Today's Moment Worthy of Banging One's Head Against the Wall

So today I get an e-mail from one of my higher-ups containing details for the final exam of a course I don't teach. As part of the students' final exam they are to write an essay (about five paragraphs in length) responding to a prompt they have seen before. I'm stunned, however, as to the extent to which we have watered this task's challenge down. To wit:

• The students know of the prompt at the beginning of the course.
• The students are typically allowed a whole 90-minute block to write the essay.
• The students may use previously-prepared notes to write the essay.
• The students' notes may be in the form of a graphic organizer teachers prepare delineating how topic deserves its own paragraph and should include a definition and example

Fourteen years of teaching at the secondary level tell me that sophomores are capable of succeeding at a more rigorous academic challenge than this. Properly guided by teachers, students could master this task with more challenging conditions.

I once heard an individual claim that a great crime against disadvantaged kids, against minority kids in struggling schools was to hold them to a low standard, to expect them to fail. I think the phrase was "the soft bigotry of low expectations." I can't say that AJHS is engaging in bigotry, given the predominantly white nature of our students and predominantly white nature of our teachers and staff and administration. Perhaps its a soft condescension. Or a soft enabling.

Either way it's damning the students residing outside the AP-level courses at AJHS to a high school experience that may not be sufficiently rich for them to achieve greater things later.