There is nothing worse than finishing up the chapter, allowing your students to work on the study guide for their first class in groups during class…and then realizing that your twelfth graders have no idea how to add fractions together. Which means their trouble with the implied domain of functions involving fractions makes way more sense.

It is frustrating when the problems my students are going through are not because of the concepts we are learning, but because of gaps in their knowledge from the last three years of their education. At this point (when I posted this on FB), there were many defenders of my dear seniors. “I still don’t know how to do fractions – I never learned!” “Well, sometimes it’s hard because the teacher doesn’t make it interesting or relevant.” “Well, it is close to the beginning of the school year [actually the 6 weeks just ended] so they probably forgot a lot over the summer.” And my personal favorite “Thanks Common Core.” 

Well. Firstly – as a teacher I simply don’t have the time to glitz every single lesson to make it completely relevant and interesting to every single student. The point is that you’re in school, you learn it, you study, you do well. Secondly, you don’t forget every single thing you’ve ever learned in your life over a month and a half. Thirdly, they should have learned fractions in elementary/middle school – well before Common Core (which I do support) came into their schools. So where is this breakdown occurring? My personal opinion is that the guidelines that No Child Left Behind places on schools causes pressures to just pass children through – so you end up with a student performing at the 9th grade level in 12th grade math; however, how they got in my class with the skills they possess is not something I can control. What I have to do is scaffold them until they have these vital skills.

The kids I teach are college-bound. They are a part of an engineering magnet, so it is reasonable that I expect them to hone their advanced mathematics skills to prepare them for college. It is difficult to maintain faith in the future of my students, because they are going into math-centric fields without the necessary tools to do well and succeed. Since we’re a little ahead of the other teachers who teach the same subject, I am going to take the week following their chapter one test to focus on the skills they should have learned from their previous teachers. I keep telling myself that it doesn’t matter that they should have anything. If they didn’t, we need to get them back up to level.

I guess this was really more a reflection and rant? It gets discouraging to not be able to continue on a topic because of a lack of knowledge. That you can know how to take a composition of a function, but don’t know that you shouldn’t add x² + x. I’ll have to suck it up and do a review of these fundamentals…because they deserve a brighter future, and so do we.