Read his past posts. Same charming tone.
I will try to be atonal in future then.
Maybe atoning is preferred.
"I will let the school figure all that stuff out. After all that’s why I am paying a tuition that is higher than that of the Ivies. "
Thank you for sharing! It’s important to know that about you.
@MSDhoni- I agree with you that a kid shouldn’t sit through a year of language if they are advanced. But I don’t think you should get 3 years of credit for taking 1 class- that’s not fair either. At my school (and in my state) you need 2 years of language to graduate (3 for honors diploma) so if your kid started HS at the French 3 level, they could take French 3, 4, and AP French to meet that goal. My district offers a lot of language in middle school (though it doesn’t count for HS credit) and possible (and frequently accomplished) for a kid to reach AP level in more than one language. (We offer French, Spanish, Latin and Chinese).
And btw- if your posts are an indication of your attitude at your child’s school- I am not at all surprised that the school resents you
Well, I missed the mark on my earlier reply. I was thinking about college teachers and the path leading to disability service==which is good information.
I worked in both middle schools and high schools in a city district. Hence, I had the opportunity to speak with teachers. Like parents, I ( the school psychologist for several buildings each year) was competing for teachers’ time and. If I estimate broadly, teachers have about 5 classes they teach on a daily basis and if each class has 25 students, then they are instructing 125 kids daily.
By their breaks, teachers are often pretty-well fried and need and deserve time to sit, visit and drink coffee. But when they enter the teachers, lounge, they are handed a list of calls from parents who want to speak to their child"s teacher asap, or are involved team or IEP meetings, or departmental meetings about…, or grading tests and papers,or planning for teaching the next day or even next hour. Teachers are also met by me and other school staff who use teachers’ break-time to discuss a student, or health concerns, testing, and on and on. In the secondary schools where I worked, teachers arrived by 7:30 and often didn’t leave until after 4 or later. Some might leave as soon as their day is over to take their child to the dentist or whatever they need to do as people. Teachers are an impressive group of professionals! Perhaps, it would be easier to contact teachers by email and/or ask them when would be a convenient time to talk.
"But when they enter the teachers, lounge, they are handed a list of calls from parents who want to speak to their child"s teacher asap, or are involved team or IEP meetings, or departmental meetings about…, or grading tests and papers,or planning for teaching the next day or even next hour. "
On one hand, I sympathize and am quite sure that there are plenty of helicopter parents who want to blather about nothing other than their special snowflake’s needs, but on the other hand, as a working professional with clients all over the world, I have a non-stop influx of client emails that need to be answered too (many of which come in over night so I wake up at 5 am to answer a dozen of them), so there’s nothing special about that.
Exactly- teachers are professionals too…
Ap scores went live for teachers (in the east) at 6:00. If you have a good relationship with your kid’s teacher you might be able to get scores. I have already sent them to 5 kids who requested
@toowonderful as you appear to be an AP course teacher, would love your opinion about something. We have an AP US teacher in our school who is a notoriously low grader, lower than the other AP US teachers. As our AP scores went live today, a number of my kid’s friends scored 4s and 5s but only got a B in his class. They are wondering whether to ask the teacher to adjust their grade based on the fact that they scored higher on the exam than the grade would indicate they should have. I doubt he will respond favorably to this (he has been teacher a very long time) but what are your thoughts about this, and about situations in general where a grade doesn’t match an AP test score? (Anyone else - feel free to chime in!)
^ Since you asked for chiming in – The idea of retroactively changing a course grade in response to a high AP test score is interesting – if the student were to have gotten a low AP test score, would the parents ask for the course grade to be lowered?
In general I think it is hard to convince teachers to change their grading expectations. It is great that the B students excel on the AP tests – perhaps this is kind of information is something that the GCs could use in their letters of rec in the future.
AP exams do NOT correlate to grades. There are several tests where you can get a 5 by only answering ~60% of questions correctly. That is not an A.
I got a C in my calc class but a 4 on the AP exam and a B in my stats class and a 5 on the stats exam. Why? Because I earned a C and a B respectively in the class. The course and exam should not be dependent on one another IMO.
I agree that course grade should not be changed. The actual ap test is a roll of the dice (esp this year with the new format) and often does not reflect class work. That said- if multiple teachers teach the same class, one groups grades should not be dramatically higher or lower. Are teachers giving same tests/essays etc? THAT is something that can/ should be brought to admin. In my district we are required to give “collaborated” tests. All teachers who teach the same class have input on test- and everyone gives same test. Helps eliminate easy/hard arguements
It seems to me that if one teacher is giving lower grades–but his students are getting higher AP scores–there is a failure of supervision of at least one of those teachers.
Well, we had a situation at S’s school where there were two AP teachers for a certain subject. The tests and work were all “collaborated” (they did the same stuff) and one class (my S’s) kept doing consistently worse overall than the other class. I think this points to the teacher…
There are a handful of teachers at our high school that will bump a grade if you do well on the AP exam (“well” defined by the teacher—usually 4 or 5).
The test are made purposely hard and you can’t apply the 90% is an “A” rule. A “5” (and sometimes a 3 or 4 depending on the school) is enough for many colleges to accept that you know the material well enough to skip the class. In that case, it’s not a D either! (which is what a 60% would normally be).
Colleges are required to implement 504 plans if they recieve any federal money.
Uhttp://heath.gwu.edu/transitioning-high-school-college-spotlight-section-504
Teachers’ desks aren’t large enough to land a helicopter.
We found that the teachers in my son’s public high school were for the most part respectful and responsive to emails from me – he is a gifted kid who is severely dyslexic and had health issues and it required a lot of working out how best to educate him. His private middle school teachers were responsive but resentful. My daughter’s private middle school was a spectacular school. She had medical issues at the time – it appeared that she had a degenerative, genetic vision problem that was rapidly affecting her vision. They were responsive, respectful and proactive. At her private high school, many teachers (including an incompetent guidance counselor) were frequently non-responsive and clearly didn’t think parents should be involved at all. It was partially a boarding school, so maybe they didn’t want boarders to be disadvantaged.
@zannah’s point that things are different in college is important. They don’t expect to communicate with parents and can’t unless the kid signs the appropriate waiver. It has all worked well for both kids in college and graduate school.
A related question that I have is, why do the teachers in my district feel the need to cc a bunch of other people such as the administrators, department heads, etc. when they reply to emails? For one thing it’s intrusive. If I write the teacher an email I presume that it is private, so when they cc people when responding then the privacy goes out the window. And I can’t figure out why the teacher feels the principal will care about whatever matter I am bringing up for discussion, so it’s wasting others’ time! But for another thing, it goes to that idea that teachers don’t want to communicate with parents because somehow they feel threatened, as if they have to cover their behinds on every transaction! At one point I trained myself that whenever I emailed with anyone in my son’s school district, I ended by asking them not to cc others without asking me!