Miss Inadequate and Mrs. Wonderful

I was talking to Megan today and we were remembering days gone by when Megan had a very young, inexperienced math teacher in 7th grade.  I remember going to a conference with Miss Inadequate.  I came armed not only with my daughter's poor performance records but the knowlege that most of my daughter's friends were struggling in her class as well.  When I got to the conference she told me that Megan was not very good at math and that perhaps she should consider dropping to regular math.  I asked her to show me the satistics of where her classes were performing in comparison to the kids in other teachers' classes.  I remember asking her why her classes were performing about 20 points lower on the district wide exams than the students in other sections, with other teachers at the same school.  Her conclusion was that she just had a class full of slow kids and that the other teachers had better students.  She had no numbers on which to base her conclusion, but she was convinced that must have been the problem.  I proposed that perhaps her teaching methods were inadequate, that she needed to improve, that my daughter and her classmates were bright, wonderful math students in 6th grade, and that her conclusions were totally erroneous.  There is nothing like a dumb teacher calling your kid dumb to get up the ire of  a parent.  She must have impressed the administration the same way she impressed me because she was not there the next year.

The next year in, 8th grade, Megan was taking Algebra 1 and had a great teacher who taught the class in the traditional method.  She would give a mini lesson and send the kids home with about 30-45 minutes of homework.  The next day she would have selected students work out the homework on the board in front of all of their peers.  She would praise a correctly done problem and analyze where the erring students went wrong.  She had a 95% pass rate on the End of Course exam.  The district pass rate was 60% and the state pass rate was about 20% on the same exam.  I loved that teacher!  Megan had a great basis in algebra.  Unfortunately, the teacher retired the very next year.  I never confronted her on this because there was no need, but I bet she did not think of her students as slow.  She didn't have to use excuses, because her teaching mehods were wonderful enough for almost all of her students to succeed.