ALL CLASSES ARE NOT EQUAL

May 4, 2012
Filed under Opinions

All people were not created equal.

People certainly aren’t treated equally either, especially when they are in the classroom.

There is a shockingly large difference between AP and honors courses and traditional courses.

But just how wide is this       gap?

Does the work influence the motivation or does the motivation influence the work?

It’s both.

Teachers treat the kids in higher level classes with a much higher level of respect, and thus that respect between the student and the teacher becomes mutual.

Teachers traditional classes teach students kindly, but their methods seem to highlight aspects of babysitting and an exhausted tolerance of more than a handful of unmotivated students.

AP and Honors students, however, are generally more focused and more likely to listen than those in traditional courses.

But in defense, traditional students are constantly becoming subject to simpler, more tedious assignments that border insulting of many students’ intellectual capabilities.

The traditional students are probably less motivated because they aren’t academically stimulated by the course work, and thus they quickly grow indifferent to the subject matter.

Maybe students in traditional courses are more rowdy and restless because they’re eager to get these un-challenging and un-interesting assignments over with.

It can become belitteling, almost insulting, to one’s intellegence to be forced to do countless worksheets or tedious coloring assignments which can be comporable to middle school.

Lowering the bar too low is not going to help anybody in the long run.

Instead, it will only encourage restlessness, laziness, and even cheating.

No one wants to do busy work.

It’s a huge waste of time and it doesn’t really push the lesson farther.

It’s completely useless to us.

Busy work has the detrimental effect of making students indifferent to the subject matter,

Busy work is nothing more than a complete waste of time.

On the other hand, AP and Honors can become so busy that it totally overwhelmes students.

The tests and quizzes are significantly harder than those of the traditional courses.

While sometimes the homework load is minimal in AP or Honors, the hours spent studying can cause a normal person skyrocketing through the roof, high of insanity.

Honors courses can have less homework and classwork than traditional, but what homework honors students do have is a lot harder.

Students sign up for higher level classes to challenge themselves and to get into more selective colleges.

Students commonly sign up for traditional courses because they have too much going on after school, because they don’t want to spend more time on exhausting schoolwork, because don’t want to push themselves as much as honors students, and finally because in the end, they didn’t want to take higher level classes.

But in reality, all too often these students are signing up for a lot of busy work, coloring maps, and useless classroom activities.

There is great competition in the honors system.

This competition has driven some students through the proverbial roof.

In the end, if nothing changes, it’s really a question of which poison to pick.