AP European History for Able Sophomores

Determined high school sophomores are desirable candidates for Advanced Placement European History (APEH). If they read well and enjoy expressing themselves in writing, their steady im­provement in analytical and writing skills and their intellectual maturation will doubly reward the entrepreneurial teacher willing to tackle the course.

Early in their high school careers, these adaptive students can develop disciplined work and study habits that will equip them to realize life-long academic and professional objectives. Further, their commitment to excellence will like­ly strengthen the academic tone of their schools and encourage the improve­ment of teaching skills that benefit other students as well. Thus, the effect of the program promises to be as salutary as the founders of AP intended; even though it was not sophomores they had in mind.

When the AP program  was conceived over thirty years ago, it was designed to give more intensive instruction in col­lege preparatory work to the ablest stu­dents in their graduating year and thus enable them to make better use of their time in school. The program promoted curricular continuity between schools and colleges by offering freshman-level examinations in eleven key liberal arts disciplines. Students who received scores of 3, 4, and 5 within the 1-5 grade range were usually deemed cred­it-worthy and eligible to place out of the introductory survey and into an ad­vanced course.

Initially, the program served the few. In 1955-56, the first year of the exami­nations, 1,229 students from 104 mainly northeastern private schools took 2,199 exams, the results of which were sent to 130 colleges. In 1985, 205,650 students from 6,720 schools (over 76 percent public) took 280,972 exams in twenty-four introductory college courses in thirteen fields, including computer sci­ence. The results were sent to 2,170 colleges. As Harlan P. Hanson, director of the College Board’s Advanced Place­ment program, recently noted, “. . . as the program has been put to work, it has literally fed upon itself . . . [aided by] the growing realization on educators’ parts that an effective local school, like an effective local hospital, is defined not by its minimal services offered to all, but rather by the adequacy of its varying responses to differing individual’s sepa­rate needs.”

In considering AP’s service in meet­ing student’s specialized needs and thus its role as an academic rite of passage, it is important to note the range of high school students that the program serves. Of the 205,650 candidates in 1985, 67 percent were seniors, 27 percent were juniors, and 3 percent were sopho­mores. (The remaining percent were either beyond the high school level or their grade level was unidentified.) While sophomores are a tiny minority among candidates for most AP exams, they are serious takers of biology (10 percent of 22,801 exams in 1985) and European history (28 percent of 15,304 exams in 1985). And the percentage of APEH sophomores has been inching steadily upwards since the early 1970s, when they comprised less than 10 per­cent.

With curriculum revision under way in states such as California and New York, and with the national concern for upgrading education and improving the quality of academic preparation for col­lege, as well as making higher education accessible to more students (the aims of the Educational EQuality Project of the College Board), the number of sopho­mores taking the exam will increase. Already, New York State Commissioner of Education Gordon Ambach has ap­proved such an early beginning. Chided by critics who charge that the newly mandated twelfth year of social studies (a half year of government; the other half, economics) would edge out AP and other college courses and “lead to a lowering . . . of standards,” Commis­sioner Ambach replied that participa­tion as an informed citizen requires ev­ery New York State high school gradu­ate to have a solid foundation in the areas of government and economics. Further, he stated, “Advanced Place­ment courses in American and Europe­an history, which are not appropriate replacements for the mandated twelfth grade courses, may still be taught in lieu of the appropriate courses in grades ten and eleven.”

European Culture Studies is the re­quired tenth-grade course in New York State. Therefore, APEH is an appropri­ate offering for the talented on this level, and schools should encourage such students to progress in strength (a term promoted in a 1953 publication). General Education in School and College (Harvard University Press), written by faculty members from prestigious pri­vate schools and universities in the Northeast, stressed the importance of providing able students with an oppor­tunity to move ahead in fields where they are strong. According to the re­port, “We shall call this progression in strength to distinguish it from what is usually called ‘acceleration,’ that is, mov­ing ahead by a term or a year in all subjects.”

The recognition that able students exist at all grade levels and a sequence of AP courses in secondary school edu­cation can stimulate and nurture these students has encouraged growing num­bers of schools and teachers to offer AP biology and European history to tenth grade students.

In considering AP’s service in meeting students’ specialized needs and thus its role as an academic rite of passage, it is important to note the range of high school students that the program serves.

How well do they do? According to Lucy Haagen, Associate Program Direc­tor at the Educational Testing  Service, the mean score for sophomores taking AP in 1985 was 3.14, marginally better than that of juniors and seniors. I have taught APEH to seniors, and most recent­ly I have taught  sophomores—who, in fact, do as well. I know other teachers in private and public schools who also teach APEH successfully to tenth graders.

When we meet, we confess our relief that we are not called upon to medicate senioritis. In contrast, we find our APEH sophomores tenacious. They stick with the demands of the course throughout the year and are ever willing to revise and rewrite essays to improve their work and grades. And they are forth­ right. “This is the first course where I can’t bluff my way through,” is a com­mon confession after the first exam. If they want to stay in the course, they know early on that they must read the assignments to prepare for class. Their youth, then, belies the abilities and am­bitions of these students to develop the skills and master the subject matter of the course.

But there is more to an APEH course for sophomores than reading assign­ments and recalling certain facts. The challenge for them lies in going beyond the facts to cognitive levels where they conceptualize events, manipulate differ­ent kinds of historical evidence, recognize historical continuity and change, and or­ganize data to support a hypothesis.

Easily said? Yes. Easily done? Of course not. No matter how academically motivated and gifted tenth graders may be, they require instruction, coaching, and practice in honing the skills expect­ ed of college freshmen in introductory history courses. They also need guided instruction in understanding the inter­woven themes of modern European his­tory, which the APEH exam tests.

The national exam administered each May is tough but fair. It has two major components; 1) a 75-minute section of 100 multiple-choice questions covering political, economic, diplomatic, intellec­tual, cultural, and social history; and 2) an hour and 45-minute essay section requiring students to write two essays. One is freely chosen from six offerings on major topics and periods; the other is obligatory and based on documents geared to a specific question. In 1983, the document-based question (DBQ) dealt with linguistic, socioeconomic, and political conflicts between Flemings and Walloons in nineteenth-century Bel­gium; in 1984, the role of the German army in aircraft development prior to World War I; and in 1985, changing views and treatment of juvenile offend­ers in nineteenth-century Great Britain.

Clearly, DBQs in APEH, in contrast to those in AP American history, avoid mainline topics. Students are unlikely to be familiar with the sources. They are expected, however, to be conversant with the handling—sifting, weighing, analyzing, and synthesizing—of sources. The college and high school teachers who assemble at Trenton State College in June to read and grade the essays deem as incompetent those who “laun­dry list” the contents of documents. To earn credit-worthy scores, students must consider the perspectives of the writers of the documents. They must also critically judge the evidence, piec­ing it together as historians do into a logical narrative that answers the ques­tion. Students are provided the evi­dence for the DBQ and about fifteen minutes of reading time; for the free­ response question, they must supply their own supporting evidence.

Understandably, some teachers shy away from teaching the course, let alone to an audience of sophomores. There is so much history to cover, so many skills to train and develop! What if students do poorly on the exam? How will it reflect on teachers’ abilities?

To begin, APEH teachers must be entrepreneurs, risk-takers in the class­room, willing to experiment with cre­ative strategies to direct students into divergent ways of seeing and under­standing the past. They should ignore the exam as the focus of the course and concentrate instead on teaching a re­sponsible curriculum and on training students to read discriminately and clar­ify their thoughts in speaking and writ­ing. Top-heavy emphasis on facts cop­ied from blackboards to notebooks par­alyzes students’ abilities to see the past in its vitality and connections to the pre­sent. Teaching methods must actively involve students.

. . . we find our APEH sophomores tenacious. They stick with the demands of the course throughout the year.

Problem-oriented discussions are wel­come substitutes for teacher-dominated lectures. The problems can be  narrow or broad in scope: To what extent was preindustrial society socially stable? How much political and social power was available to women in nineteenth-century Great Britain? From the per­spective of your social class and gender (students are assigned occupations by lottery), which statements in the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen do you support, reject, or seek to modi­fy? Was it a mistake to unify Italy? Was Lenin a true son of the Russian revolu­tion or an apostate?

Study skill sheets are helpful for stu­dents to guide them in taking notes on the relevant facts and concepts. A quick review in class of the reading’s high­lights sets the stage for debate. Facts can be referred to easily as students use them to interpret the past. In the beginning of the course, students are apt to be frustrated  when the answers to the questions posed are murky, dependent on definitions of concepts such as “socially stable” and “true son or apostate of the revolution.” As the year proceeds, however, they relish the role they play in defending their positions. And the best classes, every teacher knows, are those in which students continue wrangling as they head out the door.

The teaching task with these able and ebullient students centers on directing their thinking into structured argu­ments that others can grasp and re­spond to. Whether students view the Congress of Vienna as a failure or a success will hinge on the emphasis they give to the “cold war” of liberal and national ideals against conservative principles rather than to the relative peace among the major European pow­ers prior to World War I. Able tenth graders can grasp differences in inter­pretations and the ways in which data can be structured.

While it is important to challenge their minds with diverse ways of looking at events and personalities in the light of recent scholarship, it is incumbent on the teacher to move through the course. Every treaty and philosophe cannot be covered, but the broad contours of European events from 1450 to 1970 can traced to complete the course in the traditional sense. Spending three weeks on the Italian Renaissance and  longer on the Industrial Revolution means frantic event-hopping in twentieth-cen­tury chapters as May nears. Nor is whip­ping through every event to “complete” the course desirable.

The preferred teaching strategy is post-holing, or greater depth coverage of wisely selected topics. Here teachers can supplement textbook or monograph readings with primary-source docu­ments, art slides, a film, and exercises on writing hypotheses and outlining rel­evant evidence before the test. Instruc­tion that helps sophomores build confi­dence and skill in their writing pays off in better essays.

Furthermore, a useful teaching and helpful grading technique requires stu­dents to underline their hypotheses and general statements with one-color mark­er and their supporting data with anoth­er color. The two-color limning pro­vides an instant reference to both com­ponents in the paper and the degree of balance between them.

For students having their first serious exposure to modern European history, reading assignments on a long-term, generally a month’s basis, are recom­mended. These help point the direction of the course. The assignment sheets should include test days, return-of-test days, and review and catch-up periods to accommodate the unanticipated fire­ drills, assemblies, and extra time needed for discussing more difficult readings. Flexibility should be built into the course syllabus.

Yet once assignment goals are set for the longer term, teachers should adhere to them even if students’ comprehen­sion seems opaque at times. Learning history is often relearning it from a different angle or in a subsequent re­ view. For example, Marxism, difficult to absorb the first time around, can be reviewed when studying German Revi­sionism and Lenin’s alteration of Marx­ism. Book reviews and editorials that refer to Marxist ideas can help clarify the ideology, as can class exercises. One possible exercise assembles students representing nineteenth-century Ger­man Liberals, Conservatives, Catholics, Socialists, and Feminists with Chancel­ lor Bismarck. Representatives from each discussion group “confront” Bis­marck, expressing their approval or dis­approval of his policies and confessing whether they have “sold out” to him.

In essence, an APEH course for soph­omores must be carefully constructed to relate broad developments to particular events and ideas. Unfortunately, teach­er education tends to neglect training in the synthesis of text assignments and primary source documents that can help students grasp the historical craft and patterns in history. APEH teachers must become their own architects in the year­-long course. They must build the frame­work to suit their teaching strengths and interests, and they must complete its construction with selected readings and skill exercises to enhance learning out­comes.

One way to organize the course, which I have found effective with soph­omores, is to contrast the lives of elites and ordinary people. Beginning with a unit on the preindustrial world and its pattern of work, leisure, health care, and family life, I continue to intersperse social history with conventional topics. A basic model is established early that students can follow.

Peter Stearns, professor of history at Carnegie-Mellon University, pinpointed the gap between current historical re­search and secondary school history curriculum. The nature of historical thinking, Stearns argued, has shifted “to emphasize changes in the behavior and outlook of ordinary people and the way groups and societies define activities such as work, lovemaking, or crime.” History teaching in the schools, howev­er, still focuses on kings, presidents, and wars.

Organizing the APEH course around the themes of elite and nonelite history, bridges the gap. Further, topics on child-rearing, family life, women’s edu­cation, and gender roles and imagery help students understand change and continuity more clearly when they can compare social experiences of the past with their everyday ones.

For teachers unfamiliar with recent social history findings, DBQs from past APEH exams provide assistance. Some of these have dealt with the social his­tory topics of witchcraft persecution, middle-class and working-class attitudes toward work, education of women in early modern times, childrearing, and juvenile crime. These DBQs, available from the College Board (along with free-response essays and multiple choice tests), provide teaching exercises and primary sources to supplement the social history chapters in texts such as John P. McKay, Bennet D. Hill, and John Buckler’s A History of Western Socie­ty (Houghton Mifflin, 1983). Biblio­graphical assists and suggested syllabi, along with useful strategies for imple­menting APEH courses can also be found in the Teacher’s Guide to Advanced Placement Courses in European History by Mary L. Lifka (College Board, 1983).

Ideally, tenth grade courses in Euro­pean history and English should dove­tail. Such classics as Voltaire’s Candide, Dickens’ Hard Times, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Mann’s Mario and the Magician could be read and analyzed when students are study­ing the historical context in which these works were written. Too often, howev­er, custom and lassitude may be obsta­cles to reform, depriving the able stu­dent of the benefits of interdisciplinary study. On their own, APEH teachers may have to work within the constraints of the disciplinary territorial imperative, making suggestions for relevant read­ings in literature and using excerpts from standard literary classics to show how literature and art reflect dominant cultural values.

However APEH is offered to able sophomores—closely allied with the En­glish curriculum or not—students will be well prepared for the rigors of AP American history in the eleventh grade. With AP Government and Politics on the drawing board, the opportunity for sequential progression in strength will be available to students in history and the social sciences throughout their high school careers.

European history is a synoptic disci­pline. It weaves themes and concepts from the humanities and the social sci­ences in tracing change over time. It is the sine qua non for advanced study in art, literature, philosophy, and special­ized areas such as the history of science. A rigorous course like APEH builds vocabulary, develops reasoning process­es, and improves writing skills. It pre­pares students for leadership roles and for self-directed study in the heritage of the past.

Options exist for placement of stu­dents in the course. My school places students in the course who are recom­mended by their ninth-grade teachers and who have maintained at least a ninety average. Inevitably, some stu­dents transfer into on-level classes dur­ing the first marking period. But the number who stay is gratifying. Four sections, taught by a colleague and me had a total enrollment of over eighty students in 1984-85. Four-fifths  took the AP exam. More importantly, all of them were offered an educational progam to stretch their ambitions and abilities.

Secondary schools in this country must offer such programs to the able and willing, and administrations and school boards must encourage enthusi­astic teachers to create and teach such programs. The widely quoted National Commission on Excellence in Educa­tion, a stimulus for educational reform in the 1980s, states that “over half the population of gifted students do not match their tested ability with compara­ble achievement in school.” Standards for their achievement must be high. APEH offers that rigor for students desirous of the training, challenge, and opportunity for academic achievement. APEH is a rite of passage for sophomores and their teachers who choose it as a pathway toward intellectual excel­lence.