GranolaBox

Next year I get to teach AP United States Government and Politics. I’ve never taught the course, there’s no established curriculum other than what the college board wants me to teach, and I’ll have about 80 of my school’s best and brightest seniors who’ve signed up for the course.

So many kids are taking the course because it’s the only way the kids can get out of regular Government and Economics, which they have to take with kids who, in their estimation, are dumb. This is their only challenging way to meet the state requirements for the two classes, so they’re trading in Mickey Mouse courses for guaranteed homework every night.

So I gotta be ready. This week I took a College Board primer on teaching the course. The teacher was a Community College teacher from Jamestown, who’s also a prominent politician there. A lot of the other teachers taking the course also worked extensively in local government, so I was able to come away from the course with a lot of useful stuff which I will unabashedly steal for use in my own class.

That’s what teacher school is all about.

What sucked was that the course started on the first fucking day of summer vacation. No time to breathe. I took the course at the high school just down the road from mine and it reminded me for the first time in a long time just what absolute hell it is to sit in a uni-desk for hours on end.

My ADD meds saved the day and helped me concentrate, but the Stratterra did nothing for my bony old ass. Next year I’m having visions of old thrift store bean bags and comfy chairs that my kids can flop in while they read and debate the gazillion pages of stuff I found for them to read in class over the course of the past week.

Given what my therapist terms my “dour outlook” on the future I’m not sure how I’m going to approach teaching government and what some philosophe termed “the dismal science.” How can I teach about government when I’m convinced our government will collapse in the not-so-distant future? How can I teach economics when I’m convinced our economy will shit the bed even sooner?

Perhaps the coolest thing about the course was the quixotic hope that we can try to convince at least a few of our kids to try to take the government back for the people. The mere mention of this excites QoMU’s cynical gland, but I know that’s why she and an appropriate number of my students and colleagues love me.

Filed under: Teaching on July 5th, 2008