Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

latimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 122 posts

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#51

Post by cbd1984 »

lbenes wrote: post #49

I’ve traveled to Europe and Asia and it’s saddening to see what a difference they place on the value of Education/teacher compared to us. NC is ranked 48th in the country and willing to give away almost a billion dollars in federal funding over the right to bully transgender individuals.[1][2] Then we have Texas spending 64-million on a high school stadium.[3] How did we get into this mess where our culture values sp…

Maybe if you went to more than two places in the US you'd get a different picture.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#52

Post by dredmorbius »

jakub_g wrote: post #25

Side note, FYI some embedded ad redirects me to the scammy "fix your Android" thing full of alerts and vibrating the phone. This has been a nightmare on Android recently, happens more and more even on high profile websites. Time to reconsider Firefox Mobile and put and adblocker I think...

IME Chrome is unusable for all but closely vetted sites.

Firefox has problems, mostly performance. But adblock and reader mode help greatly.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#53

Post by Spooky23 »

lbenes wrote: post #49

I’ve traveled to Europe and Asia and it’s saddening to see what a difference they place on the value of Education/teacher compared to us. NC is ranked 48th in the country and willing to give away almost a billion dollars in federal funding over the right to bully transgender individuals.[1][2] Then we have Texas spending 64-million on a high school stadium.[3] How did we get into this mess where our culture values sp…

Travel to New York. We spend a fortune on students and teachers. Outcomes vary, and usually have more to do with home situation than money.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#54

Post by sliverstorm »

jasonjei wrote: post #18
srtjstjsj wrote: post #6

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/1... > Nearly 2.5 million students took a total of almost 4.5 million AP tests overall last year. Of the test-takers, just 322 obtained every point possible on an AP test, and perfect scores were logged on 21 of the 36 AP exams. Here’s the breakdown of those perfect scores: 67 in Computer Science A 55 in Spanish Language and Culture 54 in Microeconomics 36 in…

I took AP Latin: Vergil in high school. That was one of the hardest classes I've ever had to take because the grammar is so complex (I'm also not surprised Japanese has few perfect scores). I know I didn't get a passing score. I'm surprised however that Chinese has no perfect scores. I remember some students that had moved from Taiwan or China would take AP Chinese to get free college credits. The grammar of Chinese…

I've always noticed ESL students who have progressed to fluency have a significantly better understanding of English from a technical standpoint. I know most of the rules by "gut feel", but they can actually recite the rule, identify parts of speech, etc. As a result I expect they would do better than I (a native speaker) on an extremely pedantic English exam.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#55

Post by jayess »

lbenes wrote: post #49

I’ve traveled to Europe and Asia and it’s saddening to see what a difference they place on the value of Education/teacher compared to us. NC is ranked 48th in the country and willing to give away almost a billion dollars in federal funding over the right to bully transgender individuals.[1][2] Then we have Texas spending 64-million on a high school stadium.[3] How did we get into this mess where our culture values sp…

Spending != quality.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#56

Post by dsajames »

Really? Just just woke up day and had a desire to bully trans people? What, they were bored?

It's self righteous people like you who widen the divide. This issue wasn't even talked about a year ago and suddenly they're bullying?

Maybe if more people were pragmatic to new laws affect everyone else instead of reflexively only considering a miniscule few you would see that there isn't any more bullying going on there than before or in most other places for that matter.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#57

Post by SolderMonkey »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #6

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/02/1... > Nearly 2.5 million students took a total of almost 4.5 million AP tests overall last year. Of the test-takers, just 322 obtained every point possible on an AP test, and perfect scores were logged on 21 of the 36 AP exams. Here’s the breakdown of those perfect scores: 67 in Computer Science A 55 in Spanish Language and Culture 54 in Microeconomics 36 in…

"Surprisingly low numbers, considering how many hundreds of students ace their calculus tests in college."

I think there's a trend of becoming a better student in college, so I don't find it so surprising to ace calculus in college.

myself as a counter example, I was an ace in high school passing 10/12 AP exams, and almost failed out of college--go figure?

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#58

Post by SolderMonkey »

josinalvo wrote: post #29

I am not sure if such clean-looking, new-looking classes are standard in the US, but it gives me a tad of skepticism... Is this school in an affluent neighborhood?

went to this school '06-10 and had to pleasure to get to know this teacher when he started there. Not much of an affluent neighborhood, lots of gang violence, but still lots of good people come out of it because of leaders like this teacher

caveat; this is a magnet program of about 200 students within the overall two thousand and some

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#59

Post by bpeebles »

dsajames wrote: post #56

Really? Just just woke up day and had a desire to bully trans people? What, they were bored? It's self righteous people like you who widen the divide. This issue wasn't even talked about a year ago and suddenly they're bullying? Maybe if more people were pragmatic to new laws affect everyone else instead of reflexively only considering a miniscule few you would see that there isn't any more bullying going on there th…

Trans* people have been bullied pretty much forever. The tide is finally shifting to be able to force places like schools to change their polices to help reduce/end the bullying. It's clearly the correct thing to do.

Re: A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam

#60

Post by SolderMonkey »

ben_jones wrote: post #41

It's been awhile but the AP exam for me was nothing but rote memorization. You memorize how to solve n types (10? 15? 20?) of problems and then you grind through the test a) identify what type of problem it is b) apply algorithm to solve. Furthermore the AP exam environment, IMO, varied by the school giving it. I could have easily stored formulas in my calculator (for the calculator section), I could have easily coll…

In the framework of 'a) identify what type of problem it is b) apply algorithm to solve', how many freshman college classes (what the AP classes try to emulate) don't work within that framework?

While I believe our primary and higher education systems could use a lot of work, I think the AP program is at least respectable as a stepping stone into higher education, especially for communities where higher education isn't a norm or accessible.

Post reply on HN