Senior Year Senior year:  a final learning opportunity, or a wasted year of miscreant mischief?

In a recent editorial in the New York Times, Marc Bernstein, a faculty member in the Education Department at Fordham University, proposed an alternative to the traditional senior year:  namely, going straight to college, internships, or similar post-secondary fields.  As a means of opening up dialogue, the staff at the Times opened up his editorial to responses–and that conversation has just continued.

Another conversation revolving around alternatives to the traditional senior year occurred via NPR’s State Impact Ohio radio show, in which several players in Ohio’s secondary and post-secondary education worlds debated the merits of the current high school model.  The full audio clip can be seen below, and it reflects a similar debate raised recently by the CBS Evening News, in which they profiled two very different high school seniors and their perspectives on the necessity of senior year.

 

So what’s your opinion?  Is senior year worth it, or is it simply an extended slide in which students increasingly lose motivation, becoming simply occupants of desks rather than learners in them?

For your final post, juniors, you’ll get a chance to make an argument that answers that question.  In this blog, you can incorporate any number of the different elements we’ve discussed this year:  videos, audio, images, links, social media…the list goes on!  I’d also like to challenge you to go outside the classroom walls and interview your peers–either via video or audio recording–to get their perspective.  You could even host a podcast on the subject, complete with a conversation/debate between you and one of your peers!  However you choose to go about it, I want to get your perspective on the topic, and I want you to defend it using as many varied outside sources as you can!