I think the sentence I like hearing most from my students is “Wow, that’s really easy!”
So what else does everyone know except for me?
Over the summer, the science department head at my school accepted a job in another district, classes got shuffled, and I was given a section of AP chemistry to teach. This was and is a great thing. Based on the first day, the kids seem quite capable, and I think I’ll be able to do a lot with them. When I got to school this morning, one of my AP students said “I’m not going to be in class this afternoon, so can I turn in my summer assignment this morning?” I thought to myself, “Summer assignment? I wonder what it was.” I had brought the textbooks () to the room before the first day. The (former) department head gave me a copy of the book and told me that it was the book for honors chem 2 (which I’m also teaching) as well as AP. In class, the students saw the pile of textbooks and said, “That’s not the book we were given over the summer.” We were given THIS one (). I checked with the teacher who was given the other section of AP chem, and she confirmed that the students were right about the book. Strike two. This afternoon, the new department head gave me a copy of the summer assignment, which also states that the students were to be given a test on the material (four chapters from the book), and that satisfactory performance on the test is a requirement of remaining in the class. Now it’s not like I can’t deal with these things. But when the teacher is finding out about the textbook, assignments and tests from the students, the cart is driving the horse, which isn’t exactly a recipe for success, especially in an AP class.
butterflies
School starts in a little over 24 hours, and like a lot of teachers, all of the “what if I’m not good enough” self-doubts are running through my mind. I know rationally that I did a decent job last year, and that there’s no reason I can’t do the same this year, but the rational part of my brain isn’t the part that’s pestering me. This year I’ll be teaching AP chem and organic chem, neither of which I’ve taught before. As I was thinking and planning and researching on the web, I visited , a site put together my Mitchell Charity at MIT. One of his quotes, which kind of sums up the nagging fear, is “If you can’t explain it to a nine-year-old, then you don’t deeply understand it yourself.” I’ve kind of caught myself thinking the equivalent of “What if I can’t teach organic chemistry to a nine-year-old?” “What if I can’t teach a nine-year-old enough chemistry to get a 5 on the AP test?” It seems silly when I think about it that way, and yet seeing how silly the whole thing is doesn’t make the nagging worry go away. :-/