Educators often struggle with balancing two methods of structuring sections of a course: completely standardizing course curriculums and allowing teachers to instruct classes how they see fit. Both methods have benefits and drawbacks: teacher autonomy allows for widely desired individualized learning, and standardization allows for concrete equality between students across different classes of the same course.
Seven Hills also faces these issues, with its pride in individualized learning contrasting its obligation to retain a remotely standardized curriculum. The English department especially tends to lean toward granting teachers autonomy. This often causes students in different sections of the same course to feel their section is easier or harder than others. Although teacher autonomy poses many benefits, the resulting workload discrepancies among course sections are deeply unfair to students.
The nature of Seven Hills is teacher autonomy, and completely eliminating this would go against what the institution stands for. In larger state institutions, extreme standardization is necessary to keep the substantial number of students and classes organized. “In some schools, you literally have to read from a script,” English teacher Nate Gleiner said. “My wife had to do that when she was an art teacher. She had to write the state standards on the board.” While this may be necessary for larger schools, especially those under state regulations, Seven Hills is small enough to cater its teaching to individual students. Extreme classroom standardization is not the type of flexible, personalized teaching that Seven Hills represents.
Additionally, moderate levels of classroom freedom are beneficial since they allow for individualized curriculums that can bend to meet students where they are. The nature of a highly standardized teaching system is to allow little to no teacher modifications to the previously set course. Although this, in theory, allows all students to get the same standard of education, the curriculum fails to consider those who may be above or below its level. With a rigid curriculum, there is no way to accommodate said students by pushing those at a higher level to do more challenging assignments or providing support to students who aren’t yet at the curriculum’s level. Seven Hills, however, allows teachers to do this.
“One year, Nate Gleiner and I were both teaching his senior course, and he was going to assign a paper,” English teacher Mark Beyreis said. “I said, the students in my section aren’t where [Gleiner’s] are developmentally: I think we’ll get more out of a paragraph essay.” This successful individualization illustrates the beauty and benefit of having a flexible curriculum at Seven Hills: teachers can move onto different paths to meet students where they are. Then, in theory, they can work to bring students up to the set curriculum more effectively and leave them with a deeper understanding of the concepts covered.
Beneficial as it may seem, Beyreis’s anecdote also raises an issue. Even though all students were in the same course, Gleiner’s students had to do more work than Beyreis’. Though the goodhearted intent was to meet the section where it was, the difference between one paragraph and five paragraphs is immense to students. Further, because of Seven Hills’ nature, teachers technically have the freedom to make all their assignments slightly more or less time-consuming than in other sections of the same course. These small choices can accumulate to make one section of a single course vastly more difficult than another.
Beyreis, along with Head of School and English teacher Chris Garten, teach sections of the Honors British Literature course, and many complain of the differences in difficulty between these two sections. “I’m one of the people who’s usually cited as an example of someone whose expectations might be higher,” Garten said. “That is, in terms of volume of work.” Many of his former students would agree. “Though I appreciate what the experience taught me, in Garten, we’d have double the homework and double the essays [than those in Beyreis],” junior Areej Arif said. “I think the discrepancies are large, and it’s a gap that does need to be bridged.” Assigning a large amount of work is not a bad thing. It provides students with a greater opportunity to practice English-based skills, thus leading to improvement. However, through Garten’s small choices to increase the difficulty of his assignments, two class sections under the name of the same course were assigned entirely different amounts of work.
The difference in workload can also be seen between English teacher Tricia Hoar’s and Gleiner’s AP Lang sections. Junior Dougie Schecter, one of Hoar’s AP Lang students, said, “When she does assign homework, it’ll be at least a few hours worth.” This is entirely understandable in a rigorous, AP-level course. An issue arose when Jackson Hamon, one of Gleiner’s AP Lang students, said, “It takes me thirty minutes to do his whole assignment.” Hamon may very well work faster than Schecter. However, they made it into the same course, so their skills in this area should be remotely similar. Spending two hours on English homework is very different from spending thirty minutes on it, especially considering how busy Seven Hills students can be.
Hoar’s high emphasis on grammar also increases the workload for students. “You fail if you have one drop quote, one comma splice,” an anonymous junior said. “You fail while Gleiner’s classes get revisions.” The higher emphasis on grammar in Hoar’s AP Lang class increases the relative workload of her students since they have to focus on making both their analysis and grammar impeccable. She certainly is not the only teacher who cares about grammar, but she has the most rules surrounding it. “Everybody in this department cares about grammar,” Hoar said. “The way that we go about that might feel different.” The way teachers go about things, however, is everything. Grammar is an essential skill for students to master. However, students in the same course should have the same amount of emphasis on, and thus workload surrounding grammatical concepts.
One workload is not necessarily better than another, but the amount present in sections of the same course should be the same. Junior Liam Bardon in Hoar’s class said, “I think her workload really prepares us for the AP curriculum and helps us to find success on the AP exam.” And it certainly does! Doing more English-based work trains students to read, write, and analyze more quickly and efficiently, all of which are highly advantageous skills for both the AP exam and students’ futures in writing. Now, however, Gleiner’s students may feel they are relatively less prepared.
One could argue that the disadvantages of each section (higher workload and less preparation) even each other out, resulting in a lack of significant discrepancies. However, this is incredibly difficult to compare and deeply depends on personal preference. Further, the same course should have the same disadvantages. If different course sections have different disadvantages, they no longer belong to the same course.
Section-based deadline differences can also cause differences in workload. In Beyreis’s sections, for example, deadlines are consistently flexible. “Beyreis is unfair to people who have Garten because with Beyreis, we had months,” an anonymous junior said. “I was three weeks late on an essay I got a 95 on, and [Garten’s class] had already written another essay by then.” It is possible that, even with the extension, some students may still wait until the last minute to complete the essay. However, having an easily obtainable three-week extension not only makes assignments easier to complete but also easier to perfect. The flexible deadlines can also lead to a significantly lower workload since students can spread work over long periods. “[In Beyreis’s class], you could ask for an essay to be pushed back, and it would work, but that doesn’t work with any other teacher,” senior Natalia Butler said. “It’s definitely easier to get an A in that aspect because you’re going to have more time to write.”
All sections of a course should feel equally prepared for the exam and the future based on the resources and workload they have. The difference in preparation should reside at an individual level and be based on differences in individual study habits and work ethics. Some students need different amounts of resources, and it is essential that courses are flexible enough to become easier or harder for these individuals. However, if an entire section of a course feels the need to become easier or harder than another section, the two no longer belong to the same course. The chances of all students with fewer English-based skills being placed in the same course through random selection are close to none. If it’s not a random selection, and all these students are purposefully put in the same course, making it easier is the way to go. In this case, however, it shouldn’t be called the same course as the others.
Generally, the more work a course has, the harder it becomes. Based on this, it is clear that some sections of courses at Seven Hills are more difficult than others. 87% of one hundred students polled agreed that different sections of a single English course must put in different amounts of effort to achieve the same grades as other sections.
These issues can put some students at a competitive advantage. “Last year with Ms. Mysore’s AP (a former Seven Hills English teacher), it was really easy, and everyone got A’s,” senior Lina Asfaw said. “But we had Mrs. Hoar (in the same level AP course), and we had to work twice as hard to even get an A minus.” Universities looking at Seven Hills student applications do not see that Hoar’s class was more difficult than Mysore’s. They only see that two students from Seven Hills who took AP Lang applied to their college, and one got a higher grade than the other, failing to realize that the two put in the same amount of effort. Even if the two students achieved the same grade, colleges fail to notice that one student put in more effort than the other to get there. More work should put one student at an advantage over another, and this fails to happen in some cases.
The prestigious nature of Seven Hills generally attracts highly driven, competitive students. Many have dream colleges at equally prestigious universities, and multiple students in a grade will often apply to the same college. Details matter when applying to these universities. Differences in GPAs can contribute to the difference between getting into a dream college or not. This certainly isn’t always the case, but the fact that it is a possibility is reason enough to work to solve these discrepancies.
It may be a fear that leveling the workload in each course would rid teachers of their autonomy. Hoar said, “[The current situation] is a natural consequence of having teachers teaching as opposed to some sort of robotic program.” However, just because these issues are natural consequences doesn’t make them ideal. If making sections of the same course with the same level of difficulty eliminates teacher autonomy, then teacher autonomy was never the right decision in the first place. There are ways to give each section the same workload and maintain teacher autonomy, but they require alterations to the system Seven Hills currently has. The changes may not be ideal for current teachers.
Another justification is that the teacher a student gets comes down to natural luck. Life is all about luck, and students should learn how to deal with that. However, students deal with their fair share of bad luck outside the classroom. If at all preventable, why should the school want to extend this luck system into the classroom, blindly favoring some students over others?
Parents pay tens of thousands of dollars each year to send their children to a school advertised as the best of the best. The school could elevate itself to the next level if it faced these discrepancies and worked to solve them. It would stand out: not only would Seven Hills have an autonomous teaching system, but it would also face the consequences of this structure to the point where barely any exist. Some changes could take this incredible school to the next level.
If the classes are to continue where they are, it is only fair that each section of the course has a different GPA weight based on the workload and, thus, the general difficulty. The classes could be labeled AP Lang I, II, and III, with increasing levels of difficulty and increasing GPA weights. Students could pick which course they want to take, and the openly different sections would not only allow different difficulty levels to exist, but the entire section would be on an incredibly similar level. This would lead to the vast majority of the section benefitting from the same workload.
Another solution is to assign one teacher to each course to prevent discrepancies from section to section. This way, the teacher can focus on assigning the same amount of work to all their sections, differing workloads on an individual level as needed. In this sense, teachers can maintain a level of autonomy that the school cherishes while ensuring that the course retains the same level of difficulty across all sections. Further, the teachers can avoid time-consuming compromises with other teachers in different sections and have the autonomy to teach the course however they see fit. “I think it’s the fairest way to do it,” junior William Huguenin said, “…so everybody feels like they’re being graded on the same standards and conditions.”
The last solution, and the one that maintains the current course and section structure, is greater attention to student feedback and a greater degree of collaboration between different teachers of the same course. Gleiner said, “What I would like to see is a clearer and a more concrete articulation of what each grade level is doing.” This could be accomplished by updating course standards based on student feedback and Seven Hills’ unique teaching style. It could also happen informally, with teachers of the same course meeting frequently and ensuring they give their sections the same amount of work. In any case, more collaboration and response to student feedback can help take this already successful department to the next level.
All of this is not to say the English department is unsuccessful. When looking at the bigger picture, it is clear the department does an incredible job of preparing students for college and beyond. “A student I taught years ago as a senior had done entirely college prep classes, and he came back and said he felt super prepared,” Beyreis said. “In fact, the writing center had offered him a job to come and work there.” Students leave the school feeling prepared, primarily due to the incredibly accomplished teachers in English and education. This already successful department could further improve with minor tweaks, such as increased standardization to decrease differences in sectional difficulties.
