whelming. Compared to the writing required in previ- ous classes, Abel’s AP English class pushed him to write somewhat longer papers and to carefully craft a thesis rather than writing a summary. Although the workload wasn’t unmanageable, Abel felt especially challenged by the close reading students were expected to do in order to understand and discuss texts like Hamlet, The Glass Menagerie, and Death of a Salesman:
“[The teacher] expects us to do a reading log. That means we take notes personally from everything we’re reading—at least one hour a day, on very specific things like why they use this metaphor and stuff like that. Plus, he gives other essays… At first, I didn’t like doing all this work, because I was never good at English, but now, I guess it’s helping me to get my GPA up.”
Beyond AP English, Abel encountered little else that required him to work hard. His law class, which consisted of a great deal of note-taking, along with occasional tests and quizzes, was less interesting than previous years’ social studies classes and he acknowl- edged that all the note-taking could get boring. College Algebra seemed more valuable, but Able also described it as “more of the same thing” he encountered in previous math classes: “we had to do stuff that we did last year, because a lot of people will forget—and you need certain steps to do certain problems.”
Abel found his ETC class more interesting than in previous years. During sophomore and junior year, he was disappointed with his Information Technology classes feeling that he already knew much of what was covered. By senior year, however, he felt the class was more useful:
“[Sophomore year], it was just typing, and I already know how to type fast, so that’s not a challenge for me. Junior year, it was all pretty easy. And now we’re getting into complicated stuff—the stuff that like really counts… like making webpages, how to get to the root of them, how to get the homepage and the childpages and all that.”
Despite his interest, the work appeared to be fairly easy to complete, consisting primarily of following directions out of a textbook or off of a worksheet. The students in the class appeared to primarily teach the material to themselves:
“[The instructions] are easy – all the steps are in bold. And you check what you’re looking for, like, you gotta change a font, like how to change it and change a picture and stuff like that… There’s really nothing to talk about. Before, we used to read the [instructions] out loud—everybody took turns reading it, but now, we read it to ourselves.”
Overall, Abel was content with his senior year schedule. Although he did not describe senior year as challenging, he did feel that he was learning a lot, explaining, “even though I only have four classes, the classes are at a more advanced level.” Despite failing both semesters of the Work Experience credit of his shop class, he was still glad he had taken ETC courses, believing that “it might help me with colleges I want to go to, because it’s dealing with computers.”
Though Abel was satisfied with his classes, he found little engaging or exciting about them, saying that he couldn’t think of an example in any of his classes where he really enjoyed the subject matter or assignments.
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drafting building over there and we took a tour.” Most ETC classes characterized as medium challenge fell into this group of classes in which class time was used for college application or search. These activities did not, however, constitute engagement in course content.
In general, across ETC courses, almost no homework was assigned: there was minimal work assigned during class, and students did not report the work as difficult, resulting in several hours—almost one-third of the school day for some—where students were not pushed or challenged. For example, Monty, a student with ac- cess to a nonselective college, complained that while his class was involved in an activity, it was not related to learning construction and architecture. Rather, Monty’s class was painting walls and hanging up dry- wall in the classrooms in the high school, but even that work tapered off by the end of the year, when he admitted,“…truthfully, we’re not even really doing any carpentry work or anything like that. We’re basically doing GRPs [Guided Reading Practices].”
Adding to unstructured class time, many students participated in the work experience program, which was largely unguided and unsupervised. Even if a student did not have to work on a given day, some still were able to leave school early. Students found the process of finding a job very difficult. Most students described an unorga- nized, unclear process; they were almost entirely on their own to find employment. Many were still searching for jobs well into the school year. Alberto, for example, a capable honors and AP student with access to selective colleges, described how, without a job, he simply sat around for a third period in his Business & Finance class:
“Well right now some students from my class, they’re working on like stores like JC Penney, as a sales clerk or at a restaurant, or newspaper, yeah…[I] just sit here [in class]. Stay with my friends….I don’t go anywhere [to work].”
Alberto confirmed that he was assigned to a work placement for credit, and that he received a grade in the course, despite never having a job. Raquel, a similarly highly qualified student, simply left her Information Technology class, even though she did not have a job,
citing a common frustration for students in finding appropriate work placements: “[It’s been] kind of hard [to find a job], because a lot of places ask you to be 18 already, and I’m not 18.”
Finally, when students did find jobs, they rarely had a job where the place of employment or individual job responsibilities related to their shop class. In all three fieldwork high schools, it seemed as though any job that a student found counted as an appropriate work place- ment. There were too many examples of this problem to truly do justice to students’ frustrations with work experience in the scope of this chapter. As Montez explained, it was better to have any job than to be bored for three periods:
“You gotta have…[a job] related to your shop. Some of [the students] do, and some of [the students] don’t, but the teacher lets them get work release, because they figure, you had the class for 3 years, and for 3 periods—there isn’t too, too much you can learn there. They only teach you so much.”
It was clear from our interviews that even those students who wanted to take challenging work tended to be limited by their participation in ETC. Abel (see Abel: A Case Study on p. 84) demonstrates how ETC courses constrained course selection. Despite taking AP English and College Algebra, Abel’s ETC require- ments only allowed him to take three core classes senior year. Though Abel signed up for both a fourth year of math and an AP English course, he took only three core classes (and four classes total) senior year. He was finished with school by lunchtime and never reported finding a job that would count as work credit for his information technology program. Given his lim- ited schedule, it is unsurprising that he did not describe senior year as being very challenging, despite finding AP English challenging.