Oxford: The People and the Methods

My wonderful classmates for the AP course were not as international as I had originally predicted.  In my American ignorance, I hadn’t realized how North American AP is.  IB is the more international direction – although we at NDP determined, a few years ago, that IB would not allow us to educate young woman in the particular direction that is our individual charism ….   There were 16 of us, including 2 Canadians, and those who taught further abroad (England, Berlin, Istanbul) were Americans teaching at American military-based schools or in comparable situations.  However, we were a marvelous mix of age and experience.  Although there were, of course, common readings, I came to realize, quickly, that for every work I had not read, there were works I knew better than many others.  (This is the kind of situation in which it is easy to feel yourself inferior when someone says, “The last time I read Virginia Woolf’s letters all the way through,” if you don’t perform an immediate reality check re: your own strengths.)

As I mentioned earlier, most of my colleagues have more hours/week scheduled for AP.  Many of their schools subscribe to the AP Equity Statement which stipulates that AP should be open to any student who is willing to put in the amount of work required.  I feel a bit guilty when I hear comments such as this:  “Students who score a 4 or 5 would have done so despite your teaching.”  I can’t help wanting to take a bit of credit for the eight 4s and eighteen 5s my 2011 students earned ….

Additional discovery:  the Oxford education operates on an intriguingly different pathway. I did not experience this in my Americanized AP class, whereas Al did in his course.  An Oxford (and, I am assuming, a Cambridge) education consists of courses in which one attends seminar classes on a particular topic.  However, each student also engages in a tutorial with the professor.  The professor provides a set of readings to the student.  Each week (or twice a week) the student writes an essay and meets one-on-one with the professor.  The meeting consists of a presentation/critique of the student’s essay and discussion of further direction.  There is incredible accountability, as well as an incredible relationship potential, in this model of education.  I now understand the source of the university model which dictates that a professor teach only 2-3 courses and maintains a large number of office hours (although I believe that the university tutorial model has devolved drastically in the US).  I also finally appreciate, 40 years after the fact, what my dear mentor Dr. John Hertz was trying to do when he asked me to skip the usual undergrad second-semester senior Chaucer course in favor of an independent study which involved a weekly meeting/discussion of medieval lit and which resulted in my thesis on water imagery in The Pearl.  My niece Carolyn is gearing up for a semester at Oxford which includes 3 tutorials; I think the experience will be an incredible turning point in her education.