Anna Real
Staff Writer
Having to be your own teacher is challenging, especially over a holiday break. Advanced Placement Biology and Chemistry students are expected to learn several new chapters on their own, during Thanksgiving break. Students shouldn’t be expected to learn new things on their own because the nature of their education requires a teacher’s guidance.
Because of the limited amount of time students have before they take the AP tests, AP students have to work fast in order to learn all the material. Since AP teachers have so much information to cover, they assigned their students new chapters to learn while on vacation and were expected them to be ready for a test when they returned.
Every year, Manhattan Beach Education Foundation receives many donations from parents and students in the Manhattan Beach Unified School District. According to the MBEF website, these donations are put toward teachers’ salaries and finding great teachers for the students. Since the families of Manhattan Beach are the ones paying every year to have teachers teach the students, it is not fair that the students are having to teach themselves. The students of any school should not be expected to do the school employees’ jobs for them.
Switching the method or Flipping the classroom, which is a method where students learn the material at home and practice more in class, would hurt the school’s system. According to AP Biology teacher, Jessica Bledsoe, students do slightly better on AP exams when the teacher is teaching them the material. Having the student teach themselves the material could potentially mess with the school’s and the students’ amazing test scores and most of Mira Costa’s chances of success.
According to AP Biology student Annabelle Mirhashemi, learning the curriculum took over 5 hours to do and was a terrible inconvenience during the Thanksgiving break. These students should not be expected to learn and do that much work all by themselves and take a test on it the next week. It is not fair that the students have to spend hours working on material their teacher should cover in class. Spending more than five hours on only one class over the break is too much homework and the students wouldn’t really absorb the information. They could give the students time when they come back to school from break to ask questions and go over the material before taking a test.
Someone might argue that since the student chose to be in an AP class, they should be able to handle the workload. This is unfair because the students expect a faster pace and more homework, not having to teach themselves. An AP class is defined by the US College Board as a course taken to earn college credit and where students study more, not a class where students must teach themselves materials they haven’t studied before. Students shouldn’t have to teach themselves since that is not what they signed up for when joining any AP class such as history, chemistry, biology, etc.
Another argument from teachers is that the curriculum is material that the student’s have already covered in first year Biology. This still is not fair to the students because students haven’t studied the material in two years and some students skipped first year biology. It is not fair that the teachers expect students to remember the information since many of them have most likely forgotten and have to relearn it. Not to mention, some students never learned the information having skipped first year biology.
Students teaching themselves new material violates the way Mira Costa has educated teenagers for years and is also the job of the school and teachers. Students should not be expected to learn new materials on their own since that is the teacher’s jobs and should not be tested on lessons that haven’t been explained to them.
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