issue w/ teacher
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| Fri, 11-17-2006 - 11:25am |
I just can't wait til parent-teacher confs. next week! my DD was telling me last night that she "hates" her anatomy teacher. My DD is very strong willed and doesn't hesitate to speak her mind. She asked the teacher what her grade was yesterday, which is when the grades had to be in. The teacher told my DD that she had a "c". I don't think she has gotten a C for her whole academic career. In fact, she's in the top 10% of her class. So my DD asks to look at the grades and the teacher said she was missing 3 labs. 2 of them my DD did but didn't hand in (I don't know why, except one day she was absent, looking at a college, but I don't know why she didn't hand it in the next class.) The 3rd lab was one they had just done and gotten back and for some reason, the teacher made a mistake and gave everyone a 0 on it instead of putting in their grades. My DD pointed out that adding in a 0 for everyone would bring down their grades and the teacher said it wouldn't, but my DD kept insisting that it would until the teacher finally "got it" and agreed to change everyone's grades. (I guess math isn't her strong point.)
The thing that bothers me is that my DD says that everyone in the class is getting a C or D and the teacher's excuse is that "it's an honors class, so you should be able to do more work." Well, all my DD's classes for 4 yrs. have been honors classes and I haven't heard that excuse before. She has gotten all As and Bs. It's true that an honor class gets weighted, so that when their class rank is done, if you get an A in an honors level, it's worth more than if you get an A in Academic, but to me, if eveyone is barely passing, maybe the teacher should re-think how she is teaching.
I have taught a few classes in college and my goal was to get everyone to understand the subject so I would be happy to give all As. Noone was failing. I really hate these teachers who think their job is to make the class as hard as possible. Is the class really learning anything that way? I know one night, my DD had a lot to do and I was helping her by typing an outline for this class. They actually have to make an outline of what they have read, type it and I guess hand it in. Maybe some people study better by writing things down, but to me it seems like a big waste of time. (I was so lucky that the subject matter was digestion and elimination too.) I'm not the kind of person to complain to teachers either, because I feel like kids just have to learn to deal w/ stuff on their own even if they have a "mean" teacher. I'd just like to know what other people, esp. teachers, think of this.
I told my DD the only bright side to this would be that next year when she goes to college and has to take Anatomy for nursing school, she will already know it.

I never understood that type of teaching either but there seem to be 1 or 2 in every high school
The area we lived in before this one had a Chemistry teacher like that. More than half the class failed and NO ONE ever got an A. To me, said teacher was not doing his job. How many jobs can you keep with a more than 50% failure rate. But he had tenure AND many parents though he was the cats meow in that their kids would be ahead of everyone else when they took Chemistry in college. I never quite understood that reasoning......
Anyway, it sucks but yeah, I think it happens and the two missing lab reports are going to be all you get back in the discussion, dont you think?
And why is it ALWAYS the science teachers?????
It could be that this teacher expects more from the kids and that previous teachers did not.
Perhaps the kids all deserve Cs and Ds for the work they are doing. They are not being "coddled" and "hand held". For example, if your daughter didn't hand in two labs and didn't have prior agreement to hand it in late because of an absence, she deserves zeros on those labs. Why are not not getting on your kid's case about those labs?
If the teacher had not put in the grades for the last "lab", the kids were all in the same level. The teacher might not have factor that mark into the grades yet. The marks could very well be based on a cumulative average,not including that grade. And if all the kids were missing that grade, they were all on the same level.
I also find it rather strange when you say that "NO ONE fails" your class. That is unreasonable and tells me that you are teaching to the lowest common level.
I suspect you're dealing with a couple of things here.
I do agree that my DD should have handed in the labs on time and I would have no sympathy for her if the teacher didn't accept them or gave her a lower mark for handing them in late. IN a way you are right that the teacher is treating everyone the same, but the point my DD was trying to make by stating that giving everyone a zero (incorrectly, because the teacher was too lazy to get the grades in on time) for one assignment was that it brought everyone's grades down. If she cut out the zero and posted the correct grades for the next quarter, then it would have been ok.
If you don't believe me, try this--if you have 10 assignments that are 100 points each, the total would be 1000. If someone got a 95 on each assignment (to simplify it very much), then their average would be 95. If you added in a 0 for one grade, that would be 11 assignments, 10 of which are 95, which would be 950, then divide 950/11, the average is 86. That makes a big difference on grades--it brings an A down to a B! I thought that would be obvious to anyone who had graduated from high school, never mind college. My son is in 5th grade and he is doing mean, median and mode now.
BTW, my DD is ranked 35 in her class of over 400 kids, so I really have never had a problem w/ her grades, which are all honors level since 9th grade. If I sound defensive here, I'm trying not to. Right now she has 6 classes- 5 of them are honors and one is AP Calculus. Her grades for this quarter were 3 As and 3Bs. Of course, the lowest grade was Anatomy. And the teacher wrote "could do better." this was the first negative comment I have ever seen on her report card in 12 years. I figure the teacher is probably mad at her for pushing her on the grades, but maybe she could do better too, I don't know. I think she overloaded herself this semester by taking more classes than she has to, but she refuses to drop a class. I was actually more worried about Calculus since this is the first AP class she has had, but she got a B, which I was really relieved about. I have never gone in to "yell at" a teacher and I have never complained about a grade since she has never gotten lower than a B, there wasn't much to complain about. I know that she had more trouble in PRe-Calculus last year because the teacher was pretty new and just didn't seem to know how to teach, which I could tell the first night I met her. The only way my DD passed was to get other kids to explain the subject to her. I also agree that she has to deal with it cause I'm not in the class and I can't study the subject for her and that even if she hates the teacher, that's not an excuse.