I love teaching second semester seniors; I absolutely love it.
Senior year is a rare time when many students, long working to build a transcript or to accumulate credits, realize their education is more than the sum of completed assignments. After mid-year reports are sent to colleges, grades don’t matter like they once did. And this is a good thing, especially when grades rather than learning drive so many students. Second semester, then, becomes a moment of potential, a moment when seniors can apply what they have learned and consider how it will affect their lives when high school is complete.
American Government classes inspire discussions about how Supreme Court decisions might influence future elec¬tion cycles. Anatomy students ponder the ethical implica¬tions of genetic interventions to alleviate disease. Students studying CADD imagine the possibilities of robots carrying out tasks humans are unable or unwilling to do. Literature students make and create rather than take meaning from texts. As students write college admissions essays, they wrestle with genuine questions about audience, purpose, tone, detail, and nuance—the very elements English teachers have been inviting them to practice throughout high school. As students sit in interviews for post-secondary positions, they speak in effortless ways about their understandings of circuitry or integrals or parallax or artistry. Without grades being the ultimate concern, they write and say what they think rather than what they think a teacher wants them to write or say.
This creates the wonderful paradox of the second semes¬ter of senior year: students assert risky, original ideas. These risky, original ideas, when well-presented, are more success¬ful than when students dutifully follow directions. Many second semester seniors are delightfully surprised when, for the first time since middle school, they find themselves in a place where they can take academic risks they would not have dared to take in previous years. Students write what they mean, write what they are genuinely thinking, in ways that honor their insights instead of navigating what they imagine “a teacher expects.” And ironically, this is exactly what the teacher wants.
Ms. Leslie Pratt
English Teacher
