Here, on the more challenging assignment, he answered 100 percent of the questions correctly. But the assignment offered him only the opportunity to grapple with content that was more appropriate for younger students.Īnother assignment in the same classroom offered a better opportunity: The same student was asked to identify equivalent fractions using visual models, meeting a fourth-grade standard. He did the work he was assigned, and answered 87 percent of the questions correctly. I’m just going to be a small number in a class, and I don’t want to feel behind or left out.” “The teacher is not going to wait for me. “I don’t want to feel like I’m behind when I walk into a class on the first day of college,” she says. It worries Hajima deeply when she considers her future. In their physics class, for example, they might get through all the content in the first 20 minutes-and then have nothing to do. “The time goes super slow,” Hajima’s friend explains. When Hajima and her best friend talk about how it feels to sit in classes that aren’t challenging enough, they speak of watching the clock. She’d jump at the opportunity to learn more. It’s just education-wise, I do, because it’s not challenging.” She reflects on her choice to move schools, in pursuit of better preparation for a medical career: “I don’t really regret moving here because of all the new friends. It isn’t lost on Hajima that the academic experiences she has access to at her current school-where her classmates are primarily Black-are weaker than those at her previous school (in the same district), which is primarily white. If we feel the classes they have aren’t challenging for us, there are no other options.” “They only have up to pre-calc,” she says. She maxed out on the school’s math offerings as a junior. In fact, she had transferred from another public high school-one with higher test scores and more advanced course offerings-explicitly because she’d been enticed by the promise of this program.Ĭonsidering that Hajima joined her new school based on the promise that it would prepare her for pre-med studies in college, she was shocked to learn upon arrival that there were no AP math or science courses available to her. When she arrived at her new high school, Hajima’s hope was that the medical careers program would put her on the right path for medical school, both in terms of academic readiness and with some college credit already under her belt.
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