Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Confession Number Fifty-Six

I must confess...

... that my AP Euro teacher completely fails at teaching. And everyone in my class feels the same way.
He thinks that in an AP class you should focus on the big picture during class discussions and then worry about the little details on the test. This is a completely ridiculous philosophy on an AP class.

AP classes are supposed to be at the college level. I'm pretty sure that teachers in college don't teach like he teaches. He doesn't even know what he's talking about! Countless times, we have corrected him on his facts.

The essays are ridiculous. He doesn't even grade them. He doesn't read them. He simply gives everyone 100%. I heard that one of my friends wrote one essay on the origin of the word f**k and still got a 100%. It makes me so mad! He's not preparing us for the AP Euro exam at all!

This is his second year teaching AP Euro, and he should have never been given that position. So many people warned me not to take his class. Sometimes I wish I would have listened.

Last night, I sent a message out to a bunch of people in the class on facebook asking if anybody would back me up if I brought this situation up with the administration. I got a heck of a lot of support, but we ultimately decided to talk to our teacher first and tell him that we feel he is teaching the wrong way. If he didn't change, we would bring it up with our principal.

Today when I came into class, guess who I saw! The principal. Sitting at our teacher's desk to evaluate his teaching. Our teacher performed pretty well for not knowing crap. He still got a lot of things wrong. Not to mention the fact that a girl in our class taught us about Peter the Great the first half of class. You should have seen our principal's face! She was paying such great attention to the things she was saying about Peter the Great; it was kind of scary. I think she thought to herself, "Wow! A student has actually learned something?! I'm so surprised one of our students has actually learned something. This is so intriguing!" The problem is that our principal has too much faith in the teachers, and I'm sure she gave our teacher a good report.

In light of this situation, about 7 people from the message I sent out on facebook decided to have an online study group. We all logged onto AIM and got in a chat room. We divided up the terms that our teacher gives us to hint at the random facts that will be on the test and we each defined our terms. It was much more successful than I imagined it would have been. And now we have created a forum. Yayz for us!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Way to go Justin!!