"Honors" class - more fluff, low standards

The Charade of “Honors” English
by Mère Fâchée

In the early 2000’s, I made the mistake of allowing one of my daughters to enroll in high school in a large district in south King County, after homeschooling her since 5th grade. After a semester in regular English, her teacher recommended that she be transferred to the honors level class. We were both shocked at the appallingly low academic standards in this class.

The previous teacher had attempted to help my daughter improve her writing skills, holding her to much higher standards than the class as a whole. The ‘honors’ teacher seemed to think the kids were all still in elementary school. My daughter’s classmates told her that, at the beginning of the year, they were all required to make either a diorama or an ethnic heritage doll.

Many of the kids in this class turned in no assignments whatever. They relied completely on extra credit, which was given for frivolous things. For instance, my daughter brought in a cartoon that related to a topic under discussion, and that she thought the teacher and class would enjoy. It never occurred to her that she would earn extra credit for this, but she did.

In the spring, when the class was reading Watership Down, one of their assignments was to collect up all their previous assignments on this unit, put them in a notebook of some sort, and do four illustrations about the book – three for the inside of the notebook and one for the cover. My daughter is a fairly talented artist. However, she considered this assignment beneath her and not worthy of an honors class. She was also battling mono and struggling just to have enough energy to get through the day. She did not want to do the assignment and asked me about it.

I told her that if she decided not to do the assignment for philosophical reasons, I supported her. But, I gave her two caveats.
· A protest that occurs only privately is no protest at all. If she decided to take this position, rather than turn in nothing, she should turn in a letter explaining why she was not doing the assignment.
· If she chose that route, she should be willing to take a zero for the assignment, as protests have their costs.

My daughter looked at her online grades and decided that her 120+% average could take a zero hit. Then she wrote the letter. It was very harshly worded, taking to task not only the lax standards of the teacher and the lameness of the assignment, but also the poor quality of work and lousy work ethic of her fellow students. Rather than turning in just the letter, she turned it in with the notebook of work, minus the illustrations. She did receive a zero for the assignment, though I am sure that the notebook alone would have been given at least half credit.

There was never a private conversation concerning the letter, though my daughter had invited it. The next day, the teacher spoke to the entire class to explain that the reason that she asked them to draw illustrations was so that they could picture the characters in their minds. She did not seem to be concerned about the allegorical nature of the book, as that critical aspect never arose during class discussion. My daughter’s opinion was that most of the class was unaware of the deeper literary meanings in the book.

So much for ‘honors’ English.