In junior year of high school, everyone started focusing on college. You could see it in the hallways: the people who’d visited Harvard and had the sweatshirt to prove it, the discussions about where to apply and what major to choose—and all the AP classes they were taking to get a leg up.
Ah, AP classes. Students saw them as a necessary evil to get college credit—and they were. I took 7 ½ classes (I dropped out of AP Statistics halfway through), paid $456 to take 5 tests, and hauled in a semester’s worth of credits. It was a great exercise in terms of cost-cutting and hey, it even threw in some time management skills.
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But in terms of learning—you know, what the purpose of school is supposed to be—I gained less than I expected. I’m not talking about the information—integrals, dates, chemical formulas—but how I obtained it. The course content might have been on the college level, but the way we were being made to read and write and speak wasn’t. Only when I came to college did I realize how unprepared my high school had made me.
Take reading, for example. In high school, we were given long AP US History texts every week and told to read every word and extrapolate some sort of meaning. That was fine when it was only three or four pages—but 30 or 40? Forget it. People took one look and gave up because they just didn’t know how to read effectively. In college, when such lengthy readings are the norm, I’ve only now learned to skim the text for the thesis and introduction and conclusion sentences. Why wasn’t this taught in high school?
In English classes, it became a common joke that you could bullshit your way through a paper if you used enough big words. True or not, this idea has seemed to take root, such that people would fumble their way around a paper and never actually state their argument. Only in my senior year of high school do I remember real emphasis being placed on argumentation and rhetorical strategies. In college, however, it becomes painfully obvious when you have no idea what you’re writing about. “Does our paper need to have an argument, or is it, like, just a research paper?” one person in my history class asked the other day. My professor stared at him in disbelief. Is this what our high schools are teaching us?
The biggest difference I’ve seen, however, has been in how presentations are assigned and evaluated. In high school, we’d have weeks beforehand to prepare, with frequent reminders on good presentation strategies, and have an inflexible schedule. Nowadays, most of my presentations are impromptu, with sometimes only minutes of preparation. Flexibility is emphasized above memorization: proper delivery, timing, and expertise are non-optional. In high school, we were conditioned to expect that our itineraries would be planned for us; in college, we are thrown into situations and expected to find our own way out. It doesn’t take much imagination to wonder which is a more viable approach to real-world situations.
Much of what I’ve learned in college concerns the learning itself. While high school taught us time-wasting, bullshitting, and rigidity, college professors want us to be prepared for any situation. No one expects us to read and absorb every word of that forty-page essay, or regularly use five-syllable words in our papers. In fact, my professors actively discourage this. What I love about college—and what I wish would be taught in high school—is that education should always be efficient. (It had better be, considering how much tuition we all pay into it.) When done right, all of us learn more.
