Some people really, really care what is covered in the AP History examination. I am good friends with a high school history teacher and he tells me that it’s pretty near impossible to get to the present when teaching a high school history course. There just isn’t enough time. But, if you were to teach kids about history since 1980, wouldn’t it make sense to talk more about the rise of an aggressive conservatism than an aggressive progressivism?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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There has been an “aggressive progressivism” since 1980? Where have I been?
Well, you can argue that gay rights (marriage, in particular) is an aggressive change on our country’s values. So, an argument can be made. ObamaCare would be another significant change.
Good points.
I’m an AP US teacher and exam reader. We’ve been sweating this change for years now.
The fact is that “content” broadly labeled is not the sole intent of a history course. The skills that the new framework highlight are intellectual skills that all educated people should have some familiarity with.
The content is largely left to the teacher, as long as you genuflect sufficiently towards the motherfucking jargon that floods from Princeton like a busted sewer main.
None of the teachers who teach AP US at my school tend to radically alter what we teach or how we teach.
The only change is that multiple choice questions will be formatted differently, there will be short answers designed to supplement the multiple choice and the essays will be graded differently.
The grading of the essays makes some difference to the students (They should be REALLY clear what their thesis statement is), but it’s really going to make a difference to the readers.
The previous AP essay was graded holistically. And – despite my obvious bias as a reader – was graded well. Why they felt the need to change that to a series of “points” that students get for showing a certain skill (one point for synthesis!) is beyond me.
But students aren’t going to be learning anything differently than they were a year ago, aside from how to answer a College Board question in a College Board approved way.
I failed both the government and history AP’s with a “2”. I got a 97 equivalent content in government, and a 94 on history equivalent content in college. Average grades for the courses were around 75 so it’s not like it was spoon fed.
I hate AP exams.
Exams or papers? We have that discussion all the time. Why give a test? How do tests reflect real learning? Isn’t a paper a better tool for gauging real understanding?
But the AP exams give pretty decent essay questions, unless you take it on a year when they don’t. Then… Ha ha!
As for me, I got my “2” in Studio Art.
Papers, I excel in. DBQ’s I suck. I can rely on documents and stuff, but too much comes from my own knowledge.
I also got a 2 in calculus. Got 94’s in both semesters of calc.
I got a 4 in English, which had to be purely from the essays because I left half the multiple choice blank.
I think that when the AP American History exam causes a serious political fight over the US civil religion’s story of origins–when that happens, the AP History exam is not longer needed at all. It cannot substitute for a university American history course.
Of course, this shows how absolutely destructive the appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education has been to American public schools and educational standards.
Things have gotten so bad that I think it is now time to stop the standardized testing altogether, bankrupt the testing companies, and put the savings into actual local school operations.
Good history IS a fight over the meaning of America. And a good history course should embrace that argument. One good addition to the AP curriculum is historiography. Now a student will need to compare Charles and Mary Beard’s interpretations of the Constitutional Convention with those of Carl Degler.
So in some sense, the College Board is trying to foment the debate rather than the rote memorization of facts. I applaud that, but that’s what good APUSH teachers were already doing.
It’s been awhile since middle/high school for me, but I studied history at a university, and one thing I learned early on is that middle/high school history is just “social studies”.
History and what actually happened isn’t 100% known. Historians are always working to try to piece together what happened, what didn’t happen, and what might have happened.
I love history. It’s a shame that you have to go to college before you even get close to it here. All it is in k-12 is last names, dates, and battles/elections.