Notes from the AP

This morning I went to an AP Calculus Workshop. Let me start by saying that yes, there really are things I'd rather be doing at 7:45 on a beautiful Saturday morning than driving to a local high school and sitting in a classroom for 7 hours. I did manage to convince myself that although there are lots of things about Calculus that I don't remember, that I wouldn't be the biggest bonehead there. This is an advantage to being arrogant, a characteristic I keep under wraps most of the time, but which I can fetch out of my mind's closet when I need it.

We get to the room, which was just your basic public high school classroom (History, I think) and the instructor gave us a fat booklet and pointed to a list of questions that we were supposed to work on. This was exactly what I didn't want to do- work. I just wanted to sit there passively and have knowledge stuffed into my brain, you know, like a regular student. But work I did. I even surprised myself a bit with what I could do.

Then we started to introduce ourselves. We found out that there were two people sitting next to each other, and one had taught the other in high school. I found out that a local high school has at least 2 teachers teaching AP Calc who had never taught calc before. Another woman who wanted to be the first non-white-male in her high school to teach AP Calc.

Then our instructor told us about what it's like being a grader (or reader, as they're called). They all go to a convention center somewhere and about 800 teachers sit around tables and grade the same problem on hundreds of papers. This reminds me of a job that I had for about 2 months in between when I was accepted to Wharton and when school started. Remind me to talk about Aspen Systems sometime.

There's apparently a whole hierarchy of graders- up to "Chief Reader." Their goal is consistency. Fairness enters into it not at all. The College Board pays for everything, but she said the cafeteria food gets really boring, and if you're a normal person who wants to get anything from the vegetarian food line gets shooed away for not being a "registered vegetarian." I have many friends who are vegetarians, and I do wish they had to register, because sometimes you don't want to go out to eat with them.

After an hour of this we started going over problems and she would explain how they were graded. It's pretty interesting and I think I understand it well enough to explain it. The rest of the day was doing math problems and talking about them. I don't really like math that much, but considering there were several unfamiliar things at least I learned something. And I got 0.6 credits toward something with initials that I don't know what it is.

I did mean to say on the survey sheet afterwards that they really need to have coffee at lunch. Going back into the classroom for the final 2 1/2 hours was pretty brutal and being half asleep didn't help much. I also remembered, too late, that last time I went to one of these things I brought a seat cushion because sitting in those hard plastic classroom seats hurts your butt after a couple of hours.

Oh, and the name of supposedly the best Calculus teaching wiki? Designated Deriver.