After looking very hard for a topic that I wanted to look into more for this class I thought that I found it, looking for stories about what going on with the under-privileged students of the world, but what I did not know was that this is a very hard topic to find information or stories about. So I think that I am going to start looking into a different topic. I found an article on the incredible students of our world. The students that are talked about in this article are students the have moved on from high school to college and thought that their high school courses were actually harder. This seems like it might be something that interests me a lot.
It is said in the article that “Our students find college not as challenging,” says Temba Maqubela, and that the following student was not challenged at all “Jeff Zhou, a freshman at M.I.T., for example, would appear to have a killer schedule, with philosophy, physics, chemistry and multivariable calculus. But Mr. Zhou, a lanky water polo player from Buffalo, N.Y., dressed in baggy jeans, a natty black and white zip top and leather flip-flops, sinks into a chair in M.I.T.’s student center and looks sheepish as he pulls his orange spiral chemistry notebook from his backpack. In two weeks, he has taken only four pages of notes. “Most of the material so far,” he says, “for me has been review.”
Students like this one are just getting so ahead of things in high school that when they get to college the first two years are a breeze, nothing that they can not handle. Do I think that this is wrong, no not really? I do however think that this really says something about American universities today. I think sometimes students that need an extra challenge in school really do not get this in college, nothing in college is really individualized and so there for these students get left with little challenge to do the work.
The article goes on to state that most students that are going into college today are very ill prepared. Most of the time students are not being given the education that they should be getting and they are not learning the things that they should be learning. On the other hand the students on the top end of the spectrum are getting brighter and brighter each and every year. The students that are at the top and really know there stuff and get smarter and smarter each and every year. I am not sure really what to say about this other than I do agree that this is happening, people in general are getting smarter and smarter all the time and there is really no proven reason why, but it is true. This article ended with thoughts about pushing these students to explore other unexplored areas, areas that they have never ever thought of looking into before and I really agree with this. If these exceptional children are bored with their normal academic areas that they excel in, than have them explore and look into other less charted areas for them. Have them see how far they can go in learning about new and different things; this will make them more learned and better people all around. All in all I really think that this article really opened my eyes to a whole new side of things in education, students not being challenged enough is not something I usually think about when think about education as a whole and I really think that it must be an area that is looked into more.
The article . . . The Incredibles
