An overabundance?

One of my primary concerns with teaching AP Statistics is the pressure to cover the material in time for the test. I have often heard colleagues bemoan not having sufficient class meetings to properly cover the material for their AP course.

For ten years, I taught a non-AP statistics course and I purposefully chose to cover far fewer topics to allow my students to gain depth in those topics we did cover. In "regular" statistics, we would spend a year on about half of the AP topics. It was a project-based course with computer labs in which students would learn the Data Desk statistics software and spreadsheets as well as calculator techniques. Students wrote surveys and gathered data from the student body and faculty. They read "How to Lie with Statistics" and gave sales pitches in which they used statistics artfully to better sell their product. We played craps and blackjack to study probability. And I'm not talking just one period, but multiple days so that we had lots of quality data. Students researched data on the internet and learned how to organize it and how difficult it can be to find quality data. They had the time to make both big and small mistakes and then stop and start over and learn from their mistakes. I had them research data from non-Western countries in an attempt to give the course a global feel.

As I plan for AP Statistics, I certainly do not suffer for lack of material. Rather, the problem is too much. I cannot possibly do everything I want to do with my students this year. Today, I assigned them their first free response question. Their first test is Friday and I plan to give them two such problems, so I felt compelled to provide them with a chance to try one out ahead of time. Tomorrow in class we will go over the scoring and look at sample responses and their scores. In order to fit this free response question in, I dropped a couple other questions from their assignment sheet. And I know that going over the free response question will take the entirety of Wednesday's 35-minute period.

As I peruse my materials, I find a plethora of activities and projects that I want to use. And I don't want to just throw the activities at my students. I want to scaffold them properly. I want to give them sufficient time to reflect on the questions they might answer, what possible answers might look like, the processes they might choose, the information they need to answer the question, and where they might find the information. I want them to have enough time to fully address their questions, to feel free enough to try, fail, re-think their strategy, and try again. And then, sufficient time to write up a beautiful, well-crafted solution, one that displays the salient parts of the process and clear support for their answers.

Don't start feeling sorry for me. I know solutions to my problems will present themselves. Forgive my whining. I don't want my blog to merely be a rant and complaint bucket. I do know I can scale the problems back. I know that rather than address all the different parts in each project and activity, I can have my students focus on one or two of the components at a time. I know I can do this. I just don't want to spend time teaching my students how to AP. I want to help them be more creative, inquisitive, tenacious, fearless, and courageous. Here we go.