<p>When I first started teaching, I taught at a school where no one had passed the exam in years (more than all of you have mentioned so far). To make matters worse, not a single student had scored a 2 in a dozen years. They asked me to teach the course, mostly because no one else in the building wanted to do it, and they figured I would remember it, fresh out of college.</p>
<p>There were a number of things about that school that contributed to those results:</p>
<p>(1) I frankly had no idea what I was doing, and no one could even point me to any information regarding what was on the AP Calculus exam. They handed me a textbook and said go to it. This was before audits were around, before I knew of AP workshops, and before the internet was largely in vogue for exchanging this kind of information. Accordingly, I mostly tried to teach at the pace my students could handle through as many of the beginning chapters as we could get through.</p>
<p>(2) The courses leading into AP Calculus simply did not prepare students for the later courses. One of the major issues that we had was that our Algebra I and Geometry courses were ridiculously watered down. We had maybe half our school passing Algebra I even with the watered down standards, and we were desperately trying to get those numbers up. One of the side effects of this was that some students who worked decently hard were convinced that they were brilliant math students, and those students were needed to keep the more advanced classes running. Their lack of background hurt some in Algebra 2 and Pre-calc, and those classes were watered down a bit in order to help keep those classes running.</p>
<p>(3) Due to the economic constraints of our environment, maybe a half dozen of the 19 or so kids who would take the class would own a graphing calculator, and the building only had a dozen or so calculators for the entire school to loan out. Some of the kids would take the AP exam without the calculator, and it certainly wasn’t a regular part of instruction.</p>
<p>Definitely the internet has made self-studying for AP Calculus a lot easier than in the past, and it’s certainly made a complement to your studies a lot easier as well. But I think that school was an indicator of the kind of systemic failure that many of our schools across the nation are suffering under.</p>