A Saturday reflection as the school year heads to its conclusion
Sometimes as teachers we find that no matter how much we may have planned, we have to throw it out the window and improvise according to the situation at hand.
Normally I pace my instruction for Advanced Placement government to finish all the material about two weeks before the AP exam, and then have the students do semi-guided reviews for two weeks. For several reasons, that is not the case this year. For one thing, rather than being the test on the first morning of the several weeks of AP testing, this year we are on the morning of the 2nd week, May 15. Several of my students will be taking other AP exams earlier, which will (a) have them out of classes, and (b) interrupt the continuity of preparation.
Of greater importance, this year's students came in with far less background, and have struggled far more with some concepts than any previous year.
I had already implemented a change I made in the middle of last year. Instead of curving multiple choice tests (because the score on the AP exam is itself curved around the median), I would let students look up and correct their mistakes for partial credit to raise their grades. That is helping them correctas well their mistaken
Normally I pace my instruction for Advanced Placement government to finish all the material about two weeks before the AP exam, and then have the students do semi-guided reviews for two weeks. For several reasons, that is not the case this year. For one thing, rather than being the test on the first morning of the several weeks of AP testing, this year we are on the morning of the 2nd week, May 15. Several of my students will be taking other AP exams earlier, which will (a) have them out of classes, and (b) interrupt the continuity of preparation.
Of greater importance, this year's students came in with far less background, and have struggled far more with some concepts than any previous year.
I had already implemented a change I made in the middle of last year. Instead of curving multiple choice tests (because the score on the AP exam is itself curved around the median), I would let students look up and correct their mistakes for partial credit to raise their grades. That is helping them correctas well their mistaken