Teach 180: 14% (Day 130)

On Thursday, seven of twenty-two students didn't take the AP Statistics test that was scheduled for that day.  Absenteeism and apathy among my seniors is rampant.  If I recall correctly, I gave 13 of my seniors incompletes for the current reporting period due to work not being turned in or an assessment that had not been taken yet.

Some of the students have missed multiple days of class and the fact that they had to learn half of the current chapter via screencasts on snow days did not help.  As a stat teacher, it made sense for me to gather some data.  The table below shows the overall average percent absence was 14% over the past two weeks.

A lack of "touch points" has been a problem for many teachers this year.  One Algebra 2 teacher in my department greeted her students on March 26th with "Who are you again?"  She hadn't seen the students since March 9th due to days when she wouldn't normally meet with them, spring break, snow days and the standardized testing day.

Our math departments (middle school and upper school) will be meeting on April 19th to discuss what we have chosen to leave out of our curricula this year and the impact it will have on students as they move through the sequence of math courses.  In future years, we may offer AP classes in math, but we may no longer have any time to review before the AP exams.  This will be especially true if we need to take content from lower level courses and move them into upper level courses.  Our current bell schedule will be the death of our AP math program without a coordinated, major overhaul of the curriculum in the next two years.