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Unchallenging Classes
"If you’re going to promise small classes and better teachers, then deliver smaller classes and better teachers."
By Nico Savidge
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When Youth Radio’s Nico Savidge signed up for Academic Choice classes, he was expecting a rigorous curriculum that would really challenge his intellectual ability. Instead, he got a mediocre curriculum coupled with boring teachers. Nico wonders if there is really any difference between Academic Choice courses and standard classes.
When I signed up for a program at my school that was supposed to give me smaller classes, better teachers, and more interesting work, I was expecting a MUCH better education than I actually got.
Academic Choice, or “A-C,” claims its curriculum challenges students to do their best by having regular discussions in a classroom with a smaller student-to-teacher ratio. That promise sounded nice, but after a few months, I realized my “A-C” classes weren’t any harder than my old standard English and History classes.
In English, our teacher bores the entire class. She gives us dull assignments that fail to stimulate our writing or discussions. My history class was even more of a letdown. There my teacher lectures almost the entire time, always managing to stray to topics nowhere near the original point. Plus, our class is no smaller than in the regular high school – there are routinely more than thirty students in the class and we have run out of chairs on more than one occasion.
Look, if you’re going to promise small classes and better teachers, then deliver smaller classes and better teachers. It seems to me Academic Choice classes are just regular classes with nice titles so that people will be more attracted to them.
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