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TheReportCard.com St. Augustine, Florida
A Concord Review High School Author (now
at Stanford) Wins A Rhodes Scholarship
Posted on 15 January 2015
Maya Krishnan
By Bill Korach www.thereportcard.org
Rigorous writing is not required or taught in most high schools in America, but serious academic writing is de rigueur for admission to top colleges and is highly respected by employers as a critical skill. The Concord Review has published many of the best high school history papers in the world. TCR Publisher Will Fitzhugh says his authors are accepted at the greatest universities in the world including Annapolis, Harvard, MIT, Stanford, The University of Chicago, West Point, Yale, and many others. Maya Krishnan wrote her Emerson Prize-winning paper for The Concord Review when she was a senior at Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland.
Ms. Krishnan, now a Senior at Stanford, has been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University. Not every student can win a Rhodes Scholarship, but every student can benefit by becoming a better writer. Writing an excellent history paper not only teaches writing skills, also teaches the writer research and acquisition of knowledge. In her interview with The Report Card, Ms. Krishnan discusses her paper and how the effort paid so many dividends.
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Q: Your HS history research paper was 24 pages in length. What was the requirement of the International Baccalaureate class? Do you recall the length of the average submission from your class that year?
My IB History class required a paper that had a word count between 1,500 and 2,000. I ended up getting very interested in my topic and doing lots of extra reading. Eventually I realized that only a fraction of my research could end up in the IB History paper, so I mentioned to my history teacher, Robert Thomas, that I wanted to work on a second independent paper to go along with the class assignment. He was very enthusiastic about the project and encouraged me to develop the paper into a full-length submission.
Q: Who inspired you to take an interest in writing?
One of my high school English teachers, Daniel McKenna, was one of the first teachers who got me very interested in writing. In Mr. McKenna’s English class, literature and writing felt high-stakes—like there were crucial insights worth gaining from texts like Othello and Macbeth, and that intense critical analysis was the only way to find them. I remember getting very invested in a critical essay I wrote on some of James Joyce’s short stories in Mr. McKenna’s English class. I’ve enjoyed analytical writing every since.
This class was part of a very rigorous education in writing I got from the International Baccalaureate program at my high school, Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Maryland. There were many great English teachers at Richard Montgomery, and students were regularly writing critical analyses of poetry and prose from the start of ninth grade. All students ought to be able to receive that kind of intense training in analytical writing from their schools.
Q: Did you have a “tiger mom” or were you self-motivated?
I didn’t have a “tiger mom” and I generally followed my own interests, but my parents were always extremely supportive.
Q: Why did you select the topic of Soviet Realism? Are you interested in the Soviet Union, art, history or all of the above?
All of the above—In my tenth grade IB Art class we learned about the explosive creativity of Russian artists in the 1910s and 1920s. So many new styles of art like Suprematism and Constructivism were being developed at the time, and they were developed as part of a broader utopian desire to completely reshape society. I found the notion of remaking the world through art gripping and fascinating. Then in my IB History class we spend a long time studying early 20th century Russian history, and I learned about the violence that can follow extreme political ambitions to remake the world. My choice of topic came out of a desire to better understand the blend of power, promise, and danger that accompanies the urge to fashion the world according to a new image.
Q: How did you learn about The Concord Review?
Several older students in my high school had already been published in The Concord Review by the time I was working on my paper for my History class. I remember reading their essays in printed copies of the journal and being very impressed by their work, and I recall thinking that it would be great if I could submit an essay to the journal, too.
Q: How did your submission to The Concord Review benefit you?
My submission was the first piece of academic work that truly felt like my own intellectual project. Although of course I had written essays before, they hadn’t been long enough to provide the opportunity for the kind of original thinking that an essay for The Concord Review requires. It also made me realize how much responsibility comes with writing history—when I write history I’m making a claim about the way the world really developed, and what I write may shape the way other people think about the past, so I have to be extremely careful to represent reality to the best of my abilities. I had never felt that kind of responsibility before and it was transformative for me.
Writing a paper for The Concord Review also prepared me well for college. My submission taught me how to do research, a skill that students are frequently assumed to already have by the time they enter college. I remember taking the bus to the library of a local university so I could use Jstor and access scholarly monographs. I felt a small jolt of excitement every time I came across a book or article that seemed relevant to my topic. It was an introduction to the thrill of research.
Q: There appears to be a trend away from history and from writing in high school. What do you feel writing and history contributed to your education?
I think the trend away from both writing and history is disastrous. Writing is more than a tool for communicating ideas—it’s a way of producing original and consistent thinking. To write on a single topic for ten, fifteen, or twenty pages, you have to move beyond the realm of received opinion and generate your own ideas. To defend an idea in that same space, you have to struggle to maintain a coherent line of argument. A two-page or five-page essay easily masks inconsistent or incoherent thinking. The long essay is the best way to learn to think.
Learning history taught me how to understand the deeper forces that influence the kinds of events I read about in the news every day. How can you understand what’s going on between Israel and Palestine right now without also understanding the history of colonialism, the history of European anti-Semitism, and the history of nineteenth-century nationalism? History provides students with the intellectual training they need to grapple with the complexity of real-world human affairs. Historical thinking is never going to lose its relevance.
Q: Do you agree with the modern notion that the purpose of education is utilitarian, that is to train you for the job market, or do you feel that the classical idea of education for its own sake is a better path?
I believe that the most useful education is one that teaches creative, insightful, and rigorous thinking. An education in the classics or an education in poetry can ultimately provide more lasting (and useful!) lessons than an education which caters to the latest trends of the job market. In a world where shifts in technology are constantly changing the kinds of jobs that are available, it’s probably more important for students to be engaged learners and thinkers than it is for them to master any one particular set of techniques. Reading, writing, and thinking are the ultimate twenty-first century skills.
Q: What careers are you considering?
I’m considering getting a PhD in philosophy and going into academia. I studied philosophy and computer science as an undergraduate and am eventually hoping to work on the philosophy of technology and the philosophy of computer science. I’d also consider entering the tech industry, but academia is my ultimate dream.
Q: I notice you have an Indian name, is English your first language?
English is my first language, but my grandparents lived with me when I was growing up and they spoke some Tamil with me. I don’t speak much Tamil myself, though.
Q: What do you expect to get out of your years at Oxford?
I’ll be spending one year studying computer science and one year studying philosophical theology. My hope is to gain a deeper understanding of the social and ethical implications of recent developments in computer technology. Human experience has changed in so many ways in the past several decades as a result of the personal computing revolution and the Internet, and I want to use my philosophical training to think about how we can responsibly manage these changes.
This post was written by: wkorach—who has written 610 posts on The Report Card.
Adolescent Literacy Flim-Flam
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
There is no question that lots of people around the nation are concerned about the literacy of American adolescents. They must be worried about the ability of our students to read and write, one would assume. It might also seem reasonable to take for granted that professionals interested in teen skills in reading books and writing papers would give close attention to those students who are now reading a fair amount of nonfiction and writing really exemplary research papers at the high school level.
At this point, expectations need to be altered a bit. Surely coaches of Adolescent Sports have a tremendous fascination with the best teen athletes in the country. There are lots of prizes and even scholarships for high school students who perform very well in football, soccer, basketball, baseball, etc., and there are even college scholarships for good teen cheerleaders. We might think it odd if all high school coaches cared about was physical education classes and even in those, only those student/athletes who were most un-coordinated and incompetent. Not that it is unimportant to worry about teens who are overweight and cannot take part in sports, but nevertheless, coaches tend to focus on the best athletes, and colleges and the society at large seem to think that is fine for them to do, and is even their job, some would say.
But when it comes to students who read well and write good term papers, the Literacy Community has no interest in them. It is only able to focus on the illiterate and incompetent among Adolescents, and their professional peers seem to think that is fine for them to do, and is even their real job. And it surely is important for them to help those who need help. They should do research and develop curricula and programs to help teens become more literate. They have been doing this for many decades, and yet more than a million of our high school graduates each and every year are in remedial (non-credit) courses when they are “admitted” (conditionally) to colleges around the country.
Perhaps the current approach to literacy training for young people might deserve a second look. The Chronicle of Higher Education surveyed college professors, 90% of whom reported that they thought the freshmen in their classes were not very well prepared in reading, doing research, or writing term papers. Their high school teachers had thought they were well prepared, but college professors didn’t see it that way.
No doubt many of those students had the benefit of the Adolescent Literacy Initiatives of AdLit.org, National Council of Teachers of English, National Writing Project, Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), Alliance for Excellent Education, Partnership for Reading, National Adolescent Literacy Coalition, Learning Point Associates, Education Development Center, Council of Chief State School Officers, Scholastic, Adolescent Literacy Coaching Project (ALCP), National Governors’ Association, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, Adolescent Literacy Research Network, Adolescent Literacy Support Project, WGBH Adolescent Literacy website, and the International Reading Association, not to mention the many state and local literacy programs, and yet our students’ literacy still leaves a lot to be desired, even if they can graduate from high school.
To me it seems that, unlike coaches, the literacy pros are almost allergic to good academic work in reading and writing by our teens. I am not really sure why that would be the case, but in the last 27 years of working with exemplary secondary students of history from 46 states and 40 other countries, I have not found one single Literacy Organization or Literacy Program which had the slightest interest in their first-rate work, which I have been privileged to publish in 103 issues of The Concord Review so far. They may have heard about it, but they don’t want to know about it, as far as I can tell.
It does seem foolish to me, that if they truly want to improve the reading and writing of adolescents, they don’t take a tiny bit of interest in exemplary reading and writing at the high school level, and not only in the students’ work, but even perhaps in the work of the teachers who guided them to that level of excellence, just as high school coaches are interested in the best athletes and usually in their coaches as well.
They could still spend the bulk of their time on grants given them to do “meta-analyses” of Literacy Strategies and the like, but it seems really stupid not to glance once or twice at very good written work by our most diligent teens (the Literate Adolescents).
Of course, I am biased. I believe that showing teachers and students the best term papers I can find will inspire them to try to reach for more success in literacy, and some of my authors agree with me: e.g. “When a former history teacher first lent me a copy of The Concord Review, I was inspired by the careful scholarship crafted by other young people. Although I have always loved history passionately, I was used to writing history papers that were essentially glorified book reports...As I began to research the Ladies’ Land League, I looked to The Concord Review for guidance on how to approach my task...In short, I would like to thank you not only for publishing my essay, but for motivating me to develop a deeper understanding of history. I hope that The Concord Review will continue to fascinate, challenge and inspire young historians for years to come.” Emma Curran Donnelly Hulse, Columbia Class of 2009; North Central High School (IN) Class of 2005......“The opportunity that The Concord Review presented drove me to rewrite and revise my paper to emulate its high standards. Your journal truly provides an extraordinary opportunity and positive motivation for high school students to undertake extensive research and academic writing, experiences that ease the transition from high school to college.” Pamela Ban, Harvard Class of 2012; Thomas Worthington High School (OH) Class of 2008...
But what do they know? They are just some of those literate adolescents in whom the Professional Adolescent Literacy Community seems to have no interest.
This message is from a highly capable high school senior,
Class of 2015 (name withheld)
Digital Side Effects:
In my opinion, technology’s place is not in the classroom, at least not for the most part. Sometimes it is necessary, but most of the time, it only serves as a distraction and offers activities that inhibit productive, successful learning.
At my school, students are allowed and actually supposed to use laptops to take notes during each class, unless the teacher specifically instructs otherwise, which they rarely do. Sitting in class, I often see other students’ laptops open to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, celebrity gossip websites, even Hulu, a website for watching TV shows. Then, a few days later when we have an assessment, students will anxiously ask a number of questions on the material taught in class while they were surfing the web. The entire class is slowed down, everyone’s time is wasted, teachers are disrespected, students come to value web surfing over learning, students retain less information which then makes for a shakier foundation for learning more in the future, and students learn to prefer cramming, or come to see cramming as the only way to prepare for assessments.
Additionally, technology can help students get out of doing assignments in the way that will most benefit them. For example, students will look up how to solve a chemistry or a math problem, rather than completing it themselves independently. Students will look up summaries of English texts to avoid having to actually read the full work. Students will look up translations of Spanish assignments to avoid having actually to read the full text in Spanish. Perhaps, using technology, students can still temporarily do well on in-school assessments, but in the long term, which truly matters, students will not be prepared for the challenges in their future and their career.
Many middle-school-aged boys, such as those at my younger brother’s school, are addicted to video games. After being introduced to video games, often through their classmates at school, these students cannot stop thinking about the games. Perhaps their parents and teachers will impose restrictions on when and how long they can play the games, but the entire time they are not playing games, they are probably thinking about, and looking forward to playing, the games. In that sense, the video games distract them almost all the time and have a large negative impact on their lives, especially their academic lives.
In the summer of 2013, I attended a math research summer program where instructors created made-up names for math theorems, concepts, and conjectures they were explaining, so that students would not be able to search for them using technology and thereby escape the crucial learning process. Overall, the program was a success largely, or at least partly, because of that practice, and students were able to learn much more, develop their math skills more, and discuss much more as a result.
The Concord Review—Varsity Academics®
I am happy to send along this letter describing both “logistical” and pedagogical dimensions of how I have used The Concord Review in class since employing the first class sets in the 1988-89 academic year. You know from the fact that we have expanded our class subscription “coverage” from all U.S. History classes to all U.S. History and World History since 1500 classes that we have been very satisfied with the Review. In fact, I am glad to say that, due to an expanding school enrollment, our class set for this year will number about 80 subscriptions.
In terms of “logistics,” the system we have employed here has been simple and consistent with the way we deal with texts in all disciplines. Our students purchase their texts, so as students move through our bookstore before school opens, they mark the texts they need on a list, and the above-noted classes simply have The Concord Review listed as a text.
Pedagogically, I (or other appropriate instructor) view each issue with an eye toward an article or articles which are appropriate for any part of the material under current or imminent study. Because of the wide range of subjects and chronological eras covered in each issue, it is pretty easy to discern immediately one or more articles which will be applicable and useful. I do not feel compelled to put the Review in student hands the day the issues arrive, but rather plan ahead. For example, I might be covering mid-19th century reform in U.S. History when new issues arrive, but will hold off until we are doing the Civil War to distribute the Reviews and assign an article on some phase of the Civil War. The girls are told to treat each issue of the Review as an extension of their texts, meaning that they must hold on to each issue, for additional articles may be assigned from a given issue later in the year. Again, given the wide range of topics and eras covered in the typical issue, it is not unusual for me to be able (again, as an example) to assign an article from one issue on the Civil War in December, then go back to the same issue in April for an article on some portion of mid-20th century History. Students have been great about this, and are thus prepared throughout the year.
As to the articles themselves, I have found several uses for them. An obvious advantage of the articles in the Review is that they are scholarly and informative, and, as my students have noted, a refreshing break from the text (this is a comment I frequently hear). Secondly, the articles, in addition to being scholarly, are readable, and the “right size,” and thus readily accessible to high school students. Even “popular” history, such as found in American Heritage [now gone] and the like, can be “too much” for high schoolers, as the articles can be too long or presume too much a priori knowledge. The articles in The Concord Review are substantial and appropriately challenging, yet “intellectually digestible” for all students, not just the gifted few in an AP section, for example.
In addition to providing excellent reading, allowing for deeper exploration and discussion of some aspect of history, the Review provides an excellent methodological model. All students in History at Santa Catalina must write research papers based on both primary and secondary sources, with the length and quality expectations of the papers escalating appropriately from freshman to senior year. Sometimes, as you well know from your own teaching experience, explaining “arcane” items like where to put footnotes, etc. to students can be like trying to explain what “pink” looks like to a person who has never been able to see. The Review puts in students’ hands excellent History, not only in terms of content, but in terms of methodology as well: footnotes, bibliography, placement, and all the other details. I have found it helpful not only to have students read an article for its content, but then to dissect it methodologically, asking my students (as appropriate to their level) to identify primary as opposed to secondary sources, to suggest what other sources might have been helpful, which sources might have the most credibility, and so on. We can thus effectively and efficiently combine quality reading with critical thinking/analysis and a methodology “practicum.”
The fact that teenagers are always highly interested in what other teenagers are doing is helpful, for the articles hold something of a natural attraction to the students. In addition, they are always impressed that students like themselves can produce such high-quality work. Many teens are used to hearing how poorly their age group is doing academically, but The Concord Review is refreshing proof that such is not universally the case!
I could go on anecdotally for quite a while, but I think that would result in an excessively long epistle! Suffice it to say that my students (yes, even those who don’t “like History”) find the Review informative, accessible, and instructive, not only in terms of material they are learning, but also in terms of critical thinking and mastery of historical methodology. In a time when those of us who teach History frequently find ourselves hard-pressed for classroom time in meeting our goals, the Review is truly “triply rewarding” for students and instructors. I cannot imagine a junior high or high school History course which could not benefit immediately and tangibly from having its students use The Concord Review.
December 2002, Broeck N. Oder
Chair, Department of History, Santa Catalina School, Monterey, California 93940
The Concord Review 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, MA 01776 www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
