The Fourth Wall.

I love getting to know my students.  If anything, I am an extremely social person - so teaching 80 teenagers per day is perfect for me.  I love to learn about their families, histories, and passions - and I enjoy most of the experiences that we have together throughout the year. In addition, most of my students (and their families) learn about my life history, and often hear stories about my family, travels, and experiences through my teaching.  

That being said, I work diligently to maintain healthy and well defined boundaries with my students, always with the hope that they have a clear understanding that I am their teacher, not a casual friend or buddy.   So I stress that my personal life is not something that my students are allowed to cross in to.  Generally, they are respectful of these lines, and I am always appreciative of it.

But I am a big believer that successfully teaching someone anything is a social experience - and one that must be understood from a personal perspective.  To learn, I mean really learn, we have to connect to it personally.  To that end, I break down the fourth wall in my classroom.  I learned about the fourth wall concept as a young theater student, and it is defined as such, "The fourth wall is the imaginary "wall" at the front of the stage in a traditional three-walled box-set theater.  Speaking directly to or otherwise acknowledging the audience through this imaginary wall in a play, is referred to as "breaking the fourth wall." Think Ferris Bueller (or at a Ryan Adams concert) speaking directly to the audience - it is endearing.  And it helps all of us root for him down the stretch.  

In order to truly teach my students history, I often have to present stories (of the Romans, wars, myths, etc.) to them - and teach them analysis.  But when I make mistakes, or when I see that a personal story from my life may better explicate the idea - I break the fourth wall and speak directly to my students.  When I am enforcing the tardy policy, or discussing grade percentages at the end of the semester - I am performing a professional duty - and all of my students know that.  But they also know that I am a normal, vulnerable human being who is working a job, and lives his life outside of that job.  

I believe that one of the biggest pitfalls that teachers fall into is hiding behind that fourth wall of professionalism, at the expense of developing positive relationships with students, and/or showing any vulnerability in the classroom.  So while my boundaries are real - by the end of the year, my students (and their families) and I really know each other well. Reconciling the balance between healthy boundaries and healthy teacher/student relationships is a huge part of teaching - and I hope that I can continue to find the sweet spot in that effort.

Test Scores {are not everything}

It is that time of the summer when all AP scores are posted.  This can be a time of great relief, or disappointment, for all of the students, families, and teachers involved in Advanced Placement classes.  I find that it is important for us to remember that our learning experiences always equal more than the sum of our test scores.  

That being said, most of us hope to see a score on our AP exam that reflects our work in the course - and that is not always the case (especially when we are dealing with an exam that covers....wait for it...10,000 years of history, throughout the entire globe).

But to provide some perspective on the AP World History exam - I thought I would post the 2014 score distributions, including every AP World History student in the entire nation.  It is my hope that students can gain some clarity about their scores by looking at the distributions.  So here it is:

2014 AP World History Score Distributions (National)

5 - 6.4%

4 - 15.8%

3 - 31.7%

2 - 27.9%

1 - 18.2%

53.9% of all students scored a 3 or above on this year's exam.