Such teaching is more effective as students are likely to forget what exactly has been covered in their world geography class (for my geography class I was expected to memorize and write down the names of every country in Europe on a blank map yet I cannot remember much of that now). Furthermore, the stepping stones to a better education are already present in many honors programs. Weiner’s essay demonstrates the care that honors teachers have for their students. He asserts that teachers in honors programs “want the best of” their pupils (Weiner). Primarily, this means that a necessary part of a higher education, expectation, is generously given to the students in the program. As expectation is one of the most important steps to learning, students are likely to live up to the harsher standards in a new honors program. In addition, this feeling is often reciprocated by the honors students themselves. In high achieving honors programs, students often feel “damn lucky to have the advantages an honors education brings them” (Weiner). Such a quote shows that the majority of honors students appreciate the chance to achieve more, which explains why students often work hard to meet …show more content…
Unfortunately, they are not. The existing “honors” classes simply consist of the more skilled students in one class with the same material as the non-honors class. While this is somewhat helpful for the students in the “honors” class as they only need to interact with people that understand their sentiment and will struggle alongside them, surely this should not be the only benefit of an honors class. Additionally, despite AP classes being more desirable, it is very difficult to take them before senior year. A better honors program would have challenging true honors classes to lead the honors students up to the AP courses. Furthermore, existing honors programs have additional failings in unexpected areas. In a highly interesting comparison and analysis between honors students and sea lions, Kristy Lindemann-Blols shows these failings. Lindemann-Blols states that honors students are often fail to apply knowledge and skills to other areas simply since they were never taught to do so. This is an obvious problem that current systems face as a large goal is to teach the students to be capable in their future job. An excellent quote from the essay speaks to this concept well. Lindemann-Blols claims that “Knowledge gained, whether through formal academic study or general life experience, is not useful if one cannot apply it across various contexts.” Such a quote