In which I begin to learn that high school has changed – not always for the better

I’d mentioned periodically that my oldest son has started high school, though I can’t remember if I’ve griped, in this forum, about the fact that the freshmen class has iPads and the teachers are going overboard with using them, to the point that all class readings, and homework assignments, and pretty much everything, is found via an app on the iPad.  As we speak, he’s struggling through an assignment where he seems to need to flip back and forth between the reading, the questions, and his own work answering those questions, instead of being able to have all these materials in front of him at the same time.

And it looks like we’re going to have a problem with biology, one of the two classes we had dared to place him in the honors-level class.  Our first issue — and we’ll have have to talk to the teacher about this — is that the teacher thinks that, since she has said that she’s available for questions off-hours, that it’s equally OK for her to send out homework assignments after class has met, due the next class — so he got an e-mail Saturday at noon with an assignment due tomorrow.  Highly unprofessional!

What’s more, so far, the instruction has been very vague:  “think like a scientist!” with questions that he can’t make heads or tails of.  If you give him an assignment to read about the parts of a cell and answer questions on the content of that chapter, he’d do fine.  But if this continues, if even biology is about verbal/writing skills, he’s doomed.

Perhaps I’m too ready to jump to conclusions, having read a while back a book asserting that this new emphasis on verbal/writing skills, even in math and science subjects, is what’s causing boys to fall behind.  But I’m worried. The stakes are a lot higher these next four years.  We know he’s not going to be getting financial aid/scholarships, and, instead, we’re going to be the ones subsidizing the other kids, and I’m not particulaly keen on paying the tuition bill if we’re not going to (that is, he’s not going to) get our money’s worth.  (The fact that financial columnists talk about the “net price” of college as if it’s something parents have any control over is another one of my pet peeves.)