@ohioan74 Your attitude towards your teacher right now – no matter what their quality – is honestly appalling. Colleges understand there are teachers that are rough but things aren’t going to be easier once you get in college.
Luckily colleges won’t need to read this thread to realize that there are some pretty jerky, entitled high school students.
I will say right now, the single B will nor mar your chances to gain acceptance to top schools. Your attitude and reaction to that single B, however, will stop you cold. Top schools care about grades but they care more about how students deal with adversity (if receiving a B can be called adversity) and the student’s character. What they most certainly do not want are students who whine and complain about instructors when presented with a B.
Make sure this attitude does not show up anywhere in your essays or letters of recommendation.
I understand that there are some bad teachers out there, just as there are bad accountants, bad doctors, bad lawyers— and bad students.
But you’ve shown no evidence that you have one. Perhaps you do. But you haven’t given us any reason to believe it. On the other hand, you have given some indication that the problem might lie elsewhere.
To answer your question: I think that college admissions officers are probably more likely to attribute a sudden drop in grades to Senioritis than poor teaching, particularly in the harder courses. To be honest, the poor teachers rarely get those courses. Those courses are the plums-- the ones everyone wants to teach. They’re the ones normally filled with kids who want to be there, the kids with good attitudes and enthusiasm for learning as opposed to merely grades. The poor teachers normally don’t get a shot at them. And college admissions officers realize that. Again, I’m speaking in generalities, since you’re the only one in this discussion who is in the class. I suspect that your Spanish teacher’s version of the story might differ significantly.
And, yes, I got off the topic of bad teaching, to the topic of what you’re going to do about it. This is a discussion, and that’s how discussions go.
If this grade in this course matters to you, you have 4 or 5 weeks to pull your grade up. You don’t like the way this teacher grades, great, you’re certainly entitled to feel that way. But there’s nothing you can do about that, other than to rise to her standards. Make sure that every assignment you hand in exhibits perfect spelling, perfect grammar, perfect everything. One kid in that class has a 92-- great. So it’s possible. Make sure that you’re the kid with the 92. You say you’re a straight A student otherwise. Wonderful. So you have the native intelligence, the study habits, and 3 years of Spanish behind you. Use the resources at your disposal. Go to extra help. Pull up tutorial videos. Work with that kid who has the 92. Learn to begin sentences with capital letters.
It’s hard sometimes for bright kids to suddenly find themselves needing help in a class. Very frequently, they have no idea of how to access all those resources at their disposal. They’re frequently used to the material coming easily to them and they’re hurt and embarrassed to suddenly find themselves not understanding the material. In short, they find themselves to be merely mortal, just like those other kids who have never enjoyed the “straight A” life. They sometimes lash out, unable and unwilling to believe that all those wonderful things they’ve always believed about themselves might not be true.
Again, let’s assume for a moment that all the adults on this thread are wrong, and that you’re a model student. Let’s pretend that you didn’t exhibit an incredibly disrespectful attitude towards your teacher. Let’s assume that your teacher really deserves all the names you’ve called her (though I’m guessing you would be far less tolerant of someone using those words and attitudes towards, say, your mom.)
The ball is still in your court. A month from now, school will be winding down or over. Your teacher will put a grade on your report card, say goodbye to her colleagues, and be on summer vacation. It’s up to you what grade goes on that report card. You can choose to put all the blame on the teacher or not; it doesn’t really matter. It’s your grade. What are you going to do about it?
@ohioan74, I hope you’ll come back to this thread in 5 years. You’ll see it from an entirely different perspective. Right now, you’re taking no responsibility for your grade - everything is the teacher’s fault. That’s not going to serve you well in college, believe me.
It’s more likely for a bad teacher who “simply refuses to” teach to give undeserved As than undeserved Bs.
Depending on your hs and the particular college, adcoms may know this teacher is funky. (Thus does hang a bit on the adcoms knowing your school well, having a history with the hs and its applicants.)
Or the GC may make mention (we had this problem and the GC stepped up for us.) But the first question is what’s your probable major? If it’s STEM, so be it, it’s good to continue with language classes and a B won’t kill you (assuming you have the rest of the assets they look for.) Otoh, some lib arts majors do require language savvy and you can face competition from kids who did get an A.
As for attitude, posters are right that it’s what you do about an issue that matters. In fact, the top colleges are looking for your resilience and problem-solving.
But, we did have this issue with a teacher, who played favorites and held my kid and a few others to higher standards than others. (If I told the whole tale, it would curl your toes.)
if you want a top school, be sure you understand all they look for, it’s not just stats.
I should add something: in our case, this teacher was impossible, forget my D settling for a B, it was worse.
But as soon as D got to college, she started realizing how much positive influence this ugly battle and his standards had on her. Your Spanish teacher is asking you to perform at a high level, hold yourself to that at all times, despite some vagueness. D and I quickly realized her more successful college skills came from this very same fight. His standards had become hers. The grading was unfair, the ego blow was real, at the time. But the end result was a real improvement in her approach. She and I still roll our eyes and laugh over this unexpected realization.
There are many ways that teachers can be subjective in their grading, but marking off points for grammatical errors is not one of them. Correct grammar is the most objective grading category in a language class, and by the time you have reached 4th year Spanish it would be hard to imagine a course where grammar would not be a crucial component (along with content, structure, argument, etc.) in essays, speech, and translation exercises. So while it is entirely possible that this teacher is not adequately explaining all of the different criteria that go into grading an assignment in a 4th year language class, and that she is unsympathetic, unfriendly, and has higher standards than other teachers in your school, try to see this as an opportunity to meet her higher standards in order to actually learn the language and to prepare for the more rigorous demands of college level Spanish courses. And rejoice that there is only about a month of suffering left!
colleges don’t gaf. your job to get an A. The single B may or may not mar your college chances, depends on how inflated your school is.
I speak from personal experience, I had a spiteful AP lang teacher (regularly gave me far lower grades on essays than I’d receive on the same type of essay on standardized tests (AP, regent practice essays), the average grade in her class was about 15 points lower than in the other teacher’s classes. my school is very inflated; one needs a 3.95 chance to get into a top ten school.
Due to this bad grade, my gpa was too low and despite my otherwise stellar/flawless resume I was rejected from every reach school across the board except Harvard (where the interviewer was a former teacher at my H.S who knew of how difficult a grader my teacher was and likely told Harvard that my low gpa really isn’t that bad). so yeah, you might be screwed.
My D has a similar situation yet different. Her French teacher is a horrible teacher who would call a friend to ask a French related question in front of the whole class. Would play movies in class that were spoken in English instead of French and no one knew why. Would pronounce the language wrong (D has started to learn the language since 7 and she knows the teacher was wrong). Would walk out in the middle of class to receive a phone call and never returned to class, but she is an easy grader. D got an easy A in her class but refused to get the easy A in her junior year without actually learning the language, so she took French off this year, self-study and have a tutor work on it at the same time. She will go back to French 4 next year and will try to get a good grade on her IB test instead of enjoying an easy A but flunking her IB test in French and not knowing what she has learned.
What I was trying to say is if you have a passion in learning, you will try and find a way to excel it and that’s what colleges are looking for in a good student. If you know your grammar is not on point and you just let the teacher grade it because she said it’s not relevant, you are not a good learner and you deserve a lower grade.
In college you will have some bad profs and TAs. In your career you may have bad bosses. That’s life; you learn to deal without whining or making excuses.
No one ever said life was fair, but it’s how you deal with it that will make a difference in the end. If one B is going to keep you out of your choice college, why would you want to go there? Not that that will happen, but theoretically speaking, keep perspective here.
Also, as snarlatron mentioned, if you think this is hard, wait until college when individual TA’s for one course each grade differently, some more harsh and others less so. And these students are all taking the same class. That is not fair either, but it is the way it is.
Just do your best, and if you’re confused by the teacher, then ask her for clarification. But don’t worry about your college chances being adversely affected by a B,it’ll be ok.
OP sounds like a grade-grubber. Adcoms can smell that.