No problem. I was chatting on a whatsapp group with a few of my classmates and I believe that stuff will get real on tuesday when we go to class.
Mmm, yeah. You should hear the story about my teacher right now - it's starting to get really bad.
So basically, my school is attempting to offer two AP classes freshman year, and it's their first year implementing them. One of the classes is AP Human Geography - which is a really easy class, mainly due to its easily explained concepts and ideas from the textbook, as well as there being many easy-to-look-up terms/concepts, like the "Demographic transition model" and "Illegal Immigration". Seems pretty easy, right? Well, it should be, and really is, but the teacher is making the class hell.
In the class, we're getting a ton of homework. When I tried recording how much homework I had from that class, I can tell you, it's about 3 - 4 hours a night. My other AP class has almost none - we're supposed to take care of ourselves and own work (which is reasonable). The teacher gives us the excuse that it's "related to the subject and test" - which while it's related to the subject, it's usually sloppily written and contradicts itself in its own directions.
The situation got really bad when the teacher gave us something called the "Obituaries Project" where we had to find obituaries of people who migrated to the US in their lives. However, the biggest problems we had were, first, the fact that she wanted specific time periods of when people migrated/died - from before 1920, 1921 - 1945, etc. On the directions, she stated the measure for these time periods should be "from what year they migrated to the US" - which seems like the obvious choice, mainly because we were looking for obituaries of US immigrants. However, even though she
specifically stated this on the directions, when I emailed her to clear confusion, she stated that she wanted the
death date of the immigrants, not the
migration date. Only me and my friend knew this, and attempted to tell other people, but nobody believed us (as the directions stated differently). Not only this, but only premium sites/databases (like ancestry) hold obituaries from before the 90's - where she gave the excuse that it was a "searching and research skills assignment" - where as the one of two kids in the class who knows how to use computers and Google, I couldn't find a single database
other than ancestry that held obituaries this old.
Also, the work has little to no relation to the test at all. Sure, it helps "expand our knowledge" of the subject, but the problem with the tests is that they are publisher made, the teacher never looks over them,
and they use word from word sentences from the book, even when these sentences have nothing to do with the subject of the material in the first place. As of now, I'm the one of three kids who have even scraped by with a 90.5 (A in our school) percent grade. Most kids have D's in the class, and with our most recent test, the highest score was 25/35 questions correct.
When I talk about a ton of homework, I mean - a
ton of homework. The homework is tedious, nearly completely useless when it comes to getting good grades in the class, where most kids aren't learning a single thing - they're coming into the class with high expectations and wanting to learn, but coming out with the thought alike to "oh yay, more homework".
Even better, though, the principle sides with the fact that kids are just "procrastinating" and the teacher is doing nothing wrong, we're just not working hard enough. Almost every day, he reminds us how "greatful we should be to only get 1 hour of homework a day". We're getting 5, and he just claims it's bad time management, and we're all being lazy, and we should really be getting 9 hours of sleep
at least. Don't forget that there are kids with several clubs like me (and most of the school), where they practically have two extra hours of school plus 4-5 hours of homework. At most, you can only get 7 hours of sleep - the whole staff is contradicting themselves.
Most of all, however, is the fact that the one teacher that's giving us so much homework is a total stickler for how she grades work. Kids are trying their best, but if you make one mistake, she provides a D for the assignment. Most kids are doing normal work, likewise, just simple sentence answers (as the work should be), but still getting D's - the only reason I've been getting 100's on these assignments is due to my natural tendency to take too many notes and fill up the whole page, which is
really irritating, because with all the homework she gives us, most of us don't have time to write this much. (I'm lucky I write as fast as I do). Also, it's a BYOD (Bring your own device) school, and she bans taking notes on a computer, requiring us to take ridiculous amounts of notes by hand. When she tells us to do something on the computer, though, she forces us to print it -
for one project, I had to print 70 pages of paper.Not only that, but she also tells us to completely ignore internet safety - she claims to "make short passwords", "never clear your cookies", etc. She says putting your personal info online is no problem because apparently "everything is so secure now that you don't have anything to worry about".
Worst of all, however, is the fact that after a test that the majority of the class gets bad grades on (all of them so far), she gets really angry at the class and spends
a whole class period yelling at us. She punishes us with more work when
the work that she's giving us is what's giving us no time to study. She singles out kids for failing, and ends the class saying that the kids "asking questions about the subject are wasting time", then rewards us with more homework.
Now, I'd like to say that everything pans out over time, but this is a
freshman high school class, not college or a junior/senior year AP class. We're just getting used to the new college environment of AP, and she's completely destroying us with her amounts of work, and refusing to listen. It's getting really ridiculous.
