Is Getting Accepted the Most Important Goal?

In class today, we discussed an article from the New York Times about how the first well renowned public high school in the country stopped offering AP courses. Scarsdale, a school in Scarsdale, New York, dropped the AP classes and created a class called advanced topics (AT), which covered less material, but in more depth. This class still offered the AP exam, but made it optional. I was interested by this, and when I got home, I looked up the article online. I thought it was very interesting to see the students’ reaction to the change in courses. The article stated that most students “praised” the elimination of AP courses. I was surprised by this, because I believe looking in on it, one would think it’s a great idea because you’re not learning just to pass a test, you’re learning to learn. Many believe that is the way learning should be. But when it comes down to your own future, I believe people do what is best for them, which is learning in order to pass the test. That obviously isn’t the strategy at Scarsdale, which is why I thought it was interesting to see that the students are supportive of the change. When reading this article, I couldn’t help but think; would Thoreau support this change? The idea of going more into depth of fewer subjects is what made me believe that Thoreau would be supportive of this change. The AT class goes into more depth, which doesn’t let them cover all the material on the AP test, but the students get a better understanding of what they learn. When Thoreau said, “I say let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand.” (Thoreau 73). In this quote, I believe Thoreau is saying, it is better to do less than more, because when you do less you are able to care about what you do. That is the exact reason Scarsdale changed their AP classes to AT, so they were able to move at a slower pace and learn to have a passion for what they were being taught. I thought it was very interesting how this article related to how we discussed whether or not New Trier should have eliminated its 5 level courses, and how some of the ideas Thoreau spoke of were seen in the reason for changing Scarsdale’s AP classes.