Alright I've had all this pent up frustration and anger with this class for too long. I've never used reddit before but it seems like this is the best place to let this all out. Who knows, maybe a lot of you guys are also having the same difficulties as I am. I hope it's okay for me to rant here. My new account isn't letting me post on r./teenagers so I thought this was the next best choice.I'm a senior in high school and I'm also doing my second year of the IB program. I'm doing school entirely online, but my school also has kids attending in person so it's sort of a mixed model. This is about a certain biology teacher, we'll call her D. Now D is pretty old, so it's a given that she's had difficulties adjusting to the new teaching model and to the online platform for posting/submitting assignments, and I'm aware of that as I'm in her class online. There's a lot about what she does that just doesn't make sense however. When we're doing online lectures and the screen is shared through zoom, she goes to the next set of notes and starts explaining them, as expected, but before she explains the notes, she moves away from the laptop (where the microphone is) to presumably near the projector board in front of the in person class. We've told her multiple times that we can't hear her and that she needs to stay near the laptop since the first day, but she's continued to do the same thing. To make things worse, the room has a horrible echo that makes any noise far away a garbled mess when picked up by the low quality microphone. Adding that to the automatic noise suppression Zoom has for anything considered 'background noise', you can't hear anything D says once she starts walking.Okay so what if I can't hear the lecture, I'm fairly self sufficient and I can do a pretty good job by just learning from the notes and going off of the typed lecture notes. Oh boy. Tests. D has her tests in two sections: multiple choice and free response, with a separate Microsoft forms for each test. Normally before online learning, D's tests were printed out packets of questions in a set order for multiple choice and the free response were simply typed out questions with large blanks to write in. Now for us online students (elearners), she's obviously going to have to type each question in manually and scan in any accompanying graphs or diagrams, which takes a lot more extra work and I acknowledge the extra effort that she puts in for us. However, with how 'unfit' she is with technology, it is almost expected that she's going to have mistakes littered throughout anything that uses a computer. To nobody's surprise, questions have typos and there was even a question that went "A, B, D, D." These minor mistakes are really easy to look over and shouldn't really affect our how we answer the questions, but what about the possibility that she types the answer responses in the wrong order? Many times the answer choices have similar wording and there have been times where the same answer choice was repeated. What if D forgets to select a right answer for a question, making it impossible to get certain questions right on the Microsoft forms? When I came in to do a test correction and D pulled up my responses to the Microsoft forms, there were questions that I got wrong that showed the right answer in green, but there were also questions that I got wrong without the green indicator showing what was actually right (granted I shouldn't have been looking over her shoulder in the first place because I'm supposed to figure out the right answer myself, but I'll explain later why this is pointless). Also, the Microsoft forms test was shuffled, as expected, which is a good test security measure and all, except when I came in to do test corrections. D wrote down the question number I got wrong and the answer I put and tells me to grab a packet and start working. If you remember earlier, these are the packets the in-person students use, which has the questions in the order that D typed the answers into the Microsoft forms initially and not in the unique shuffled order for my Microsoft forms. So basically, I was doing test corrections for questions I probably didn't even get wrong and I even had a question that had the right answer (because my question numbers didn't match the question numbers on the packet). I didn't realize the problem until a friend of mine brought it up afterwards, I just assumed that the Microsoft forms showed D my answers in the unshuffled order. All of these problems with testing make the test harder, and it doesn't help the fact that the test themselves, regardless of whether you're in person or not, are already really hard by themselves! We're getting these tests back to back and it's just tanking my grade.So the first response will be to tell her about it right? Being online and all, my only way to contact her is through email or Schoology (our online school platform where stuff gets posted). Well, D almost never checks her email and doesn't check Schoology at all. D never even checked her emails last year when we were all in person. A friend of mine said that D was saying all our emails went to her junk, until a parent got involved. Contacting D sucks even more for me especially because I have D as an advisor for a big essay I have to write to get my IB diploma. I've sent her numerous emails talking about my essay outline and my rough draft to ask for advice and I haven't gotten a single email back as a reply. Advice normally would be really good to have but isn't really necessary, except the forms I need to fill out for this IB essay are mandatory and a part of the actual essay. I need to show aspects of meeting with my advisor and reflecting on the essay writing process, and I've filled the form with fake reflections trying to pretend like I've actually talked with D about anything close to what I'm actually writing. I've also sent her emails about mistakes in the grade book with grades that she's put in wrong, to which I've gotten no reply. On Schoology, I submitted a lab writeup as a word doc, and apparently the website messes up the word doc formatting a little bit, which caused the title headers on my tables to be cut off by a page break. D marks off points for it (she's always been a strict grader), and I send her an email about how the website messes up the formatting and I ask her to download the word doc file and open it on her computer to look at the lab report there. No reply. And along with the grade being entered in wrong, she put in the grade still taking off the points for a formatting mistake on the website's part. I even resubmitted the lab write up as a pdf file, telling her through email that nothing has changed to the lab report and that submitting the file as a pdf would avoid the problem I had earlier. She obviously hasn't seen that email either and probably wouldn't believe it in the first place.So keep in mind, these are all just the technological problems I've had with D's class. There's a lot of other problems in her class in general that I won't get into for anyone's sake who is still reading this far. I've talked about these problems with my classmates and even other teachers, but this obviously doesn't seem like it will be fixed any time soon. I'd really like to tell her through Zoom while I'm in her class but we're either doing notes, which she goes through really quick with no time to ask a question, or we're doing bookwork, which is an absurd amount of questions that I'm trying to get as much done as possible. I've had D as a teacher for 2 years already and I know she's not the best with technology and I know that she assigns a lot of work, but this year just makes me want to hang myself. Her class alone is enough to overwhelm somebody, but with other classes, extra curriculars, and a job, this is really getting to me. I apologize for any mistakes or confusion in my rant, I'll try my best to answer any questions on this thread. This is probably my second or third ever post on reddit, please keep that in mind.tl;dr: Boomer teacher making online school really difficult and ruining everyone's grades, including the in-person students, and especially for the online students. via /r/IBO https://ift.tt/37i7Ejy
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