Tuesday, October 03, 2006
How Hard is Too Hard?
7 weeks in and things are going well.
I only had a few students fail my classes. Most made A's or B's. However, my AP classes have too many A's, I'm afraid. I've been thinking perhaps things are too easy in those classes. I try to give harder tests, but they still do well on them. I've been trying to figure out what else I can do to make the class more challenging. I'm not looking for a certain grade distribution, but if almost everyone is getting an A then the class needs to be harder.
This week I think I found the point where the classes are getting harder. My APB class got more B's than A's on the last test, and they have another test tomorrow. Hopefully that will be similar. My APC class has been devouring everything I give them, no matter how hard I think I've made it. They'll complain about how hard the test was, and then 90% of them will get A's. This week I started throwing calculus at them in earnest, and they've started complaining that they want to go back to the last unit because it was much easier. I'm hoping that the high grades until now were indicative of the material, not the difficulty of the class.
In more interesting news, I've started playing Ultimate Frisbee with a group of students. I was talking frisbee with some of my students one day and they invited me to play with them. I went last week and had a lot of fun. They were mostly students from my AP classes, and cross country runners (the two groups overlapped considerably). I was a bit worried that they'd run me into the ground since they're 10+ years my junior and currently training for speed. Nope. I held my own quite well. They say they've played tournaments before, but I don't think they've ever tried to play in an organized fashion. My experience with Ultimate allowed me to see things happening before the students did. Ok, so I did hurt my leg and wasn't able to run that weekend, but it's not because I'm old! I'm not old!
