An interesting conundrum I wanted to add- the AP English teacher at our school (and my head debate coach) yesterday told the kids in his class that he was going to be using a slide grading scale for essays, giving the top 5 essays an A, next 10 B, next 5 C, etc. because grades should reflect actual effort and some other reasons that don't make a ton of sense. So his students believed him and were freaking out for an hour until he finally told them it was an object lesson. He related the slide grading scale to world hunger and people that ignore it and don't pay attention to what's actually going on in the world. He said everyone was freaking out about their grade when they didn't give a second thought to world hunger.
My friend was so upset about this that she wrote him this really vindictive email. She said it was an immoral thing to do that betrayed their trust.
Here's my reasoning:
1. The object lesson was totally true. Kids do care a lot about grades and tend to be blind to real-world issues. I know I am.
2. It's not really fair to make them feel guilty for this, as it is inevitable for a person focusing on something as immediately affecting as education to think about this on a more regular basis than world hunger.
3. The object lesson may have actually gotten a few kids to think about hunger, but for the most part it just ticked people off and freaked them out and made them angry. So I am not sure if it was effective.
4. Spending an hour with an object lesson to try to make kids aware of hunger may be a waste of an AP English period. Because a)If Mr. Po really cares about world hunger, would he be teaching AP English or would he be out there fighting it, like he may be advocating? b) Kids do need to focus on education. Education is an integral part, in the long run, to ending world hunger. There need to be people with degrees in relating fields in order to enact any sort of change. Making kids feel guilty for thinking about education foremost is in an indirect way making kids feel guilty for supporting the fight to end hunger.
5. Kids do live in a really protected world here in the US. Most have never really been hungry. Even the poor ones don't know what it's like to live on the street, or in the car. Very few do. And none know the kind of impoverishment that exists in Africa.
6. Is telling kids hunger exists (which they already know) actually going to make them proactive? Even if Mr. Po did succeed in making a few kids think about their selfishness, this doesn't equal proaction. Might it have been more productive to spend the period actually battling hunger proactively?
7. Was Mr. Po's point even really about world hunger, or was it about kids' fixation with the immediate? Was Mr. Po's simulation actually an attempt to make a difference in world hunger, or just to manipulate a way of thought?
CONCLUSION: I don't believe what Mr. Pogreba did was immoral or unethical. I'm not sure if it achieved his objective, as I don't know what his objective was. I don't think it was an effective way to fight world hunger. But I don't agree with writing him angry emails, which just proves his point even further that kids are selfish.
Final note: I am as guilty as the rest. I will be first to admit that I know that poverty and hungry exists in the US, and runs rampant in the rest of the world. I read the book "Ishmael" and realized how limited my view of the world is. I have no idea what it feels like to not have food or a home or clothes. I am definitely very well-off, and definitely spoiled. I am aware of all of this. I feel selfish every Christmas. I give money to charities and toys to Toys for Tots. But I, like all of us, worry mostly about my grades and my boyfriends and other selfish things and do nothing to change things. This is partly because I am not sure how to go about changing something as vast as world-hunger or the world in any way, but partly because I am selfish and cannot see past my own limited perceptions. Which makes me feel guilty. And yet I do nothing about it. Does this make me a bad person, even though it is true for nearly all teenagers and many, many adults?
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1 comment:
I think I really like your teacher. School shouldn't be about memorization or even grades (but they are a necessary evil to force students to put forth effort). The true reason for School is deduction. Being able to come to understandings that you were not told. Dead poets society is a great example of this.
I'm sure that all of the students in your AP English class are very wary of their grades. The teacher used that as a tool to get a point across. I remember when I was in HS, I failed a test because I spelt the word "separation" incorrectly. The teacher waited a day, then told me that he was just trying to teach me. That was close to a decade ago and I will never forget it.
As the years pass, you forget the logarithms and the integrals. The formulas slip away as you loose practice. What sticks are lessons that shock..that go against the grain.
I really admire your teacher.
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