I don’t know what you people think is going to happen to this guy if he’s reported. Complaining that a teacher is a jerk and doesn’t do a good job isn’t likely to result in any serious consequences for him. I think the most likely consequence is that the class would become even more uncomfortable for Biggirl’s daughter.
I’d suggest having a talk with the teacher, not his superiors. I think a friendly chat would be more effective than tattling. Besides, tattling would be rude – voice your concerns to the offending party before going to the higher-ups.
I really enjoyed mathematics and was good at it up until my freshman year of college when I ran into a thousand-year-old drill sergeant with an inflamed prostate who daily tried to inflict precalculus on his class. I haven’t taken a math class since.
I don’t have any advice, Biggirl, but I’ll certainly understand if your daughter suddenly snaps and goes after the guy with a weed wacker.
It’s not the picking on her that she has a real problem with. It pisses her off, but she is her mother’s daughter. She can take it and dish it out. Really.
What’s fustrating her and making her cry is that she doesn’t understand and the teacher has made it quite clear he has no intentions of explaining it to her. I will pick up that book for her and find her a tutor.
A third vote for snagging a copy of Sylvanus Thompson’s Calculus Made Easy. If I’d had that when I was in college, math would have gone so much more smoothly. Don’t let the fact that it was written almost 100 years ago throw you; it’s every bit as helpful today as it was then.
Oh, I didn’t understand calculus until my third or fourth semester either. I think that is true with a lot of the higher math I took, I just learned the formulas and how to solve problems and eventually I understood what was going on. I think a lot of people that have “math block” try to “understand” it too much. Just go through the motions and learn the rules, eventually you will understand what it’s all about.
For calculus, think of a first derivative as a line riding along on a single point where it intersects a curve. The line (derivative) is the tangent to the curve at any point you choose. For an integral, think of the space surrounded by a curve to be filled with rectangles, now make those rectangles skinnier and skinnier until the width of a single rectangle approaches zero. That’s pretty much elementary calculus is on a single variable.
I also disagree with this. This approach is fine if you just love numbers and are happy with just playing with mathematicals abstracts. I’m not like that, and I don’t think most people are. In order to get grips with something I need a reference back to the real world. Once I have that I can be as abstract as you like, I’m happy with it. But without it, it’s just playing around with equations. I can do it, but it’s totally pointless and has no relevance to any real-life situation. Far better that I have a explanation of what the equation is doing, even in the most simplistic terms, first.
First of all, a teacher who intentionally upsets a student, for ANY reason, is out of line.
I would make a point of speaking with the administrators. True, if the teacher has tenure, they can’t exactly fire him, but there are any number of other things they can do to put pressure on him. And administrators do NOT like parents going berserk in their offices.
If this does not work, seek out the teacher and go berserk on HIM. It’s one thing to humiliate children. It’s another thing to deal with a fully-growed-adult-person, live and in your face.
I do not recommend violence. I’ve found that being loud and aggressive is helpful, though. The appearance of being on the edge of losing control is good, too.
You’re going to have a problem in higher math if you always need real world examples to fall back on. There are plenty of real world examples for calculus, but beyond calculus you are going to have a hard time finding examples to moitivate the theory.
Go to the administration, go to the board, go to the teacher. They need to know you mean business about this. It is not right for the teacher to be doing this. I was in a (somewhat) similar position my senior year in highschool. My physiology teacher made a point, daily, of poking fun at my religion (I’m Jewish). It finally got so bad (and I hadn’t told anyone) that I talked back to him, got sent to the principal’s, and almost everything was sorted out there. I wish I’d spoken up sooner, and to the right people.
as a school district employee I second going to the administration about his behavior. There are mulitple policies against his behavior. It probably wont get him fired but school districts really, really hate irate LOUD parents!
And definately get her the tutor. All the help she can get is a good thing.
I was taking an algebra class at at the community college. I was getting an A but the shit made absolutely no sense to me. Number lines? Absolute values? NOBODY CAN GIVE ME A PLAUSIBLE REASON WHY!!! Or why I, as a normal average citizen, should care.
I got an A in the class, but cannot bring myself to take the next one.
May I suggest that you make an appointment to speak with the teacher privately asap. Go in with a tape recorder going and explain to the teacher that you want to be able to discuss the conference with your daughter and any one else who might be involved. Ask her if she has any objection to that. If she objects, turn it off. But at least you will have that much on tape and you can take notes on the rest of it.
Go in with a list of questions that you want answers to. (Get your daughter to be as specific as possible about incidents that have happened and about her feelings in response to these situations. That gives you a starting point.)
Don’t let her get away with saying, “Your daughter shouldn’t feel that way.” Just respond with, “I don’t want her to feel that way either, so what can we do to change that?” You get the idea. Don’t let her be evasive.
If the problem continues, take the tape and your daughter to the chief administrator. Although she or he won’t be able to fire the teacher, there is still plenty that she or he can do behind the scenes. Keep taking it one step higher if the problem doesn’t resolve itself. (It’s almost always better to “work through the channels.”)
I definitely like the idea of a tutor, but the humiliation in the classroom needs to stop now.
Perhaps next year she could take a freshman math course at a local college for HS credit.
Considering the number of teachers that are armed these days and the frayed nerves of anyone in a confrontational situation in education, I don’t think that is wise. Assertive, yes. Aggressive, no.
When I was in HS, I was average at math until Senior year. I had the pleasure of being taught by a sadistic old fart with a million years tenure who humiliated me all year long. The grades I recieved from him were the worst I ever recieved in my entire 4 years at HS. I studied so hard that I had headaches and still the bst I could get out of this teacher was “Don’t feel bad…you’re just Stupid at Math.”
In college, I avoided all math courses somehow to get a BA…and when grad school suddenly required me to take a math course, I seriously considered withdrawing. But I figured I’d go down fighting and attended the course. It was taught by ‘Janet’, who was 25, doing research, and had to teach a class to keep doing so. But Janet know the material, loved the material, and was Passionate about the material. I learned derivatives much better than any of my HS classmates and recieved a ‘A’ for the course.
Loving the material: that’s the difference…and while HS teachers & unions would fight me tooth and nail, that’s why tenure should be disbanded at a HS level.
Zoe’s advice is very wise, Biggirl. Go through the proper chain of command, that always works best. I don’t know what state you are in, but most states require that someone teaching a class of this nature be very well qualified. I would be suprised to find out that the teacher did not have the neccesary background.
This seems more like a case in which the teacher simply does not like your daughter for some reason. Perhaps they think they will have to do more work for her. I know of teachers who sometimes resent very bright students because everything comes easily to the student. Your daughter is a Junior in an advanced senior level class, and is trying to tell the teacher that she doesn’t understand. The teacher obviously resents this, because he expects she would be satisfied with a passing grade and not worried about anything else. Not too many high schoolers I know of really care about learning.
I applaud your daughter for being willing to admit that she doesn’t understand the class material, and I hope that you can straighten things out with the teacher.
One last thing. As a teacher, I consider the students my first priority. Making time to help struggling students is part of the job, and probably the most important part. I would start by asking the teacher when he is available to help struggling students. If he isn’t willing to make time, then you should definitely go to the administration.
I lived almost the exact same situation. I had this physic teacher who wouldn’t really answer my questions or would leave me more confused than I was before asking.
The first two semesters, I failed with 40 and 45 percent (and I was in the top five in my class). The only class I had ever failed before was the obligatory art class the previous year and my parents knew that I had spent my entire year trying to finish projects at lunchtime and after school. I suck THAT much at drawing.
For this particuliar class, I hounded the teacher at lunchtime. I read the book he had made us buy TWICE. I did everything in my power to pass.
So my parents went to confront him. He told them that they should be happy that I was in the top of my class. Even if I was failing! So when I told them that both the teacher and the book were pretty lousy they went out and bought “Pour mieux comprendre Physique 536” (Understand Physics.)
The result? I passed the two final semesters with 90% and 95%. I studied hard for the final exam since I still had the first half of the year to catch up. The exam was so easy that I started laughing and laughing and getting mean glares from everyone else.
