Building Bridges to Nowhere

I'm teaching a weeklong "summer bridge" program to incoming freshmen who expect to enroll in the IB curriculum, and will be teaching those same students when school starts in late August (which cometh, and right soon). Bad news: my attempt to show them the beauty of mathematics has led to a lot of blank stares. Good news: they seem like they're going to be pretty good students. And a few of them may even come to enjoy mathematics. It will be interesting to see what the rest of my students are like.

On a side note... To make a "gain" on the state-mandated end-of-year exam, a student must go up a level from the previous year, or gain a minimum number of points without going up a level, or (and this is the kicker) maintain their level if they were at or above grade level the previous year. Put another way, kids at or above grade level could actually LOSE points and still be counted as a gain, whereas kids below grade level had to make significant gains (even bigger ones on a percentage basis) to be counted as having made a "gain." Teachers are judged based on how many of their students make gains. Administrators and most teachers have no concept of the fact that a significant factor in what percentage of your kids make gains is what percentage of them start out below grade level.

Last year I had, by far, the most students who were below grade level of any of the math teachers. Unsurprisingly, I had one of the worst scores for students making gains. I'd make a ruckus about this among my administration, but two other things are also true: I've been given the courses I wanted to teach this year, so it's somewhat difficult to claim I've been wronged, and (perhaps more importantly), even when you factor out the bias due to a high percentage of below-level students, I still had miserable results. I have a number of ready-made excuses for that, but the fact is, I'm essentially unconcerned about last year's results (except that I feel bad for the students who didn't pass but would have with another teacher), and am focused on this year.

And this year, virtually every single one of my students is at or above grade level. Of course, this year, the state is also messing around with how the state-mandated testing will occur, so it's going to be somewhat hard to compare people's scores either to previous years or to other teachers if they aren't teaching the same course and the same class of students (i.e., freshmen or sophomores). I have enough other things to worry about this year without adding concern about their test scores on the state exam, but I'm expecting them to do very well. In part because they're much better students than I had last year. But also in large part because I expect to be significantly more adept at incorporating the skills they'll need for the test into the course.

Anyway, they seem like they're pretty bright, and more importantly, willing to work. Stay tuned.