At the beginning of the school year, I posted about trying to get my AP Bio students to read the Campbell textbook for information. I said it was a hill I was willing to die on, because I felt that it’s a skill they should have, especially for college, and that training oneself to do something boring that isn’t pleasurable, but might eventually be satisfying, is worthwhile. I gave a few strategies for how to interact with the text, and they said that it helped, and then I kind of dropped the ball in favor of pushing through a lot of content.

So it was a very pleasant surprise today when five of my students stopped by the AP Fair as student representatives for AP Bio. I’d put out a general call and nudged a few people individually, but I wasn’t expecting that many to show up. When asked about the homework load, it was listed as 4-6 hours per week, but I deferred to the students. I got a really mixed bag, ranging from maybe doing two a week to consistently putting in 6 hours. What surprised me, though, was that they said that most of the homework they do is reading. All of them said that they figured out that reading the chapter at least for partial understanding before coming into lecture made lecture make sense. They got some sense of what was going on through the reading, I highlight the most important points and hopefully help them piece together into a coherent narrative (yes, even in science we have narratives), and then the fill in gaps that they don’t understand. Even though I have provided them access to Albert.io, all of the college board stuff, they emphasized that reading the textbook very important for their learning. 

I was ecstatic for multiple reasons. First, the first student to mention that she digs into the reading to succeed was one who told me “I don’t learn best from reading a textbook” at the start of the school year. Second, one straight up said “I know I have to take ownership of my learning, and that I’m responsible for that material.” Third, they, and I’m using this as a collective they encompassing most of the class, have seemed to cracked the nut of how to learn this material. I noticed at a certain point a few weeks after the first reading blog post that their comfort with the material, and therefore their grades, started bobbing up. Another student, who didn’t attend the open house, said, when I mentioned that she had gotten much stronger, “yeah, I figured out that I need to read the book and kind of pre-teach myself the material so I understand what you’re talking about in lecture.” 

I’m incredibly proud of this group of students, and I’m so happy that they have this skill that will serve them well in their future science classes. I know it’s a small group of very capable students who, by and large, have good executive functioning skills already, but given the amount of kvetching I got in the first month or so, I am absolutely taking this W and doing a victory lap.