(Looking back, I’m embarrassed to recall how late I realized some truths. HAVE A GROWTH MINDSET FOR YOURSELF AS A NEW AP TEACHER.Ī deep understanding of rhetoric may not come your first year teaching this course. Read more about pacing on different schedules. The relevant pacing guide will come directly to your email inbox. Want a copy of my day-to-day pacing guide? You can get the 180-day pacing guide here and the 90-day pacing guide here. I’m a concrete, linear thinker in a district that requires a survey of American literature in 11th grade.

It’s a great tool if you think in spirals. In the AP Language Course and Exam Description, there is a nine-unit option that weaves different skill sets together, and those units line up with the progress checks in AP classroom. Global thinkers go global.Ĭollege Board does not prescribe a particular pace or sequence, so you get to make it your own. Some teachers chunk the course according to the organization of the exam. There are numerous ways to organize the course, and it’s tempting to latch on to someone else’s way. It didn’t happen often, so beating me was a big deal.) FIND YOUR OWN STYLE TEACHING THE COURSE. Anyone who did better than I did got a highlighter. That’s all it took–one free, unusual office supply–for them to treat multiple choice practice as a competition with me. (The most coveted award was a tri-color highlighter I had from some conference promotion. The class insisted that I had to give away some kind of prize every time a student outperformed me. The first time I did this, a student got two more correct than I did. Keep yourself off center by completing a timed one-passage released multiple choice exercise WITH the students. Pull a passage you’ve never seen before and let them hear how you process the analysis of it. One of the most powerful things you can do is model your thinking. Use the discomfort to put students at ease.

There may be I’m not the smartest person in the room moments. There will be more than one I have no idea what I’m doing moment. EXPECT TO BE HUMBLED AS AN AP LANG TEACHER. Someone reading this post is a first-year teacher who was told the week before school started that she would be teaching AP English Language & Composition, that there was no time or money to send her to training, and that she would have five sections of 30 students. Maybe you had been drinking when you filled out your course wish list. Maybe you were bored and needed the challenge. English 10 students (and their parents) may have badgered you into teaching the course. You might have trained years ago and waited for THE AP teacher to retire. You might have asked to teach AP English Language or been volunteered for it.

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