Why We Need Courses Like AP Seminar

Over the past year and a half that I've been teaching AP Seminar, I've met with lots of other AP Seminar teachers to discuss our trials and tribulations.  One of the things that's surprised me is how often I meet teachers who are negative about the course.

       "It's the newest educational fad - it'll come and go."

       "It's so pointless.  What are the students learning in this class anyway?"

       "I just teach to the rubric so that my students can get a high score."

Students can also get pretty harsh.  When I first started teaching AP Seminar, I came across this article, which was published in the Stuyvesant Spectator.  The student who wrote it argues many good points.  In the article, the student poses the following question:

...why is a program that seeks to promote college readiness among high school students praised for being innovative? Isn’t promoting college readiness something the high school education system should already be doing? This is the ironic reality of our current high school education system—a reality in which launching an initiative to prepare students for college is seen as a ground-breaking move.

While these are good points, I feel they deserve a little more scrutiny.  

The first is that a high school education should be about promoting "college readiness" skills.  I guess this depends on how you define college readiness.  If you believe that college readiness means that you should be able to walk into any college classroom and get a good grade, then you're probably already well-served by your high school curriculum.  Every AP class is a class that teaches students how to succeed in a college classroom.  The sad part is that too few students take these courses, but that's a discussion for another day.

 I would argue that, at its best, AP Capstone promotes a life-long passion for learning, for analysis and for questioning. I've been teaching AP courses (AP Chemistry & AP Seminar)  for nearly twenty  years and the sad truth is that too many of my "college ready" students are prosaic thinkers.  They're disciplined and have strong study skills and they will have no problem doing well in college, but they rarely question anything their teachers or textbooks say.  They have trouble linking what they learn in the classroom to real-world applications.  They're very good at doing what is expected of them and don't seem interested in doing much more. 

Ultimately, though, the people who change the world are the ones who, despite years of being taught college readiness, are still able to think differently about the world around them.  They are the ones who question why things are done a certain way when they could be done better.  

I believe that AP Seminar & AP Research are a step in this direction.  While both teach quantifiable skills, they are open-ended enough to allow students' imaginations to soar and to show them that few things in life are more gratifying than mastering a new topic or a new skill.