It is a bit of a worship thing, where the school gets to have teachers and students commit to long periods of intense training (I wouldn’t call what traditional teachers do with their four percent kids actual teaching – I would call it AP training or AP indoctrination.)
Not to mention the work by the worker bees in the building to set up and run and keep track of all the secretarial aspects of the exam, again, at no cost to the College Board. And not to mention finding someone willing to administer for a long period of three hours – also not paid for by the College Board.
The College Board is worshipped in this way. This is a feudal system and we are the serfs. The nobleman get to keep the cash won at the sweat of our brow without even having to pay for the proctoring.
What happened with the proctoring in Leigh Anne’s situation was an egregious insult to education. It is similar to putting minimum wage workers into restaurants to work their butts off every day for practically nothing while the restaurant owners (think of Applebee’s or MacDonald’s) get most of the pie, or in the AP game, the whole pie.
And that’s a lot of cash. If it isn’t, the College Board simply drops the AP Exam in that area, like they did the AP French Literature Exam some years ago. The French Lit Exam used to be my raison d’etre for teaching.
The way I had it going on in my mind was that I would get the kids to scores of three or four by their junior year on the regular AP Exam, having come to me in French 1 in ninth grade, and they would then take and pass the AP Exam in French Literature their senior year.
I had one student years ago who went to Princeton who was able to get a four* on the AP Literature exam her senior year. The daughter of a heart surgeon in Columbia, SC, this true .oooo4 percenter just regurgitated every single thing I told her to write on the exam with that result. I thought I had done something great in that situation, but now I can see that I did very little. What was learned?
What did I really do that with those four percenters in those classes for all those years at such great stress to myself? Because my thinking at the time, which I was not aware of or I would never have done it, was that I would then gain the approval I needed from my principal and everyone else in the building. I guess I wanted their approval more than I wanted a sane life for myself and my family.
*Of course, as many of us who have taught AP lit have done, I predicted (successfully) the essay topic, so that helped. And this girl was able to apply every rule I taught her including rules involving all relative pronouns and we even stuck a pluperfect subjunctive or two in there as canned sentences.
It was truly a game where a needy approval seeking teacher trained a four percenter in a game that is still being played today! I would say that, in light of the fake feeling in that year of taking a kind of robotic thinking genius kid to a high score on an AP exam, reflecting Bob’s earlier comment here today about how machine like it all is, my mission has now become nothing less than do all I can to rid the planet of the AP exam system and traditional teaching. There is nothing healthy about any of it.
On a much more positive note, this kid, who went on to Princeton, did NOT become a heart surgeon like her dad (not that there’s anything wrong with heart surgeons!), she became an elementary school teacher, completely messing up everybody’s plans for her.
And to this day, more than thirty years later, I still have a picture frame with a message embroidered on it from her, given to me at her graduation, with that great quote from St. Exupéry about how the most important is invisible, one only sees well with the heart. It’s on a light blue field. One of my treasures from my career.
All those AP scores? Hmmm. Funny. I can’t remember much about any of that.