I am sitting in school right now. It's regents week and I don't have any proctoring assignments because I am an AP teacher so I must submit curriculum for a major audit of the program. What a waste of time. It seems that some colleges do not take AP courses seriously because some schools call every course an AP course to help kids get into college. My school doesn't do that, at least not in math. We have very high standards as to who gets into AP calculus and AP statistics. What I can't figure out is how spending hours typing a curriculum into the computer is going to make my course more meaningful? I can write anything I want. Who will ever know what I do in my classroom? Just because I am typing it, does it mean I will follow it?
I am actually a teacher that does follow all the guidelines set out by college board. I go to workshops whenever they are available in the New York area, and follow online discussion groups, but I know that what I am typing is not exactly what I am going to do.
Instead of making us spend hours doing this meaningless work, why not just look at the AP results from previous years? From my results, it would be obvious that everyone taking the course(last year all 68 of them) also took the AP exam. The average grade was 3.88 (out of a possible 5)and there was a 93% passing grade. This would hopefully show the kind of course I teach. And it would be much more realistic than the curriculum I am copying from a book.
The rantings of a teacher who retired from the classroom but not from education.
5 comments:
This particular waste of time is courtesy of (surprise) someone besides the NYC Dept of Ed.
ETS pumped up the AP's, practically forcing every school into offering more courses and sections to more students than made any sense. And now? They are worries about quality? What a massive money-making scam.
You are right: the results (% taking, % doing well) tell all that we need to know.
Btw, what text do you use, and have you changed recently?
not sure, when I get bored I play with settings. I think just colors were changed.
Ooops. I meant what calculus textbook do you use? My Thomas in high school had a yellow cover, but I was really asking about author(s) and not color.
sorry--we use kennedy book and larson, plus barron's review and another test question manual
sorry, I was daydreaming when I wrote my response the first time.
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