As a teacher, there are few questions I despise as much as “is this going to be on the test?” It means the student has no interest or concern for the implications or applications, no curiosity, no reason to think about it for more than a microsecond beyond regurgitation on a mandated exam in order to get the gold star, the shiny class participation trophy.
And yet when I asked my daughter’s history teacher what the goal was in using Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States” was in an AP US History class, his answer amounted to “it’s on the AP test.”
