Rising standards, declining population

In my state, as well as many others, seniors are being required to present a portfolio at the end of their high school career as well as a senior project. The portfolios include student’s best works over the last four years, evaluations of work, post-high school financial plans, résumé’s and career plans. The senior projects are the result of a semester-long course which requires them to identify research, prepare, and present a specific topic-oriented paper. Not only does the student have to research the topic, but they have to volunteer service time with a mentor in the area of their topic. The culmination of this project is a paper with proper citations and a presentation before staff and community members. The judges are there to critique the presentation and determine if each student’s content, organization, presentation, and impromptu skills are below, at, or above average. This is something that is required in order for each student to graduate. If the presentation is below average, the student is to redo the project in order to receive his or her diploma. The standards are being raised.

School accountability is being monitored. This seems to be a direct outcome of NCLB. Is this good for students? I believe it is. Today, as I was trying to motivate a group of 9th and 10th low-level, at risk students to work on their little research paper (complete with note cards, citations and sources). I was asked if this was the type of thing that they will have to do in order to graduate. One of my most challenging students announced to the class that this is “a really easy” version of the paper that they will be writing in just a couple of years. The senior project has been a motivating force for the students to learn how to write. This is also requiring students to stand up and be not only recognized for hard work, but held accountable for not putting forth the effort. I wish there were more opportunities for accountability and more severe consequences for a lack therein.

The disservice that we do our kids is not making them more self-reliant. I am surprised by the number of students who do not have the ability to work independently. I find that independent workers are the exception rather than the rule. The number of requests that I get from students for me to work through their thought process for them is startling. Not only am I being asked to do the work for the students, am I restating directions for students who do not bother to read the instructions even once. Rather than read, they moan “I don’t understand!” We are working so hard on writing. We are working so hard on reading, but I think that we are facing a bigger demon.

I am being told, and witnessing, a dependence on technology that is unprecedented. Given a video screen, students are capable of sitting in front of a monitor, nursing entertainment hour after hour. Students abhor pens, books, dictionaries and paper, but will create a power-point with great care and investment of time. While that may seem good, and as I sit here in front of my own monitor sympathetically absorbing my own mind into the great Web, I am being told from these very graduating seniors that some of them are neglecting their social lives in order to play video games. A student today told me that she is averaging eight or more hours a day playing various video games. This is a demon that today’s adults have not yet considered a rising force in the youth of our culture. This is generating an apathy toward the written word that is technologically induced. It is a laziness that is rapidly driving us toward an oral-based society. A society that very easily may melt into a history of conjecture and fiction, because the written word is being blasted, like this very blog, into nothingness.