What Is success?

For the past seven or eight years,   I have taken my students to the local university library.  They enter, awed at the four stories of books available to them as they begin their academic writing careers.  By the time their instruction session has finished, and they have become intimate with databases, the electronic card catalog, academic journals and Boolean searches, some I have found weeping in the stacks on Third Floor, East, hopelessly confused about how to locate a particular title; others I have seen stumble down the steps looking dazed, their eyes unfocused and their voices not quite coherent.

Even so, most tell me later, sometimes years later, that this field trip is one of the best they have taken.   They have been challenged to find what academics have written about their research topics and have used it to create their own arguments.  They have conquered the various types of scholarly media that a university offers and supports.  And they have seen firsthand the rigor and expectation of the post-secondary education world – as well as the hundreds of college-age hotties they failed to impress, properly putting them back into their place in the pecking order of academia.

Sadly, this field trip has dwindled from including all my sophomores to only a few AP Language students.  The number of students being exposed to this academic world has decreased from two buses filled with eager students of all backgrounds and capabilities to only the few high ability students who have hung in there for the second semester of a challenging course.  It has become difficult to take students out of their classes with high stakes tests for field trips. Other teachers complain.  After all, their students' tests results impact their performance reviews.  I get that.

But if all students truly must be college and career ready, they all should be given the chance to see what  college expects of them.  Shouldn’t the students who claim in their writer’s notebooks that they want to be doctors and lawyers, nurses and physical therapists, teachers and computer designers, video game designers and vets see what will be expected of them if they choose to pursue these paths?  Isn’t that a large part of making them college and career ready? 

What a shame that "success" is more frequently becoming created from sitting in a classroom, memorizing facts and working practice sets to pass a standardized test, instead of experiencing the challenges of conquering higher level inquiry.