<p>I have a daughter who is a sophomore in High School. Last year she finished the year with a 3.5 GPA, so not the best but very sound. </p>
<p>This year she enrolled in Honors English 10 and also APUSH. She is getting B+'s and A-'s in every class but APUSH. In APUSH she has a C- with a 70% going into the final. She studies for this class 8-10 hours a week minimum. She has failed every test in the class, despite studying for it for 3-4 hours at least. The teacher has been pretty non-responsive or just said she's studying the wrong things or not doing her notebook correctly. I fail to see how the notebook not be doing wrong has any bearing on her test grades. I've personally helped her study for every test with the study guide so I know that she has known most of the material going into the exam.</p>
<p>My biggest complaint is that the teacher is more than a month behind on her grading. We just found out today that she got poor grades on some of her projects that were due in early November. Had I known this, I could have done more to help. Now, it's too late we are the end of the semester and if my daughter does poorly on the final exam (which is likely given her history) her grade will be a D and she will get no credit for the class. Also, in our district if you get anything below a C- you can not graduate with academic honors.</p>
<p>As you can imagine she is extremely upset and we are frustrated as well. This one bad grade on her report card could ruin her GPA and keep her from getting into even some state schools.</p>
<p>We are trying to decide if we should:</p>
<p>keep her in the class next semester and just have her work harder, have a meeting with the teacher, call the dean regarding the situation</p>
<p>or if she should just drop the class and take a study hall. maybe have her retake the class as a Junior or maybe take this as a sign that she isn't equipped to deal with AP classes and just have her take honors from here on out.</p>
<p>Would appreciate any advice as this is our first daughter going through this and we really want to do what is best for her.</p>
<p>My daughter took APUSH and she absolutely HATED the course. She managed a decent enough grade but really hated the course and the teacher. I guess I would have her get out of AP USH and just take REGULAR USH…</p>
<p>APUSH is frequently the first AP classes kids take so the format of AP testing combined with the advanced material can be a struggle. A very knowledge parent along time ago told me to buy the AP Test study guides for my kids before the semester, and have them use those to study for their classroom tests. The way the word the material is confusing and typically there are more than one right answer, but there is always one “best” answer. I am pretty sure your daughter is not used to that type of testing and due to lack of quick response on the grading, has not had the advantage to do test corrections and deal with missed questions. </p>
<p>To me, this is now a counselor issue. Even if today was the last day for your daughter, it is possible that the counselors are at school Monday and Tuesday. Call tonight and leave a voicemail or send an email (whichever your system prefers) and be sure to copy the assistant principal on cirriculum. It may be possible for your daughter to do an extra credit project over the break to get to the “C” level. Then for next semester, get that study guide (If you go the AP section on CC, you will find threads on what books are best for each specific AP) It will make all the difference in the world.</p>
<p>Mine also hated APUSH, and dropped it fairly early. It isn’t a sign of how she’ll do in other AP classes. Mine got 4s and 5s on the rest of hers and A’s in the classes. It’s just that one class. She couldn’t do it. She had a 3.6 in high school, and graduated from Syracuse this spring with a 3.6, so not to worry. It’s a tough course for some kids. My son had the same teacher and did great. Different kids, different takes on the course.</p>
<p>Same here. Son hated APUSH, the teacher, the way the course was taught. He never broke the C range. However he did stick it out and at the end of the year he earned a 4 on the test which was better than some of the kids who had better marks in the class itself on their report cards and were better at getting along with the teacher. After the year was out, DS stated that he “could have done more” to achieve in the class and felt he learned alot despite hating the experience as it unfolded. This was, in my view, the biggest achievement / lesson of the class and turned a truly bad ongoing experience into something valuable in the end.</p>
<p>You have my sympathies. We’re in a similar situation with precalculus. My D will be in with a different teacher next semester, but it took a lot of documenting, calling, emailing teacher, counselor, school, and district to get there. Also a junior. Also about a 3.5. The one difficult class is pulling time and attention from the other courses, many of which are hovering at grades of 89-90… I agree with regular U.S. history or an online AP history class if you think it is more the teacher than the material. We are blessed to have a great APUSH teacher! It is hard, I think, on these kids who are solid students, but not academic superstars. It seems that though the colleges say they want students to take challenging courses, they should really be saying, “We want to only see As and a few Bs. Only take the classes that will yield those grades” if they are going to judge students for having overreached a bit or for having an incompetent teacher. Part of learning is finding what challenges you, where you struggle, learning how to learn in spite of inadequate teachers, and so forth. Because of all of the emphasis on grades, the competitiveness of getting into college, and such, it is hard as a parent to take as philosophical a stand as this.</p>
<p>Sophomore year is early to have an AP class. I don’t really think most high school sophomores are truly ready to be taking a college level history course. They don’t have the level of sophistication in writing and the multiple choice questions aren’t always easy even if you think you know the material. Add to that the vagaries of high school teachers and you can have problems. My kids both took APUSH as juniors with no problems - we have good teachers there, but my younger son took AP World with a guy who was a bit full of himself. There were things I liked about him, but he was disorganized and he made up stuff. My son caught on that a lot of the time he was talking through his hat and lost all respect for him. He got pretty poor grades on all the practice tests and then was able to thumb his nose at the teacher when he got a 5 on the exam. </p>
<p>I don’t know what to recommend, but I don’t think dropping down to regular history will hurt - as she’s only a sophomore.</p>
<p>Both my kids used an APUSH study guide along with their classroom materials and took APUSH as sophomores. As someone said APUSH is for many kids the first AP class and the pace and depth of material is generally more than kids are familiar with. The kids had a very good, but very difficult teacher and did not get As in the class but did well on their AP tests. There were many papers to write and this teacher was brutal with their writing…I think a very good thing in the long run. Sometimes as a parent and as a student you need to decide if the grade is more important or the learning. My kids took the hit on the GPAs and learned much from this teacher. Of course every teacher is different. Perhaps try to sort out whether the struggle is the writing, the depth of the analysis in the writing, etc. etc. I have never, ever felt that I would prefer a higher GPA more than solid learning and if it meant the kids went to a college that was notch down then they went to that college well prepared to succeed. But I know that is a unique position YMMV.</p>
<p>*My biggest complaint is that the teacher is more than a month behind on her grading. We just found out today that she got poor grades on some of her projects that were due in early November. Had I known this, I could have done more to help. Now, it’s too late we are the end of the semester and if my daughter does poorly on the final exam (which is likely given her history) her grade will be a D and she will get no credit for the class. Also, in our district if you get anything below a C- you can not graduate with academic honors.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>I hate this…students get penalized when they do “late work”…so why aren’t teachers penalized when they do “late work”…such as when they don’t get grades back to students in a timely manner. </p>
<p>With the exception of essays and large projects, no assignment should take more than a week to grade and get posted/returned.</p>
<p>When teachers are confronted about slow grading, they’ll say that they got behind, or that they had other things to do…yet students sure aren’t allowed that excuse. </p>
<p>Obviously, without timely grades, a student or parent isn’t going to know that a student is in trouble grade-wise until it’s too late. </p>
<p>I would seriously confront this teacher and unless he/she can come up with a solution, I would then go to the administration.</p>
<p>We’ve never had any success being confrontational with a teacher. We’ve even had a new but incompetent teacher get confrontational with DW just for asking what the class average was on an exam. I intervened and asked the question in an email that showed respect for the teacher and asked specifically what I wanted to know. I explained that we wanted to know whether the exam was just unusually hard for all of the kids, or whether there was something specific our D was not getting and maybe we needed to get her a peer tutor. In my opinion, the best approach would be to describe in an email exactly how your D has gone about studying (from the study guide) and ask the teacher to recommend a better way to study for her exam. Ask her whether there are other materials that should be used, should she practice writing DBQ’s, should she do practice AP problems, etc. </p>
<p>It may be that your D needs to make a super human effort to do well on the final and needs to put in the effort to make that happen if at all possible. </p>
<p>Regardless of what happens though, people fail AP classes and go on to do great things. It’s not the end of the world or the end of her academic career. Not in the least. The most successful people take risks (like taking a very hard class) and often fail only to realize that taking risks, failing, coming out ok anyway and “getting back on the horse” makes it that much easier to take a risk again. People who aim high and fail occasionally eventually figure out how to get what they want.</p>
<p>I don’t think there is ANY school that requires an AP course for graduation. Our school requires a U.S. History course but it does NOT have to be APUSH. It can be a regular U.S. History course. DS took honors U.S. History, not AP. That is why I suggested that the OP’s daughter take regular old U.S. history.</p>
<p>Our hs gives a rating of sorts to every course based on the estimated number of hours of homework expected per week. APUSH is one of the absolute hardest - with an estimate of 10-12 hours. Most AP courses have ratings of 4-6 hours or 6-8. I think this is not an appropriate course for the majority of sophomores and would suggest dropping it and taking regular American history in its place.</p>
<p>But don’t let this experience scare you off from AP - have her try again next year - but do an easier AP - like Psychology perhaps.</p>
<p>thumper: you misunderstood my post; if she stays in AP and fails, she won’t get credit for the history at all…I didn’t mean that the AP, specifically, was a requirement for graduation…</p>
<p>agree with RVM; drop down and take a different AP later on…</p>
I agree wholeheartedly with the frustration for late grades. DD2 got a B+ in a college writing course because she made the same mistakes in her writing on multiple assignments due to not getting timely feedback.</p>
<p>However I disagree as much with your last comment. It is your daughter’s class, not yours. She gets to earn the grade. DD1 didn’t really get what her APUSH teacher was teaching so she self-taught the materials. She hated it but she made it through and we know she learned the material. She was well prepared for college.</p>
<p>I would say do whatever it takes to get through this semester (private tutors, extra study materials, etc) and see if she can pull less than a D. If she can pull that off, see if you can move her to regular history for next semester. My son has a teacher that loves to “break” his APUSH students so we have gone through he** this semester. He is finally pulling decent grades, but it is the hardest class that he has by far.
I know that most sophomores take World History so I understand that it seems a little daunting. Unless she wants to be a history major, I wouldn’t worry about the lack of AP especially if she can take AP Psychology in the next two years to make it up.</p>
<p>I feel for your D! My D was in a similar situation with an AP Psych class when she was in HS. She had a 4.3 GPA going into the class, but did poorly in the AP Psych. She had a 100 question test every week along with papers to write. On her first paper, she received the first F in here life. Writing had always been a strength, so it wasn’t the writing, it was her viewpoint vs the teacher’s that differed. The weekly test grades were usually C’s despite hours of studying each week. According to D, the teacher talked off topic about himself a lot (he was homeless and on drugs in his younger years) instead of covering the material. Then he’d just tell the kids to read the book. </p>
<p>Anyway, we ended up getting D out of that class which wasn’t an easy thing to do. Since the teacher often gave crude lectures and talked about his sex life and told the girls in the class to “give it to their boyfriends whenever they wanted it” we had to use that info to get D out of the class. She couldn’t drop down to the regular psych because the same teacher taught that class, to. So she just had a complete drop. The WP showed on her transcript, but didn’t impact her scholarship. We were told by the school counselor that it could impact college acceptance to certain colleges and all Ivy’s but those schools were not in D’s radar.</p>
<p>D has psych this semester (freshman) with a solid A. She doesn’t attribute this to being more ready than in high school. She attributes it to having better instruction without the “gotcha” attitude and 100 question per week tests. The AP class was much harder than the college class she is in now. I suspect that this s also your D’s problem. Have her drop down to regular World History. Hopefully it won’t be the same teacher. </p>