That’s incorrect about most AP classes. They do not spread out over a year what is usually done in a semester: AP Bio is Micro and Macro Biology, AP US History is pre- and post-Civil war, etc. Most AP classes get you 6-8 hours. The ones that don’t – AP Macro or Micro Econ, AP Gov and Politics–are generally taught over a semester. There are a couple exceptions, but, no, we are teaching college level material at a college pace, and a kid in 8 AP courses is covering about what he’d cover in two years of college.
And that’s why, having thought about it, I disagree that the teacher’s workload is any sort of useful metric for what the kids should be expected to do. In a pre-AP or AP environment, I’m prepping kids for an extremely difficult test. My responsibility to them is to show them the path to be successful on the test. I should strive to make that path as efficient as possible for them, but how much work it is for me shouldn’t be a limiting factor. If I can make it easier on them than me, cool, but if it takes more from them than for me, that’s cool too. For me to deceive them that what they were doing was enough when it wasn’t would be wrong.
As for why they sign up for too much stuff: I don’t even think it’s that they are being goal-oriented about college. It’s just become the Done Thing at a lot of places: it’s what upper-middle class kids do: all advanced AP, a team sport, an “other” and a service org. And it’s trickling down to kids with upper middle class aspirations. It’s a form of keeping up with the Jones’.
I don’t understand this attitude at all. It’s not “give and take”, and kids certainly aren’t writing essays as favours to teachers. They do it for their own benefit (or because they’re forced to, which is for their own benefit). They don’t need something in return to make up for the fact that they have to do some homework.
I understand being unhappy with the amount of effort teachers are putting in to their jobs, but that’s a completely different issue to how much effort the students put in.
I see what you’re saying, and you do have a point, but they’re not completely different issues. If a teacher is assigning so much work that the students would have to put in a lot more effort than the teacher is willing or able to put in, that may be a sign that the teacher has unreasonable expectations.
Teachers work 185 days and non-teachers work 255 days (about).
A big issue is with grading papers after work, working during lunch and other times, we may average 10 hours of work pre day. Maybe its not 7am-5pm everyday (with no lunch) but with working on the weekends I bet we work at least 50 hours per week.
Us 1850 workhours/year
Them 2040 workhours/year
A lot closer than 185 vs 255 would have you believe
And if the teacher isn’t GRADING the work, if they are providing no feedback, or no timely feedback - the work is coming back a month or more later, why is the work being done? You don’t learn to write an essay by writing it in a vaccuum, turning it in and not receiving feedback.
I just looked over our high school registration book and we offer some of them both ways - Calculus in particular - you can take Calculus to spread one semester of college calc over a year and take the 1st AP test, or the accelerated AP version and take 2 AP tests (and then they have another year of AP calc on top of that. Apparently we are planning on graduating a lot of math majors and engineers).
But as a parent reading that book, I’m left with the definite impression that if my child is in the upper 25% of her class (she is) and she is getting As and Bs in her coursework to date (yeah, that’s how you get to be in the top 25%) her selections SHOULD BE the available AP coursework, and unless I want her to go to a mediocre State School, they will EXPECT that on her transcript. There is nothing in the registration guide as a parent that would lead me to believe that four or FIVE (theoretically, six would be possible at our high school) AP courses might be overdoing it. No recommendation that taking two AP courses would be an appropriate load for most college bound seniors wanting to pass a few AP tests nor any guidance in terms of what my kid would be signing up for in regards to homework for these courses. Nor any indication that the University of Minnesota will accept you with no AP courses at all, and a decent GPA and SAT score.
Now, I happen to know better and have told my daughter (who registers for high school in January) that she will NOT be talking multiple AP courses. For 9th graders, only AP Geography is offered (plus accelerated Math and English - which she has been in), so she should be pretty good year one.
(When my son returns to public school, we will be on the ‘just graduate dear’ track and worry about college at some point in the future - if he chooses to go. He was probably a state school kid even before this excursion - but the more I work with him, the more I’m disappointed that the school didn’t figure out his issues years ago and tell me about them. I’m thinking about having him tested for learning disabilities - at 15 - because there are just moments where its like - you’ve known that 2(6) is a multiplication problem all year - why halfway through this homework did you suddenly decide that it was division and give me 1/3 for an answer. He will do order of operations just fine for two weeks, then suddenly decide that parenthesis don’t matter. He does an outline fine one day and the next assignment doesn’t know what an outline is - just huge gaps that move from one day to the next. Its very frustrating for me, I can’t imagine what its like for him.).
We are upper middle class people who chose to live in a “mixed” part of town (the school is a lot of blue collar and immigrants - upper middle class people here send their kids private, but I don’t believe in draining the brains of of the public schools and leaving them to educate a bunch of kids who don’t speak English as a first language or who have parents who don’t value education - then pointing at the test scores and saying ‘look, schools are failing’). So around here it isn’t an upper middle class/middle class thing - its a middle class and aspire to be the first college grad in your family thing. And those parents, they don’t have a clue what their kids are signing up for when they take three or four AP courses, unless the school is very clear. And about the only thing the school is clear on is that those classes are expected for the top 25%.
(Hell, my SON, Mr. Need-to-homeschool-because- you-can’t-handle-public-school, is a 85% standardized test performer - AP Calc? AP American History. Yeah. Right).
I just cannot stand the thought of having to work with other teachers. So someone asked you to do some work, it was an unreasonable request so instead of either just doing it or laughing at them you decided to make a post on the internet about it and prompt page long ramblings from other teachers about something to do with a kid crying over a pencil. I’m sorry but that is just crazy, obsessive, crazy and weird, take a deep breath, step outside. Does the son still not shine ?
I’m not a teacher, but my parents both were (as are a disturbingly large number of other assorted relatives) and I’ll just say, required or not, teachers absolutely do work a lot during off hours. Oft times even I would get roped into helping grade papers and such (stuff with definite right and wrong answers, not essays and stuff).
By that logic, kids should not be required to do homework or projects unless you are going to pay them, as that’s THEIR time and they should not feel obligated to do assignments, practice, etc. during that time.
Calc is one of the weird exceptions that I mentioned. There are only two AP Calc tests–AB and BC. You can do AB over a year, take that test, and then (unless you graduated) take BC and that that test. Or you can jump straight from pre-Cal to BC. When you take the BC test, you get a “subscore” that is what you got on the parts of the test that overlapped with AB. So a kid that takes just BC but gets a 2(4) on that test might be treated by a college as if he got a 4 on AB, and given whatever credit that matches.
For whatever it’s worth, the NOT-Engineering kids are often the most eager to take calculus, and if there is a Very Good calculus teacher on the campus, I’d strongly recommend it for non-math kids. A good calculus teacher can work miracles, and it’s great to go off to college with math already over and done. Kids that AREN’T mathy need the extra time and attention you can get in high school.
Also, AP Human Geography is one of the weird ones as well: it really is a one-semester course, which is why it’s popular as a year-long course for Freshmen.
My concern with that, then, would be that those are AP courses in name only. There is some formality involved in getting to call a class “AP Whatever”, but not much. To be blunt, a program can test 50% of the graduating class for 20 years and never have anyone make anything other than a 1, and it’s still an “AP Class”. There are schools that have basically redefined the college-prep track as the AP Track, but they don’t really prepare kids for the exams. And sometimes these are the worse offenders for the sort of thing you are complaining about: they give a ton of work because “it’s AP!” but it’s more of the same–it’s not moving kids forward at the pace they need to go.
The problem, however, at these schools is that the “regular” track is really the “please please please pass the graduation exam track” and even if you can get into a good school having been in those courses, you might not have the skills you need once you get there.
Somewhere there is data about how many kids from your daughter’s future school are actually taking and passing the tests, and that would give you some idea of whether or not the courses are really the same as their college counterparts. It’s almost certainly public data available on the district webpage, if you can find out where to look. It’s an imperfect metric; the schools themselves can look and see how their kids’ PSAT scores correlate to their AP scores, which gives a much better picture. But you can at least see if anyone is passing at all.
The schools I know where the AP programs are “real”–where, at the very least, kids’ with PSAT scores high enough to predict a pass almost always pass–all take steps to discourage over-committing. If a school has no language about that at all, I would tend to suspect it’s because their AP program is less rigorous.
Again, I think it started as a very upper-class status symbol and has become/been marketed by the college board as a great equalizer. But really, it’s an arms race.
I don’t think the teacher’s workload is relevant. Making it relevant would suggest that it’s not ok for an efficient, highly capable teacher to assign a bunch of stuff, because they themselves aren’t spending much time grading, but an inefficient teacher teaching the same course can assign a great deal more work because they are also miserable and over-worked. Assignments ought to be based on what the course demands, not parity with the teacher.
Now, the teacher ought to derive some sort of sense of the value of the student’s time because of how they value their own time, but that’s not a parity issue, it’s an empathy issue.
A teacher also ought to take a long hard look at their turn-around time and make decisions for assignments based on what’s reasonable. Some assignments are worth doing if they are returned quickly, but are just busy work if the student doesn’t receive feedback within a few days. Those ought not be assigned if feedback can’t be delivered.
And finally, I can’t speak to elementary or middle school, but there is definitely a group of highly motivated kids in high school who are competing for top colleges. They are willing–eager–to work much harder than I am willing to work to reach that goal. A’s exist for those kids. If what it takes to get an A in my class requires more work than anything I’d be willing to put in . . . I don’t see a problem with that. These kids are young and enthusiastic and very eager to work very hard for a few years to better position themselves for their own future jobs. They don’t anticipate working like dogs for their entire career. They deserve a pathway that opens up those opportunities. And for kids in the class that want to do well but aren’t willing to put in such complete effort? An A- or a B or even a C is hardly the end of the world.
I’d prefer she takes college courses at college. I’m not worried about her taking AP courses to pass or for college credit. If those courses are the only ones offered at her school with the stimulation she needs, then that is what she will take - but for us, there is no goal of passing - or even taking - the AP exams, so it doesn’t matter if the course prepares her for the exams. (I find the idea of teaching to a test rather offensive - regardless of it its NCLB or AP Chemistry - you teach to gain some subject matter mastery, not to pass a test. And in high school, you teach to give people an understanding of a broad world and to expose them to a lot of different topics.)
And I suspect it isn’t very rigorous - we aren’t in a rigorous district. We made that choice on purpose. Kids - and teens - should be kids - they should have time to be in drama and swim team and goof around with their friends and read all sorts of books and play video games and explore - they don’t need to be taking college courses at fifteen.
With regards to the initial question I have a good set of answers that should really make things nice and clear (hopefully).
Though every district has it’s own rules along with their state regulations included you have to break it down into three small understandings.
Point 1: In most districts teachers do not get paid for their time after standard hours of school operation, in most cases 8am to 4pm with variations of course. Many people really should only work the hours they are paid for. With teachers it becomes a more difficult case because grading is a very time consuming process, especially the younger the students are as it is more commonplace for teachers to use hand-outs and so on to help make assignments easier for the kids. With class sizes growing larger in many districts you now have more material to grade. You could argue that teachers should just give kids less work to be graded, but look at point 3 and you’ll see why this is not possible. Because of time constraints and state expectations they do not have the luxury, in most cases, to not do work outside of school hours. So before ragging on them for not having things graded fast enough it is important to remember they will get it done when they get it done, as it has to be turned in by a deadline anyway (see point 2).
Point 2: I cannot think of a district that does not have a deadline for all grades to be turned in whether it is a progress report, quarterly report card, or semester report card. With that said tests and other graded material will be finished by these set deadlines, as with most districts a teacher could be written up for putting out progress reports and quarterly report cards without having the proper documentation to support the grades they are giving the students at those times. MANY teachers (usually middle school and up) hold onto everything till their quarterly report card or progress report are about to go out or just went out. Some teachers do it that way so they can have a life outside working a 14 hour day, but like many other jobs they have deadlines themselves so as long as they meet them they have the freedom to do grading at their leisure.
Point 3: All teachers have to meet their state curriculum. With furlough days for teachers being the highest it has been for a while, more and more teachers are pilling on the homework in order to get all the curriculum in with the reduced days. As the curriculum has gotten larger than it was probably 20 years ago (give or take) yet the amount of school days on average nationwide have been reduced by almost a whole month and in some states a quarter to what a normal school year was no less than 10 years ago. So now all their deadlines are the same, with less time to do it. TONS of parents think of furlough days as “vacation days” for their kids. That is very misleading and is a fallacy to think of it as such. They are days that your child is getting less time in the classroom yet he must still cover the material in a standard school year. So if you ponder why homework is “Too Much” or “It takes forever for the teacher to grade all the work” be advised that they are taking a pay cut and getting less days to do the work in class, while still having to meet the state requirements with no real exceptions.
For the record I am not a teacher and wouldn’t be knowing the things I know about the education system here in the US. But I know some who are and if you honestly think about what is happening nationwide in school districts it should be pretty clear whats up.
ADD:
For those groaning about the time off they get in the summer let it be said THEY DO NOT GET PAID FOR THOSE MONTHS. Only 13% of school districts in the US actually pay them for months they do not work (usually private school districts). Some districts offer to pay them for 12 months, but it is based on the hours they put in for the time they did in school. As contract workers they are paid for their time of teaching, not in the summer. Some school districts do not even pay them for the 3 months their off while others do, but the ones getting paid over the course of 12 months have smaller paychecks than the ones who get payed only through the school year. So again, using summer vacation as a scapegoat for their social lives is crap. Many of my friends who are teachers do summer tutoring for private tutoring institutions, work summer school (usually fighting to get that job), or cut their spending just to get through the summer. (Of course some teachers marry rich dentists who can afford to support their wife or husband over the summer, but that point/joke is situational and in turn should not be applied outside of that b^^)
They do not get paid year round at all unless they are part of a private school district or individual. Most get paid for 9 months of work, and sometimes their contracts will spread that pay over the course of 12 months. By contract their salaries are strictly for 9 months.
Example: You make 40k a year (the average pay a teacher makes after several years of service, mind you some make less, and I am not going to take out taxes and such, just a blunt description).
Either they get that 40k over the course of nine months at 4400 est a month (Sep - May) or they can get that 40k paid to them in monthly checks year round at 3300 est a month and get a paycheck every month of the year. If they work summer school they get that year round pay you are talking about, but because summer school is reduced time as well it is only about an extra month of pay they get out of it and many districts have reduced summer school.
Just because they get a paycheck every month does not imply they are being payed for taking off in the summer. Most cases they take reduced pay to get that check year round
This is sort of the point. Teachers who do off site work ultimately work a comparable number of annual hours as people who do normal office work. That puts teachers on par with the rest of the workforce.
What it means to me is that non-teachers shouldn’t bitch and moan about the 3 months off teachers get, they shouldn’t complain that teachers are overpaid because they don’t work a full year, teachers work just as much as you do, only over a 9 month period.
It also means that teachers shouldn’t bitch and moan about having to bring some work home every week. You earn a reasonable annual salary with good job security and benefits, get 2 weeks of break during the year and a 3 month break over the summer. You get more time off, so when you’re on, you should expect to do a little more.
I’ll also add that arguing about whether you get paid for 9 months or 12 months is rather like arguing about whether golf is a “sport” or a “competitive activity”. Does it really matter if you’re getting paid $40K for “12 months, but since you get 3 months off, you should work 50hrs during the weeks you DO work” or get paid $40K for “only 9 months of work, so you should work 50hrs per week to justify that ‘high’ monthly salary.”
My daughter is a teacher. For 5 years, she taught in a school system that didn’t give any appreciable time during the day to do planning or grading - she would often spend half of her weekend and many of her evenings grading papers. This year, she’s in a different state and I don’t know how it compares. I do know she has over 100 students (7th grade science) and she does have one free period a day, but I expect she puts in a lot of time at home.
Many years ago, I taught a couple of night classes. I was paid by the class hour, and on paper it looked generous, but when I spread it out over my planning and grading time, I was barely making minimum wage. One does what one must…
Anyway, I voted no child and work till it’s done. I don’t expect teachers to give out their home numbers and take call from parents at will, but the job isn’t just spewing knowledge on your students - you need to make sure they got what you spewed within a reasonable time, and if that cuts into evening hours, such is life.
Out of curiosity, where do teachers get 3 months off? When my daughter was teaching in Virginia, her school year would finish by mid-June, including the time the teachers had to work after the kids were gone, and she’d have to report back the 3rd week of August for meetings and setting up her classroom for the day-after-Labor-Day start of classes. By my count, that’s 2 months off.
Anyway, I expect the extra hours she puts in during the school year probably equal the hours she doesn’t work in the summer. Except she often did planning and such during the summer anyway… not that teachers get into the field for the money, do they??
My point is just that you seem dismayed that they encourage 4-5 AP classes a year, and said you plan to limit your daughter to two. I am suggesting that if the AP classes are significantly less rigorous than their college counterparts, your concern over how hard they are pushing the kids and your policy of limiting your daughter may be misguided because they aren’t really AP classes.
In terms of teaching to the test, AP tests are really pretty good. They have significant free-response sections, and kids who pass them really do generally have the same broad general knowledge of the subject that you’d expect a college freshman to have having completed the same course.
As far as what kids “should” do, I think they “should” do what works best for them and for their families. I was at a school very much like what you describe, and now I am at a highly competitive magnet school: we do teach AP calculus to Freshmen, and the norm is to be in 5-6 rigorous AP classes your junior and senior year. These kids are juggling a tremendous workload, and the most striking thing about the school is how happy everyone is. Not each and every kid, of course, but the overall tone is energetic, enthusiastic, and very, very proud. It would be as wrong to deny kids this sort of opportunity because “kids should be kids” as it would be to deny swim team and drama and goof-off time with friends to a kid who wanted that.
But the comparison wasn’t teachers vs. punch in/punch out employees, but with other salaried professionals- who also must put in more time than a core 8 hour day. I’m generally as pro-teacher as they come, but want to make sure that arguments aren’t being basing on misleading logic.