wouldn't be an altogether bad thing, in my opinion.

Serious academic challenges are often rather specialized and many simply aren't appropriate for the classroom. Maybe teachers should do a better job of selling some of the less *cool* extracurriculars, but I don't think there's any shortage of challenges that are ready and available.

Again, I'm not talking about the later Wittgenstein or the Incompleteness Theorem. I'm talking about more challenging basic concepts.

That said, I found that my AP classes in high school were pretty challenging. Anyone who thinks high school today is dumbed down should try to take a sample AP English, Calculus, Statistics, Computer Science, Economics, Physics, or Psychology exam ... The challenges are there if students are willing to take them.

AP classes should be the standard. Going beyond AP should be the goal.

[DjTj]

Implicit in the article, I think, is the fact that we're talking about high-school students, not elementary-school students. I agree that there are some basic things that need to be taught and learned by rote; however, we should start giving "16- to 18-year-olds" a bit more credit. By then a lot of the foundation is built, and challenging thinking can be presented. I'm not saying that they should teach real analysis to sophomores in high school, but I am saying that many high schoolers are perfectly capable of second-year calculus. For example.

This is a fantastic, free-market-style theory, but in reality most teens do the minimum expected of them and devote more of their free time to other pursuits, such as the opposite sex. Raising the minimum wouldn't be an altogether bad thing, in my opinion.

Again, I'm not talking about the later Wittgenstein or the Incompleteness Theorem. I'm talking about more challenging basic concepts.

AP classes should be the standard. Going beyond AP should be the goal.

I think you're problem is with college more than high school. AP is going to be the top at most high schools as long as AP is the required curriculum at most colleges. I am generally aghast at how little math people know who have graduated from top-notch universities. Most Ivy Leaguers couldn't tell you a thing about second-year Calculus, so I wouldn't expect that to become part of the standard high school curriculum.

Now, I actually am someone that took second-year Calculus while in high school (as a junior; my high school also offered Complex Analysis, Linear Algebra, and AP Statistics, which I took my senior year). I know it can be done, and there are more and more high schools doing it - probably 5 or 6 in the Washington, DC suburbs right now. However, it was not an easy road for many of these schools, as years would go by when 2 or 3 students wanted the course but it wasn't enough to pay a teacher, when students had to be bused from one high school to another ... I don't foresee that spreading like wildfire across the country.

When we're talking about AP courses and second-year Calculus, we're not talking about raising the minimum for graduation - unless you want 80% of high school students to drop out. Students will be taking these classes partly by choice, at least choosing high achievement - the *standard* is what they feel they need to do to get into a good college.

Right now, that standard is fast becoming AP. The number of AP classes and tests being taken is growing every year. To ask students to reach past that is to ask them to make a voluntary choice not so different from finding an academic extracurricular. How many high school kids are going to take an extra math class that isn't even required to graduate from Harvard?

...once colleges start moving their standards up, that's when we'll start seeing movement from below.

[Ancalagon the Black]

You make some excellent points. My roommate in college had never taken calculus, and had no desire to take any more math. I was shocked at this fact and resolved to teach him at least derivatives before graduation (I only kinda succeeded). And he graduated summa.

But there’s always going to be the “well-rounded” vs “vocational” debate when it comes to colleges. And I can accept that by the time they’re eighteen, people should have increased choice when it comes to what to eschew in their academic careers. For every person who says that colleges should require a more even distribution across various subjects, there’s someone who says that colleges should have no core or distribution requirements at all. That’s why I don’t think we can look to colleges to raise the bar for high schoolers.

I don’t know if we’ll get to an agreement on this. I think high school should be harder – not more work, just harder. And if a few more people drop out, then that’s OK.

[mad4comp]

Highscool is a piece of cake. 3.4 gpa and still had time to waste away at countstrike for 5 hrs a day. You know whats funny? People say, "omg your taking AP classes? You must be smart!" Uh...yea....okay...not really.

My exams were not at all difficult, everytime an exam date came up, I studied the day before and still managed to do better than 90% of the class. In all four years of highschool, I only got one "c" and that was in P.E......d@mn im still out of shape.

[Renegade7]

Truth? If you do all the work, the practice makes it easy. It's almost impossible to fail if you do all the work. Stay awake, do the work, boom, passing grades. All be the first to admit that some of us are more easily distracted then others.

[lckelsey4]

I for one, feel that MoCo public schools totally failed me. I am 6 years out, and felt like it was a big joke and way too easy. Everything was so dumbed down in my opinion so everybody could "achieve". Why is it considered achievement when everybody is dumbed down so the stupid kids can achieve at the same level. I'm sorry, but there have to be brick layers and ditch diggers; not everybody should go to college.

IMHO, you can blame most of it on the NEA, DEA, and sense of entitlement most teachers and administrators seem to have. There is no accountability in public schools and many teachers are forced to teach ridiculous Politically-Correct lessons plans so nobody is discriminated against. Read "The Language Police", if you require more details.

I refuse to send my kids to public schools and will probably find some way to homeschool them because I fear that by the time they are ready for school basic reading, writing and math skills will finally be completely taught by 7th grade so as not to "offend dumb kids" or "let anybody feel left out."