Along with the rest of my history department, I had the great pleasure to spend my Tuesday at East Side Community High School in Manhattan as a guest evaluator of their students’ semester ending roundtable presentations. While my students in the Bronx, and at many other New York high schools, spent the day taking a three-hour Living Environment exam which emphasizes memorization of a breadth of factual content, students at East Side, thanks to a waiver from most Regents exams, spent the day in deep thought and reflection, applying and showing off what they had learned this semester. We learned much to take back to our school, but what I saw also has much larger implications for the current local and national educational discourse.
I participated in two, 90-minute long sessions, one for an 11th grade English class, and the other for a 12th grade AP English class. While there were a range of skill levels and fluency in English amongst the students I interacted with, all six were impressive in their presentations and reflectiveness. Students in the 11th grade class each chose one piece of writing to share, along with a cover letter which summarized their learning. The seniors, in addition to the above, held a debate in which they each had to argue, using the lens of a school of literary
