Shoshanna Kostant – AP Calculus BC

What are your thoughts on the change?

I think they’re really depending on kids being honorable about how they’re going to answer the questions and not cheat or talk to anyone else or use notes. It’s basically using the honor code at this point. But I know a lot of colleges have to do this now as well, when they give final exams, so I don’t think it’s any different that way. In terms of writing a written response on the computer, even as opposed to by hand, that just makes the mathematics harder. I guess they’re going to have a math keyboard or something, where you can write your integral, but I really have no sense of how that’s going to work. It’s pretty similar to the MCAS last year, which was all online, so I know that people have been working on this, but I just don’t know how easy it’s going to be to answer a calculus question on the keyboard. So there’s that. In terms of our school and AP classes, BC calculus is in really good shape because we basically finished everything that they are requiring students to know for the exam except for one unit which Mr. Piro and I had already planned as a four-day, five-day unit. So I’m not really worried about kids learning the material for the AP, it’s just that we didn’t get to assist people and make sure that they actually learned the Taylor series stuff, and there is some convergence on there. So we don’t know how well people are prepared, and much of this AP stuff is going to be what kids are willing to do on their own, because teachers themselves can really only hope that kids are motivated enough without the grades to make it happen.

How is your class staying on track?

I can see [Mr. Piro, the other BC Calc teacher] and I coming up with videos to teach, or to actually hold class if it comes to it. If we’re still online by the time we’d start differential equations, we’ll probably use Zoom or whatever platform has been decided and actually teach online. We can set up a document camera and have you guys watch what we’re writing, much the same way we do in class. If it comes to having to teach you guys online, I don’t think it’s going to be independent, it will be more like an online classroom.

How will this change affect the college process for juniors?

I think the colleges are going to be fair about this, and realize that what they’re experiencing at the college level, high schoolers are also experiencing. And it’s across the board, across the country, so they shouldn’t have expectations that are unrealistic. I totally understand the anxiety that our juniors are feeling. I think our main priority is learning and not the AP exam. It’s always been our main concern, that kids are learning and not learning it for a test. And I don’t think that’s going to change. And for kids having to learn something for next year’s calculus course, we’re figuring out what they need to learn to move on. So for my juniors in Pre-calc, I want to make sure they know the limits unit and binomial theorem, and things that I know are going to be coming up on the first day when they walk into calculus. For juniors that are currently in AP, we want to make sure they’re going to be ready for multi-variable in the fall. And I think that our BC students are definitely in shape to do that. So for us it’s still primarily about the learning, and I think the colleges would want it that way. I don’t know how much the AP exam counts for colleges right now, and I think that’s something for the colleges to figure out.What could we have done at a school level and at a classroom level to prepare better for this situation?

What do you think could have been done to improve the current situation?

I wish that at the federal level, things were figured out better, so we wouldn’t be in this situation right now. And I remember when this first came out, we were all thinking, ‘this is going on in China, it’s not going on here, we’re still safe, we’re going to be fine,’ and I don’t think anyone can think that anymore. I think we just started talking about it two weeks before we actually had to leave the building. That week, I wish that I had taken that Thursday to just talk about this, not taught anything that day, but just talk to my class about what the possibilities were. But I think I was also unprepared to even think about it. I was really hoping it wouldn’t come to this. You think about everything that’s going on at the high school, with scheduling and the building and construction and all the things that Mr. Mason and Mr. Meyer are dealing with on a daily basis, I think we did pretty well, considering. Maybe other schools got up online a bit faster, although we don’t really know.
I think given everything, it would have been nice to have a letter sent out to everyone a bit earlier saying, ‘the teachers have got it, here’s what’s preventing us from putting anything online right now, we’ve got kids at home ourselves, we’re trying to figure out daycare for our own children.’ There’s a lot going on that people don’t think about, but I definitely understand the anxiety students went through just by not knowing what’s going on. But apart from the letter, I don’t think anything else could have been done. I’m pretty impressed by how the teachers have come together with the administrators to talk about this. And ultimately, in not rushing, things will get thought through in a better way than having this plan in place that was made by just a few people. I imagine that in other schools, that’s what happened. They made a plan, it was top-down, every teacher got told what to do. That’s not how Brookline works. We’re a community where we discuss everything, we fight about it, but ultimately we know that what we come up with is going to be better. So it’s still a great place to be. Even if we’re blocks away from each other.