This year I had the great pleasure of taking part in the grading of the new Advanced Placement Precalculus course. I have been teaching AP for over thirty years now and I was on a waiting list for AP Calculus grading for about seven or eight years. When I had the opportunity to throw my hat in the ring for this course I jumped at it and I’m pleased that I was able to be part of the inaugural grading for this new course. I’ve been back a couple of weeks now and I should have written earlier. I want to thank Dan Meyer (@ddmeyer) for a tweet this morning that prompted me to make myself write again.
I want to think out loud here about my experience and what impact I hope it will have on my students’ lives moving forward.
I graded question 2 on the Free Response exam.
The first thought to share is that this is hard work. Over the course of my time there and with a little bit of home grading thrown in after I got home I graded more than 2000 student responses to this question. Concentrating carefully to help ensure consistency in the process requires a great amount of attention and focus.
The question was worth six points with each sub response being worth either one point or zero points. I don’t really want to go into any detail about the student work I saw, it’s not really my place to do so. What I do want to go into are my thoughts about how this experience will impact my teaching moving forward. This year I will be teaching Algebra I (in addition to AP Precalculus and AP Calculus BC). This is the first time in over a decade that I will be teaching this foundational course. I am really excited to take this course on for a number of reasons. The last few years I have almost exclusively been teaching higher level math classes which means I often do not meet students until their junior or senior year and they are enrolled in a class with high curriculum pressure at a time when they are focused on college acceptance and a load of other heavy duty courses. These older students also have a pretty deeply developed sense of who they are as math students and what works for them. I am looking forward to meeting some students at an earlier point in their trajectory, at a time when the curricular pressures are not as intimidating, and at a place in their learning arc where maybe they are not quite so set in who they are as math students.
It may not make sense to others, but the AP FRQ above had me thinking about my prospective Algebra I students more than about my prospective AP Precalculus students for next year. It had me thinking, especially the last two answers required in that AP question, about how students express what they know. I hope that my experiences in grading those last two answers will guide me this year in how I talk to my Algebra I students and what work I ask of them. It occurs to me that this might be an important opportunity to help students earlier in their math arc to learn how to articulate what they know. How can I write in a way that (a) helps me sort out my thoughts and (b) explains to my teacher what it is that I know about the math I am engaging with? I know that there are some smart resources out there on the web that teachers have shared that will help me here. One format that I like is to present an incorrect solution and to ask my students to identify where the mistake is and what the correct step is instead. I think that the hard sell will be to get my students to write in words, not just in mathematical equations.
I know that I have written before about how I want to write more. I hope that this time I not only mean it, but will follow through with it. I think that having this new course added to my plate will help to be a motivator for that. If you have any ideas to share with me you can find reply here or find me over in the land formerly known as twitter where I am @mrdardy