My biology teacher is an intern, so this is his first time teaching ever; he transferred into the intern program at my school around October after we had a long term sub. The thing is that he is so unorganized and it drives me crazy. He’s put in 0s for work that I’ve turned in 3 times (today was the third time and I’ve e-mailed him about his mistake again). I’m not the only one this happens to, other people in my class have had 0s put in for their grades on certain assignments to and had to contact the teacher, one of my classmates had e-mailed him 6 hours before the grading window closed and he fortunately saw the e-mail before midnight. It just irks me that my grade could be messed up in an instant because of this. Another thing is that he doesn’t have an account for the school portal, so he has to give the grades to another teacher who puts them in the portal which is why it could take some time to fix a grade that he messed up. Sorry if this sounds rantish, I didn’t read over this so please excuse any mistakes.
If he makes a serious mistake (as in, he wrongly puts in 0s for your grades and doesn’t respond to your attempts to rectify this before the end of the grading period), then you stand a good chance at recourse against him with school administration, who will likely be able to fix your grades even in the event that the grading period has already ended. I can’t see you ending up with anything less than you deserve if you are proactive about alerting your teacher/anyone who is able to help about any mistakes.
Anyhow, don’t worry. I don’t think there’s any need to discuss any of his issues with him personally; like I said before, if he messes up, then just notify him of the error and it will be fixed in due time.
This sounds like a combination of inexperience in teaching and lack of familiarity with and access to the portal for grades. I would have your parents contact the department chair - this young teacher doesn’t sound like he is getting adequate support from the school and it may be as frustrating for him as it is for you. I urge you to keep copies of everything submitted with date and time stamps and to monitor your portal regularly. If he is a good teacher of the material, cut him some slack on the paperwork aspects, just keep an eye on it.
Get your parents involved.
@techmom99 Don’t get me started on the material. He creates all his lectures by using the textbook word from word, which isn’t a problem in my opinion. The problem is that he tries to remember everything in the textbook and ends up forgetting to teach us some things or teaching us something in the wrong way. This is not a minor problem, it happens at least 4-5 times over a 2 week unit but that doesn’t really anger me because the teacher we had before him assigned us all textbooks and so instead of listening to his lecture and being confused I just copy what he writes on the board and read the textbook and home to understand the topic correctly. I basically use his class as a study hall now. Also, we’ve barely gotten through half of the curriculum and the school year is almost over, so I feel like I’ll have to study the rest of Biology myself if I ever want to take AP Bio…