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May 19, 2009

Senioritis Is One Symptom Of Creative Deficit in Class

Jay Matthews:

Last year, I wrote a defense of high school senioritis as a useful break from academic drudgery. This made me, briefly, a hero to teenagers across the country. Then I returned to my usual theme that classes leading up to that last semester of the senior year should still be tougher, not easier, with less time for play, not more.

I was stuck on the fact that teenagers spend on average two hours a day watching television, compared with less than an hour a day doing homework. When Washington area parents or students complained about school stress, I acknowledged that many of them had a point in this affluent region full of kids who dream of the Ivy League. But elsewhere, the majority of high school students were not studying much at all. As a consequence, reading and math scores for 17-year-olds had seen little improvement in a generation.

Yet it is spring again, a good time to ponder the balance of hard work and fun throughout high school. In last year's piece, I wrote: "High-octane students play it safe. Textbook pages are still memorized. Old exams are mastered. Anything less than a perfect score is cause for concern. Such students need to discover that that is not the way creative and productive work is done in college, or in life. The important part of the learning process is not pounding in the material but thinking it over, talking about it, coming up with new and intriguing ways of connecting it to the rest of the world."

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 19, 2009 3:44 AM
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