Daughter got a D first semester AP Physics

skieurope .I never said her grade moved from a B to D She should have a c-

Thank you Momof3kidz you do seem to be the only one that gets what I’m saying.It is annoying that I was being questioned over and over about the validity of the impact of the one assignment.It was screwy as I said but truly that one assignment he won’t accept makes the difference between a C and D.And yes we have never had a teacher who did not put in grades online.Sorry you too had to deal with it .Hoping my daughter won’t be hugely affected by it.She has great extracurricular and ridiculous amount of volunteering and works since 16 so she has all these good things going for her and has worked so hard even with the challenges she has faced.Just mad at myself I din’t insist she drop early on when it would not have affected her

@shipoo: One issue I see and I am referencing my niece’s situation a few years ago, is that your Daughter dropped the class. Some colleges are willing to withhold any action and want to see a grade improvement by year’s end so by dropping the class, the D is on the transcript with no chance to increase that grade by year’s end.

My niece was not doing well in her AB Calc class and was at a D 1st semester. She had been accepted ED to her top choice and contacted them about the situation. They stated if she could pull her grade up to a C by end of 2nd semester, her acceptance would stand. She hired a fellow classmate to tutor her and she got her grade up to a C thus keep her acceptance.

Thanks for the info lookingforward.The guidance counselor is not helpful but I am going through the districts appea processl .I do know they have had very low scores on this teachers students AP tests and we are a very high preforming district but I know he is tenured and,physchic teachers are hard to find. I do think he should not be there.Not only because of what my daughter is going through.He is known as the teacher who doesn’t teach.I think he got mad too as my daughter was asking him when he would put missing assignments in toward end of semester because she was so confused where she stood.

I understand the frustration, but you’re still placing blame. I am told that in the olden days before the magma cooled and while dinosaurs roamed the earth, teachers used a chisel and stone tablets (OK, ball-point pen and wire-bound gradebook) to record grades. Students (and parents) rarely, if ever, saw the contents of the gradebook. But students, upon receiving back their scored tests, labs, HW, etc., could easily record and calculate their own grades. So there was never a question of not knowing where one stood. It might have been better not to have dropped the class and try to pull the grade up by the end of the year, but what’s done is done. I wish her luck.

skieurope teacher didn’t grade or give back assignments so that would prevent her from scoring her own.Only knew grades when he put it on the online grading.Could not torture her any more with this teacher and really posted looking for people who had actually experienced what she is going through.Instead I got a lot of judgmental comments and even though I repeated myself over and over the validity of what I was saying was questioned over and over again.I’ll definitely think twice before posting here again.I do appreciate the few that posted with similar experiences and knew exactly what I was saying.

If the assignment had no due date listed, I don’t understand why he wouldn’t accept it.

I keep an eye on my kid’s grades and, yes, the weight of some assignments can move you up or down considerably, especially if there aren’t a lot of points for the semester and you’re on the edge.

I also have a problem with teachers who give out a lot of seat work during class without teaching the material. Not having or following any kind of syllabus is also a problem. When he did teach, did he float around from concept to concept without building foundational knowledge to show how concepts are related before moving on? If so, it sounds like it was mainly on the kid to self teach themselves the material.

This is also a big problem. My D had no idea where she stood with one of her classes this past semester because the teacher had so many assessments (three of them were months old) that were not put in until the last two weeks of the grading period. These assessments were weighted at 80%. When D was on the edge of losing an A in the class mid way through the semester, I emailed the teacher and we spoke on the phone. I was careful with my tone and the teacher was very nice and D ended up with a solid A once all grades were put in. It could’ve gone the other way, however, if she didn’t do well on those assignments that were not put in until the end and she would’ve had no way of knowing what she was doing wrong and how to work to bring her grade up.

Most everything is done online now. Kids do not turn in hard copy or receive hard copy back with score and comments on it. If assignments go ungraded then there is no way of knowing your grade or what your are doing right or wrong until the teacher posts it online with score and comments.

I think the most important thing now is to somehow change the D to C or C-. Other actions may be helpful to future kids but not the OP’s daughter.

rjm2018 thank you .You obviously know exactly what I’m talking about.Fortunately most teachers are not like this. Yes teacher bounced around when he rarely did board work.Mostly it was it was just assigning book work with him not teaching.A high level class but even kids at this level need teaching.I forget what my daughter called them but of course a few kids in the class liked doing some of the hard concepts just for fun in their free time and those kids obviously did well because they learned it on their own easily.I think my daughter might have pissed him off by questioning missing assignments and then when I contacted him even though I was initially very nice but did question him he really was pissed.I also follow closely their grades online and my daughter initially thought she could handle addressing him.She probably waited to long but he is so rude and abrupt with the kids I think she was intimidated.

With the GC unhelpful, I don’t have an answer for how to handle this except that with the grade on the transcript, the college will find out eventually.

Weird grading processes + hard class + possibly less-than-effective teaching is a recipe for grade risk - I have seen this even at our private high school. It seems like high schools in general may have more difficulty attracting quality teachers in physics and calc than in other subjects; quality may vary quite a bit between teachers even at the same school. An expensive alternative to dropping may have been a tutor.

Is this AP Physics 1? If you ask HS kids most of them probably say their AP Physics 1 teachers are not good. I have seen a lot of complaints on CC.

evergreen5 we can not hide from schools but will tell them we are appealing. Only one physics teacher at the school.Can’t afford a tutor.Disabled paying 50% of income for rent so kids can be in a good school district.

coolweather yes AP physics 1.

@shipoo, I don’t have any good answers for you but I understand your frustration. I agree with what @evergreen5 posted.

I know it’s too late for your D but this is where it helps to find out the reputation of teachers teaching these AP classes from other students. Even D’s GC has hinted at certain teachers to be wary of because she knows firsthand their reps.

I just wanted to say that you are not alone in this experience. It would be great if everyone did what they were supposed to do when they were supposed to do it but that isn’t the reality. It does seem that science classes are the worst for this at out school also.

In our experience, documenting the school district procedure for grades in writing made all the difference in how it was handled. There was some pushback, but we stuck with the written facts and took emotion out of it. We get emails of grades daily so it was very easy to provide documentation of the violation of procedure. In our case, the teacher couldn’t produce a single graded assignment.
I’m a teacher and it was very difficult to have this conversation. I don’t want to attack a teacher but this was a well-known problem and we just provided the documentation because we were not willing to let our kid be another casualty.

@skieurope

Back in the stone ages, kids with ADHD found themselves left back, or put in Special Ed. Thank all that is good and mighty in the world that we don’t do that anymore!

It is hard to understand how difficult it is when you have a child who has ADHD and helping the child advocate for themselves and learn to stay on top of assignments. We taught my son early on to use the homework assignment portals, check his online grade portals, etc., to make sure he was not missing things. Some teachers simply do not do their part in marking things received in a timely fashion. ADHD kids have trouble keeping track of things - it’s part of the disorder. My son has had an IEP (through middle school) and now in highschool a 504, so his GC has some teeth in making sure teachers are giving that feedback more quickly so that he did not find himself with missing assignments at the end of a semester. That said, there were a few teachers starting freshman year that did not comply and would enter all the homework a day or so before the semester ended. Thankfully, it didn’t impact grades for us, but if it were a class where any missing assignment takes you down a full grade - it could. Once we saw that, we encouraged our son to find a friend in each class that he could buddy up with to do a homework check to be sure that he had everything covered.

Since we are not going off to college with this kid, we do NOT check his homework portal, hover over him to be sure he does his work, etc. We do expect HIM to use all the tools available to him to be sure that he is getting things done on time.

If the appeal may drag out, it would seem like a good idea for your D to communicate with the school ASAP. Maybe someone could offer strategy suggestions: email vs phone and any particular language to include/avoid.

(This discussion is a good reminder for me. My kid #1 had a fantastic AP Physics 1 teacher but my kid #2 will be taking the class this fall with a teacher who is reputed to be not very effective and with harsh grading policies. Perhaps I should prepare kid #2 for the idea of getting a tutor early on. Kid will not want that but will likely have a similar situation for calc as well. An ounce of prevention…)

elodyCOH My daughter is on medication daily but because her teacher feedback was always so positive,saying she was a delight to have in class and things along that line and since she was always ,once diagnosed and medicated a A/B student we never were able to get accommodations.I tried several times and did not have money to hire an attorney.It caused great anxiety for her as she always had to try so hard.Being you have a child with ADHD I know you understand.Luckily she had many good teachers over the years and they would help with some 504 accommodations especially when younger even though she never had a 504.Before diagnosis they wanted to hold her back in 1st grade.The absolute killer for her in this class was not having a homework due date page and a portal that was never up to date.

Evergreen5
she has told the schools as of a week ago grades were delayed.They all said that was fine but they needed to be in by end of month.I had hoped appeal would be complete and we could send in transcripts by then with a C .We now have to go to schools bureaucratic second stage of complaint so this will not happen We will send transcript Monday and letter of explanation and possibly call and speak to admittance counselors on some.Not all schools require mid year grades but we will notify all about the D soon if this does not get resolved.