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Originally Posted by punkmusicfan21
Agreed. AP doesn't mean smarter, it's just a different kind of learning environment. I found it meant more discussion and it meant more sharing of your thoughts. I was always annoyed with people who just regurgitated something, most of the time it was taken completely out of context. I guess I should change the wording "People who pretend to have original thoughts annoy me. Sophists make me angry. And most of the time, it is these people who launch themselves into the conversation, as if they need to win a battle that isn't even being fought."
That annoys me. And Snowy, I think you'll notice the "I hate being spoken down to". I'm not elitist; I just hate phony intellectuals. High School didn't weed them out, which annoyed me to no end because I wanted to enjoy coming to school; most of the time it felt like an obligation for me because I had to sit through some sort of crazy opinion about how Tess of the D'Ubervilles was comparable to Gravity's Rainbow (I'm pretty sure that person just wanted to throw out a strange and random title and author that sounded obscure but I had read both pieces and called her out on it. She had no reply). University tended to oust those crazy pseudo-Pynchon fans pretty quickly.
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See, in my school it was the opposite--AP had a predetermined curriculum designed to teach to a test, whereas the advanced classes had a curriculum put together by the classroom teacher. The latter fostered more intelligent discussion than the former. I almost got into a bitch-fight because I said that my English teacher's advanced class was harder than his AP class, and one of the girls in my choir who happened to be in his AP class disagreed, fervently (I just think she didn't like the implication that she might be less intelligent). After this incident, I had a chance to ask the teacher what he thought--and he told me he emphasized teaching material that he himself enjoyed in his advanced class, and wouldn't think of going easy on us in choosing material. Because of the latitude he had in designing the curriculum himself, he did choose to make it harder. I have to thank this teacher profusely--he introduced me to a lifelong love of Thomas Hardy and Edith Wharton, and because of him I managed to get a perfect score on the analogy section of the SAT. He used practice tests for the Miller Analogies Test (a graduate school entrance exam) to drill us.
The phony intellectuals are something I see a lot around my campus. Fortunately, I work for a number of university professors, and get to indulge engaging my intellect with them on a regular basis. It is refreshing to sit down with someone and be able to discuss how I used Michel Foucault as a source material for a paper and know they know what I'm talking about. It's one of the reasons I come here to TFP.