Ending week 2

The hemoraging of AP calculus students has stopped, though there may still be a trickle... One of my best and brightest told me on Friday that she's going to drop, because she doesn't want to spend her senior year working this hard. Good kid, really, and I have to appreciate her honesty... So, if she goes, that'll leave 15, of which two are going to need to either get a lot of outside help, or else drop. These two have both talked to me about dropping, one of them in tears in class, and they're both really overwhelmed and not getting it; I think that each of them, in their own way, has shut down. They're in crisis mode, and if I can get them past that, help them get some confidence, I think they've got a chance. I'll try to get ahold of their families this week, maybe visit and introduce myself, to talk about how to get them on track.

Interestingly, when I started writing this entry, I was convinced that they should both drop the class. And now, my damned undying hope is winning out... because, really, my job is not to weed out the kids who are going to struggle in this class. My job is to teach my students. (And, maybe this is close to that third epiphany I was talking about before... Not a good enough sound bite, yet, though...)


In any case, this week's exam went much better: 75% passed it, and 25% earned a B (no As, yet). And what's wild is, at the end of the second week, I was testing these kids on their ability to find the derivative formula for a polynomial-- that's right, we're doing derivatives in week two. Okay, week three we're backfilling a bit, going into more limit theory and talking about continuity, but all from the perspective of "how does this relate to the concept / computation of a derivative?"

So, that's pretty nifty. This week's exam is very lightly modified from a 2003 AP test question, which is also exciting.