Something I didn't see here is allowing students to earn credit for classes by demonstrating mastery. This is often called competency-based learning, but that term encompasses a wide variety of approaches. The larger point of this approach is that students earn credit when they've demonstrated that they have learned a certain body of knowledge, and developed skills to a certain level of proficiency.
This can be as simple as testing out of some classes, and can involve more holistic portfolio-based assessment practices.
The school I most recently taught at implemented an approach along these lines. It was really interesting that it didn't actually change much for a lot of students, but the option to go more at your own pace relaxed almost everyone in a really healthy way. Students were less anxious, but got way more done and enjoyed their learning much more than they had been previously.
We had a 7-period system at my high school, but rather than shortening classes, or extending the length of the day, we continued to have 6-periods a day and then had a floating period that occurred at a different time each day. It was announced over the intercom so there wasn't much confusion about what class you were going to. For example:
I loved it. Keeping classes the full duration was more efficient (especially for classes with fixed setup/cleanup time, like band or science labs). Since the floating period was always an elective, it felt you were getting a "break" when it landed on a class you didn't like.
But most importantly it gave you an extra elective. Over the years, as requirements have continued to increase the number of electives that students can take have declined significantly. I think this is a huge loss. We need to be doing more to help students figure out what they want to do when they graduate, and providing exposure to things beyond core curriculum is an essential part of that.
When I was in high school we experimented with block scheduling, which was a fad at the time. We only had three classes a day, for two hours each, and then we changed even or odd each day.
The science classes loved it, because we could do longer more involved experiments that would take more than the usual 50 minutes, and the students liked it because it meant for example only doing math homework every other night.
It was extra awesome for me in senior year. I had a normal second period class, but my 4th period was teaching at the local elementary school and my 6th period was Academic decathlon, which became "at home study hall" in the Spring after we were eliminated from the competition. So in spring of my senior year, I'd go to school for two hours, hang out at the elementary school for two hours teaching kids, which was super fun and didn't have any homework or stress, and then go home at lunch time and be done. On "even" weeks, it meant that I did that three times in a week, and was off by noon on Fridays. It was a pretty sweet deal.
I also like the block schedule because I liked only dealing with half as many classes for twice as long. I felt the same in college -- I loved doing summer school because we'd go twice as long each day for only 8 weeks instead of 16.
Interesting. But the recommendation to limit the number of AP classes a student may take is unrealistic: with enough AP credits a student can get through college in 3.5 or even 3 years. This saves lots of tuition, and potentially relieves students' debt burdens.
If tuition were free/cheap this situation would be different.
Options like CLEP tests and even getting a GED after sophomore or junior year and going to community college early ought to be pushed harder. You can CLEP out of a solid year of college gen-eds over a couple Summers, with a little study.
May not apply to prestigious institutions but that's not where 99% of college students go, anyway.
Yes, but at what cost? Students these days have an enormous amount of stress. There may be reasons to limit the number of AP courses they are "allowed" to take so that they can maintain a healthy balance in life.
It's an awkward discussion because really, it's on a per-student basis, based on
skill (if most AP courses are easy...),
background (if I already get tutored in half my AP courses, before even starting them..),
home-life (if I'm already anti-social/introverted, being stressed by AP courses is preferable than being stressed by forced social activities),
hobbies/knowledge (if I have programming as a hobby, then I probably wouldn't count think of AP programming course as particularly stressful, or even difficult; that AP statistics course on the other hand...),
quality of the AP course itself (AP stats might be harder for everyone than AP english, meaning AP english is overvalued (or AP stats undervalued) against the limit),
etc, so it's to claim there's really an appropriate "limit". And even if you find that there is an easy limit, and simply override the special cases, you have the issue/philosophy that the limit might have been increased had you applied that pressure.
Really, its the same as college; you're free to take as many "difficult" (or perhaps, interesting) courses as you'd like, and you'll be better off in the long run for having done more (lower students/teacher ratio, better teachers, faster/higher quality learning, more interesting/specific subjects, etc)
The main difference is that its the parent who has the responsibility pre-college, whereas its the student post-college. To determine what's appropriate, and to judge what can be handled.
Perhaps better than an arbitrary limit is greater fluidity in transitioning - eg make it easy to drop from AP to normal courses within a semester, when it's determined the workload is too much. Or better metrics for evaluating workload as the problem, versus other issues. Or maybe even target the parents for improvement (if they're failing to detect and react to issue).
That is, the ideal solution would really be that the system can dynamically re-arrange itself as necessary, based on the input of the student/teacher/parent, instead of hardcoding arbitrary limitations.
And its not an area that really deserves a simple, good-enough solution, because as the GP said, the decision can be monetarily significant. And as I've claimed, the decision can also have significant impact on the student's future education. It's perhaps too important to impose a limit for "child's sanity's sake", and be done with matter.
Something I didn't see here is allowing students to earn credit for classes by demonstrating mastery. This is often called competency-based learning, but that term encompasses a wide variety of approaches. The larger point of this approach is that students earn credit when they've demonstrated that they have learned a certain body of knowledge, and developed skills to a certain level of proficiency.
This can be as simple as testing out of some classes, and can involve more holistic portfolio-based assessment practices.
The school I most recently taught at implemented an approach along these lines. It was really interesting that it didn't actually change much for a lot of students, but the option to go more at your own pace relaxed almost everyone in a really healthy way. Students were less anxious, but got way more done and enjoyed their learning much more than they had been previously.
We had a 7-period system at my high school, but rather than shortening classes, or extending the length of the day, we continued to have 6-periods a day and then had a floating period that occurred at a different time each day. It was announced over the intercom so there wasn't much confusion about what class you were going to. For example:
I loved it. Keeping classes the full duration was more efficient (especially for classes with fixed setup/cleanup time, like band or science labs). Since the floating period was always an elective, it felt you were getting a "break" when it landed on a class you didn't like.But most importantly it gave you an extra elective. Over the years, as requirements have continued to increase the number of electives that students can take have declined significantly. I think this is a huge loss. We need to be doing more to help students figure out what they want to do when they graduate, and providing exposure to things beyond core curriculum is an essential part of that.
When I was in high school we experimented with block scheduling, which was a fad at the time. We only had three classes a day, for two hours each, and then we changed even or odd each day.
The science classes loved it, because we could do longer more involved experiments that would take more than the usual 50 minutes, and the students liked it because it meant for example only doing math homework every other night.
It was extra awesome for me in senior year. I had a normal second period class, but my 4th period was teaching at the local elementary school and my 6th period was Academic decathlon, which became "at home study hall" in the Spring after we were eliminated from the competition. So in spring of my senior year, I'd go to school for two hours, hang out at the elementary school for two hours teaching kids, which was super fun and didn't have any homework or stress, and then go home at lunch time and be done. On "even" weeks, it meant that I did that three times in a week, and was off by noon on Fridays. It was a pretty sweet deal.
I also like the block schedule because I liked only dealing with half as many classes for twice as long. I felt the same in college -- I loved doing summer school because we'd go twice as long each day for only 8 weeks instead of 16.
Interesting. But the recommendation to limit the number of AP classes a student may take is unrealistic: with enough AP credits a student can get through college in 3.5 or even 3 years. This saves lots of tuition, and potentially relieves students' debt burdens.
If tuition were free/cheap this situation would be different.
Options like CLEP tests and even getting a GED after sophomore or junior year and going to community college early ought to be pushed harder. You can CLEP out of a solid year of college gen-eds over a couple Summers, with a little study.
May not apply to prestigious institutions but that's not where 99% of college students go, anyway.
Yes, but at what cost? Students these days have an enormous amount of stress. There may be reasons to limit the number of AP courses they are "allowed" to take so that they can maintain a healthy balance in life.
It's an awkward discussion because really, it's on a per-student basis, based on
skill (if most AP courses are easy...),
background (if I already get tutored in half my AP courses, before even starting them..),
home-life (if I'm already anti-social/introverted, being stressed by AP courses is preferable than being stressed by forced social activities),
hobbies/knowledge (if I have programming as a hobby, then I probably wouldn't count think of AP programming course as particularly stressful, or even difficult; that AP statistics course on the other hand...),
quality of the AP course itself (AP stats might be harder for everyone than AP english, meaning AP english is overvalued (or AP stats undervalued) against the limit),
etc, so it's to claim there's really an appropriate "limit". And even if you find that there is an easy limit, and simply override the special cases, you have the issue/philosophy that the limit might have been increased had you applied that pressure.
Really, its the same as college; you're free to take as many "difficult" (or perhaps, interesting) courses as you'd like, and you'll be better off in the long run for having done more (lower students/teacher ratio, better teachers, faster/higher quality learning, more interesting/specific subjects, etc)
The main difference is that its the parent who has the responsibility pre-college, whereas its the student post-college. To determine what's appropriate, and to judge what can be handled.
Perhaps better than an arbitrary limit is greater fluidity in transitioning - eg make it easy to drop from AP to normal courses within a semester, when it's determined the workload is too much. Or better metrics for evaluating workload as the problem, versus other issues. Or maybe even target the parents for improvement (if they're failing to detect and react to issue).
That is, the ideal solution would really be that the system can dynamically re-arrange itself as necessary, based on the input of the student/teacher/parent, instead of hardcoding arbitrary limitations.
And its not an area that really deserves a simple, good-enough solution, because as the GP said, the decision can be monetarily significant. And as I've claimed, the decision can also have significant impact on the student's future education. It's perhaps too important to impose a limit for "child's sanity's sake", and be done with matter.
You know what’s not “healthy” and “balanced?” One extra year of college debt.