Local blogger Jan Resseger spent the better part of a school day observing the goings on at Cleveland Heights High School. A friend pointed out her blog and suggested I post it here. I’m happy to oblige:
Yesterday through a lucky coincidence I spent the morning visiting Cleveland Heights High School. Ours is an inner-ring Cleveland suburb whose high school serves close to 2,000 students. I jumped at the opportunity, because it is difficult these days to visit classes at a school. Security is an issue and, as we know, ideological attacks on public schools and their teachers tend to make everybody feel very protective.
Here was my chance, however, and at 8:00 AM, I presented myself and my photo ID at the security desk. The guard cheerfully cajoled the hundreds of students who entered when I did to show their IDs, please. This was a nostalgic morning for me. Heights was my children’s high school, and I know its halls with the polished red tile floors so well I could walk them in my sleep even though my youngest graduated twelve years ago. Yesterday I was privileged to observe three full classes: Advanced Placement (AP) world literature, non-AP American history, and a social studies elective in political philosophy.
Heights is a majority-African American high school; 63 percent of the students in our district’s public schools qualify for free lunch. The three classes I visited were filled with eleventh and twelfth graders. I will share the number of students in each class and the racial breakdown of the classes because it is important to observe how well a school is doing institutionally with racial integration.
In first period, AP world literature, (22 students in the class: 13 African American, 9 white), the teacher quietly made an exception for the student coming straight from his job by permitting him to eat his breakfast during class. She then presented a rather formal PowerPoint about dominant theories of literary criticism–Marxist, Feminist, Post-Colonial, Reader Response, Deconstructionist, and New Criticism. AP curriculum is prescribed by the national end-of-year test, and I presume schools of literary theory are a major AP topic this year. After introducing each category, the teacher invited her students, in what became a spirited discussion, to think about books and plays they had read or studied that would lend themselves to the particular critical approaches. E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, for example, might be good choices for the post-colonialist approach. The students numbered off and formed groups that will each adopt one of the critical approaches and work for the rest of the school year using that approach… [Read the rest of the post]
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