Rethinking Advanced Placement - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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While Ms. Vangos believes the program could inspire students who “like to think outside the box,” she worries that the new math requirements will discourage others.
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Peter Kronfeld on 09 Jan 11Yikes! Why? This is the perfect opportunity to show students how math connects to the real world.
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She is also frustrated by the predictable nature of many of the “dirty dozen,” the teachers’ nickname for the basic lab exercises now recommended by the College Board. In one that her class did last fall, the students looked at pre-stained slides of onion root tips to identify the stages of cell division and calculate the duration of the phases. She and her students, who historically score 4’s and 5’s on the exam, were one of several schools asked by the College Board to road test one of the proposed new labs to see if it brought back the “Oh, wow!” factor. The basic question: What factors affect the rate of photosynthesis in living plants? The new twist: Instead of being guided through the process, groups of two or three students had to dream up their own hypotheses and figure out how to test them. Caroline Brown, a senior who stages the school’s plays, connected the lab to her passion for theater. She borrowed green, sky blue and “Broadway pink” filters from the playhouse to test how different shades of light affected photosynthesis in sunken spinach leaves.
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But many of the courses, particularly in the sciences and history, have also been criticized for overwhelming students with facts to memorize and then rushing through important topics. Students and educators alike say that biology, with 172,000 test-takers this year, is one of the worst offenders. A.P. teachers have long complained that lingering for an extra 10 or 15 minutes on a topic can be a zero-sum game, squeezing out something else that needs to be covered for the exam. PowerPoint lectures are the rule. The homework wears down many students. And studies show that most schools do the same canned laboratory exercises, providing little sense of the thrill of scientific discovery.
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