Here's your work:
1. Set aside a quiet 45 minutes and work through Practice Test C. This is a test, so try to maintain a testing environment: silence, no breaks, no help from anyone or anything else. I suggest printing the test out, writing your answers on the test, and then moving your answers to the google doc (label it clearly, please).
2. Your final essay...
Education and the Workplace
Many
colleges and universities have cut their humanities departments, and high
schools have started to shift their attention much more definitively toward
STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and away from ELA
(English, Language Arts). Representatives from both school boards and
government organizations suggest that the move toward STEM is necessary in
helping students to participate in a meaningful way in the American workplace.
Given the urgency of this debate for the future of education and society as a
whole, it is worth examining the potential consequences of this shift in how
students are educated in the United States.
Read
and carefully consider these perspectives. Each suggests a particular way of
thinking about the shift in American education.
1. ELA programs should be emphasized over STEM programs. Education is
not merely a means to employment: ELA education helps students to live more
meaningful lives. In addition, an exclusively STEM-based program cannot help
but limit students’ creativity and lead them to overemphasize the importance of
money and other tangible gains.
2. ELA programs should be eradicated
entirely, except to establish the basic literacy necessary to engage in the
hard sciences, mathematics, and business. Reading and writing are activities
that are best saved for the leisure of students who enjoy them.
3. ELA and STEM programs should always be in equal balance with one
another. Both are necessary to providing a student with a well-rounded
education. Moreover, equal emphasis will allow the fullest possible exposure to
many subjects before students choose their majors and careers.
Essay Task
Write
a unified, coherent essay in which you evaluate multiple perspectives on the
issue of how schools should balance STEM and ELA subjects. In your essay, be
sure to:
- analyze
and evaluate the perspectives given
- state and
develop your own perspective on the issue
- explain
the relationship between your perspective and those given
Your
perspective may be in full agreement with any of the others, in partial
agreement, or wholly different. Whatever the case, support your ideas with
logical reasoning and detailed, persuasive examples.
- Limit yourself to 40 minutes of actual writing and prep.
- Remember the grading criteria we've been practicing (context and framing, counter-argument[s], good support and evidence).
The test and final essay will both be double weighted toward your final grade. Give me a week or so to finalize grades.
Have a great last week!
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