...god I sure hope you are dead.
If the multiple universes hypothesis is true (which would just amount to another way in which Phillip Pullman is really the never-credited author of all Western philosophy), I think the past few weeks have let me peek under the thinner curtain's folds. Here's the reality fissure: there were a few months, back in the hormone-hazed distance of middle school, when I was dead-set on becoming an IB student. I had been coddled by teachers whose paychecks are 90% determined by how well they boost the self-esteem of their ultra-adolescent wards, and was in turn convinced that anything less than the biggest force-fed spoonful of academia possible wouldn't be good enough for my "Adequately Gifted-And-Talented" self. I went as far as to fill out most of the paperwork, get the required teacher recommendations, and plot out tentative course schedules, but made the crucial mistake of taking my parents to one of the informational meetings.
They were all right with the program's structure, the costs, the rigor, the tests, such and such -- but "No bus service from our neighborhood to the school? You can't go."
Squish go the childhood dreams.
But fast forward five years, and watch the now-AP-veteran during her freshman year of college inadvertently run into and start socializing with some of the people who went through the very IB program she missed. It makes a chance, in my opinion, to carve a little window through the Universe Generator and peek at what my high school life would have been like in an alternate dimension that included buses from Roxborough to Castle Rock.
Such a peek appears to suggest that I got the better education (in real-reality, I mean.) It's not that I think I learned more through AP than others in IB did, but rather that the IB students I'm meeting generally seem rather apathetic about learning. Any queries of mine about their program are almost always met with the same response: a smug half-smile half-grimace followed by supposed-to-shock-me tales of how many hours per night they spent doing homework.
"You're smart because you took the slacker route," they always tell me. In metaphoric vision, they then pat my head and plug my mouth with a pink pacifier.
I have not yet dragged out of any of them what they feel they actually took away from IB -- no I learned all these cool things or it got me interested in these subject areas. Just I did so much homework I got an aneurism!
No one has yet asked me about AP. I wonder, though, what I would tell them if they did; maybe that, above all the details, what was really drilled into me was the crucial importance of learning -- how essential it is to try to study and understand things, not for the sake of a grade or a transcript, but as a sort of human responsibility. I don't think that's an intrinsic quality of AP, it was probably just a stroke of luck putting me in the right environment, but it remains that I would probably be very philosophically different had I not gone to the high school I did. I don't envy that alternate-universe girl.
They were all right with the program's structure, the costs, the rigor, the tests, such and such -- but "No bus service from our neighborhood to the school? You can't go."
Squish go the childhood dreams.
But fast forward five years, and watch the now-AP-veteran during her freshman year of college inadvertently run into and start socializing with some of the people who went through the very IB program she missed. It makes a chance, in my opinion, to carve a little window through the Universe Generator and peek at what my high school life would have been like in an alternate dimension that included buses from Roxborough to Castle Rock.
Such a peek appears to suggest that I got the better education (in real-reality, I mean.) It's not that I think I learned more through AP than others in IB did, but rather that the IB students I'm meeting generally seem rather apathetic about learning. Any queries of mine about their program are almost always met with the same response: a smug half-smile half-grimace followed by supposed-to-shock-me tales of how many hours per night they spent doing homework.
"You're smart because you took the slacker route," they always tell me. In metaphoric vision, they then pat my head and plug my mouth with a pink pacifier.
I have not yet dragged out of any of them what they feel they actually took away from IB -- no I learned all these cool things or it got me interested in these subject areas. Just I did so much homework I got an aneurism!
No one has yet asked me about AP. I wonder, though, what I would tell them if they did; maybe that, above all the details, what was really drilled into me was the crucial importance of learning -- how essential it is to try to study and understand things, not for the sake of a grade or a transcript, but as a sort of human responsibility. I don't think that's an intrinsic quality of AP, it was probably just a stroke of luck putting me in the right environment, but it remains that I would probably be very philosophically different had I not gone to the high school I did. I don't envy that alternate-universe girl.