Okay, so, I should probably start this off by saying I’m not a science person lol. I’m not taking this class because I want to go into the science field, like a lot of my classmates, nor am I trying to pad my resume with classes I think will look good. Basically, if you’re in the scholarship program at my school, you have to take 3 years of a lab science, so I took bio honors, chem honors, and now I’m in ap bio. I could’ve taken physics honors, ap physics 1, or ap chem, but physics at my school (honors and ap) is a notorious nightmare I know I’ll never be able to understand (insert “but colleges want you take bio, chem, and physics!!” comments. I’d rather not since I know I would never have a chance at succeeding lol) and the ap chem teacher infamously just “gives up” in problems and lessons because she doesn’t get it anymore, so no thanks to that.
So here I am in ap bio, and I honestly can’t stand my teacher. She’s a nice person, and she knows what she’s talking about, but she doesn’t have teaching credentials. She has a pHD, sure, but does that mean she can teach well? Nope. She picks and chooses random, almost unrelated stuff from the textbook she feels like teaching us (we went from evolution one day to the nitrogen cycle the next day to allele frequency the next day, which really threw people off), and honestly it feels like she goes off topic so often that you don’t know what’s supposed to be relevant information or not. Today she gave a quiz that I without a doubt failed, because it wasn’t remotely like any other quiz we had before, nor did most of it pertain to what we were learning. She told us it’d be multiple choice, then one or two short answers, but when she gave us the quiz, it was multiple choice and five fill in math questions, three of which I had no idea how to solve since we never went over anything remotely like them. The multiple choice hardly pertained to the material we “learned”–80% of it was interpreting tables and graphs, which I know is a skill that will be on the ap exam, but that’s not what she even told us to study, and we have only done like one ap style mc question in the past, so I came totally unprepared for…that mess. RIP my already fragile average.
It’s not that I don’t understand the material individually, it’s that with her inconsistent and sporadic teaching style, I don’t feel like I’m making the connections that the ap exam is apparently all about. I know I’m going to barely do okay in this class and I know there’s almost no chance of me passing the ap exam, so I wonder why I even bother. I’m not going to transfer, but I’m talking to my guidance counselor to see what she has to say. I don’t know, maybe this seems whiny, but other people struggle with her teaching style too. I just really don’t think she should be teaching an ap class. Is there any way you think I should prepare myself to do better? Or how to deal with this?
TL;DR: Lose-lose-lose situation lands me in ap bio, but my inconsistent teacher can’t teach well and isn’t preparing us well for the ap exam.
