Misery and dispair

Just finished day one (of two) of final exams. Because of my schedule (mostly even-numbered classes), today was only the 1st half of AP calc. I wrote up a challenging final, using retired AP test questions.

And now, I feel like a really, really lousy teacher. Using the AP practice of deducting a quarter point for wrong answers, HALF of the class scored a zero or less. This seriously challenges my image of myself as a teacher: obviously, a majority of the class has not learned as much as they need to.

It also motivates me to start looking at my own personal "elephant in the room", my lack of planning. I have done a really, really terrible job of planning curriculum and instruction over the past ten weeks. I've even been pretty well aware of the fact that I was doing a terrible job of it. So, really, what this quickly boils down to is, I haven't been working hard enough to allow my students to succeed.

And that brings me back around to my old adage, "I could be a really incredibly effective teacher, even in my first year of teaching, but only for about two weeks. After that, I'd be burned out, and have to move on." I've been telling myself a lot this year that it's sort of okay to spend a year getting acquainted with teaching calculus, figuring out what's hard to learn, what the keystone concepts are, and the like. And, that's still basically true. But, how do I justify the likely outcome of this experience for this group of kids? How do I explain to them that they might do better if I worked harder, but that I'm choosing not to do it?


So, I think, I need to make some changes in how I approach this class. At a minimum, I need to get back to regularly plotting out what the lesson will be (how the time is spent in class, what the intended goal of the lesson is, and how I'll assess it), and perhaps more importantly, plotting out how each day fits together to build a solid foundation for learning.

Also, I need to rock on some fundamentals with these guys, which means finding a way to make it at least a little exciting, doing basic algebra...