It’s The Teachers That Need To Be Graded

My friend is a teacher at a private high school. He’s one of two science teachers, as the school is pretty small. The other science teacher has been there for years and is very set in her ways. She believes there’s one way to teach, and if students don’t pick up on the material, too bad for them. She prides herself on the fact that “only a few students get As” in her class. Apparently, the teacher who was there before my friend also had a similar mentality, so it was very difficult for most of those students to get good grades in science.

My friend, on the other hand, believes that everyone is capable of getting an A if they’re willing to put in the effort, and is willing to help students during free periods and after classes, while the other teacher is not. My friend is new to teaching, so after he submitted his first-quarter grades, he got pulled into a meeting with the principal and the other science teacher. Apparently, the students in my friend’s class had “too many As” and he was being reprimanded for not making his class rigorous enough. The whole time, the other teacher kept giving him smug looks and making comments about how some people just weren’t cut out for teaching, if they didn’t have a firm enough hand for it. Basically, it came out that when his class’s grade average was way higher than hers, she threw a fit insisting it must be because he was giving his students easy As, because there was no way that many high schoolers could master the sciences to that extent.

He asked for a copy of her tests for the next units they were going into, and said he wanted to administer those to his class, since she thought his weren’t rigorous enough. The principal agreed and told my friend that he should use this as a learning opportunity, so he could “determine the level of difficulty” he should be striving for.

My friend taught that unit the same way he taught every single unit prior to it. He took time with students who were struggling, was always willing to repeat and review difficult concepts, and made himself available for whenever they could meet with him for extra help. At the end of the unit, both he and the other teacher administered the same test. 

In his class, the average grade was 92%. In the other teacher’s class, the average was 76%. The principal called him back in and checked that he hadn’t given extra credit or special help during the test. My friend swore he hadn’t, and then, in the most respectful way possible, told the principal that he thought that maybe the problem wasn’t that his class was too easy.

The other teacher is currently being retrained.