When you care about students learning at a high level it can
be lonely. You have your own personal
set of ethics and often not much else to motivate you forward. In high school, when you are responsible for
students for such a short period of time (50 min. a day for one year, sometimes
only half), there is no real responsibility for slacking. It’s hard to take the blame or credit for a
student’s failure or success because so many teachers have been and are currently
involved in their education.
Today I just discovered a way that might change: AP Chemistry.
I think I might get to teach it next year! A coworker just emailed me a set of AP test
data for our school to use for my data project.
If I can improve on past AP test scores it would actually be something
concrete, tangible that I can point to and say “Hey, I did that!”
Do you get positive reinforcement for high standards in your
building?
Any thoughts about how we might encourage high standards at
the high school?
I do not teach high school so I have never thought of how hard it would be to be pulled 3 different ways depending on grades yet trying to stick to what you think the standard should be. That has to be hard! I think that it would be important to have high standards especially in the subjects you teach because going from high school chem to college chem was a shocking surprise for me. It was overload and I was required to complete labs on my own along with my write-ups. Having high standards I think will better prepare them for what is next.
ReplyDeleteI wish there was a "like" button on this blog, I would click it right now! I totally understand what you mean. It is lonely when you are the only one doing something, and it is hard when you have nothing to measure your impact against. I am able to see glimpses when my students take placement tests or the CLEP in Spanish, but they don't usually call me up and go, "Hey Fandiño! Guess how it went?" They usually just tell me in passing if I happen to run into them, or their parents let me know sometimes. I hope you get the class!
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