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I see this word "rigorous" bandied about endlessly, both here in my neck of the worrds as well as in much of the popular and national writing about education. Eveyone thinks a rigorous education is good, but no one, to my satisfaction had ever really defined it.
At least in NYC all it means is that a kid (we're talking K-12 here) gets a ton of reading and lots of homework and projects. In other words, rigorous="worked to death", with no real thought to any deeper meaning and no different that what you'd find in a less rigorous school, just more of it.
It's a word that has lost all value as far as I'm concerned. But I want to hear what others think. To parents, educators and students out there, what's you defintion of a "rigorous" education and what does it look like in practice?
When I took AP (advanced placement) classes in high school, it really just amounted to reading more and doing more individual work. Some of it was also self-learning, for example managing time better for reading, learning better citing, finding ideas from facts, and making notes so that lectures in class would be more understandable. My experiences:
AP US history: memorize more facts and details, write harder essays that promote deeper analysis
AP English: read more "classics" and do collaborative group projects by ourselves with abstract topics
AP biology: learn more stuff in the same amount of time as the regular classes
AP statistics: read the book by yourself (I dropped out of this because I got a D)
AP Spanish: a continuation of Spanish 4, nothing really advanced about it since you could be in it without testing
I don't know if I learned more in these classes, but I do remember doing a lot more work or being ahead in material than other classes. Whether it promoted a more solid understanding or deeper level of analysis I don't remember, even though it was less than ten years ago for me. The appeal though, was getting out of gym due to my AP biology class, and taking AP tests to get out of college classes later, which ultimately saved money. In the end, I probably got a good academic background, but not really a practical understanding of life in retrospect.
Rigorous had a very specific and definite definition for hs, it means all ap or ib curriculum. It means the hardcore aps like physics and chem and not the soft aps like stats and psychology.
It means taking all ap tests and not just the classes and scoring high on those tests. It means taking sat 2s in hard subjects (not your native foreign language) and scoring well. It means no study halls and mostly academic classes. The a+ in honors or marching band won't count the same as the a in multi var calc.
It also means starting with double sciences and double languages in the very early high school years so that you can have the prerequisites to take advanced classes before you graduate.
The above is the standard definition that colleges use when referring to a rigorous curriculum.
You may or may not believe a rigorous curriculum is good for you or your children but it is easy to define within the context of the American education system.
I see this word "rigorous" bandied about endlessly, both here in my neck of the worrds as well as in much of the popular and national writing about education. Eveyone thinks a rigorous education is good, but no one, to my satisfaction had ever really defined it.
At least in NYC all it means is that a kid (we're talking K-12 here) gets a ton of reading and lots of homework and projects. In other words, rigorous="worked to death", with no real thought to any deeper meaning and no different that what you'd find in a less rigorous school, just more of it.
It's a word that has lost all value as far as I'm concerned. But I want to hear what others think. To parents, educators and students out there, what's you defintion of a "rigorous" education and what does it look like in practice?
That's easy. Rigorous = advanced math and hard science. Those require more thought. Not rigorous = soft sciences, art, language, sociology, history, ethnic studies. Those are mostly just memorization.
I see this word "rigorous" bandied about endlessly, both here in my neck of the worrds as well as in much of the popular and national writing about education. Eveyone thinks a rigorous education is good, but no one, to my satisfaction had ever really defined it.
At least in NYC all it means is that a kid (we're talking K-12 here) gets a ton of reading and lots of homework and projects. In other words, rigorous="worked to death", with no real thought to any deeper meaning and no different that what you'd find in a less rigorous school, just more of it.
It's a word that has lost all value as far as I'm concerned. But I want to hear what others think. To parents, educators and students out there, what's you defintion of a "rigorous" education and what does it look like in practice?
rigor means different things to different teachers.
teacher A - rigor to me means being a jerk and making absolutely sure no kid can get an A in my class
teacher B - giving more homework than a normal teacher just so kids can complain about my class being "hard"
teacher C - rigor to me means setting the hurdle so high no one can get over it
teacher D - creating intellectually challenging assignments and assessments that stimulate critical thinking skills.
hopefully most teachers such as myself choose "D".
i've taught with all 4 types though. in my experience most teachers think rigor falls under "A" and some "B".
I taught with a Bio teacher who i swear sat in his classroom after school just trying to think of ways to get kids to fail. kid needed help after school? answer - sorry do it on your own. kid missed a test and needs to find a time to make it up? answer - not my problem. kid works really hard but comes up 1 point shy of making a C or a B? answer - sorry he or she should've worked harder.
did not get along well with parents and kids never had nice things to say about him at all.
this guy somehow survived at my school for 5 years before leaving last year to go teach at a statewide public boarding school.
Eh it's a feel-good buzzword of the times, so that parents will leave us alone about stuff. I can't think of any 9-12 graders in our school who know their multiplication facts at all. A teacher popped out with "What's 5x8?" today and none of her honor students could answer it, not even after a little bit of thought. One girl thought it was 144! I'm proud to say that my homeschooled daughters know them very well and can count change back correctly. Plus a few other things they don't teach in schools anymore, and I didn't think our curriculum was rigorous at all.
That's easy. Rigorous = advanced math and hard science. Those require more thought. Not rigorous = soft sciences, art, language, sociology, history, ethnic studies. Those are mostly just memorization.
How do you figure the latter are just memorization? There are more things to memorize in math/science such as formulas than there are in some of the ones you mentioned which require more synthesis of ideas, at least if you are at the college/postgrad level... At that point, they are both difficult, at least if you want to get A's at a top school.
The word rigorous does get thrown around a lot and there doesn't seem to be a definition. I think it means a challenging learning environment and an emphasis on quality over quantity in regards to assignments.
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