Note: I wrote this post a few years back, but I forgot to hit the publish button, I guess.
I wanted to document some of my thoughts here, because it's a weird feeling taking a high school class as an adult, and I'm getting some insights into the life of a high schooler that I'm not getting by merely teaching classes.
It's hard.
OMG it's hard. Maybe my classmates have it easier because they all just came out of Algebra 2, but I'm struggling with just the basic algebra side of things, much less the trigonometry. We're learning the Pythagorean Identities and if we go slowly I can keep up, but I have to keep referencing knowledge that I just learned yesterday, and it becomes confusing quickly. It takes too long to understand everything back to the root knowledge, so I have to just memorize waypoints, but when I use memorized knowledge I forget what it all means. My brain is not used to working this hard.I'm doing about an hour of homework a day, too. Plus, I'm giving up my conference period, which means I have about an hour of teacher stuff to do at the end of each day, so this class is costing me two hours a day total. None of that is a really big deal at this point in the year, but it may be trouble later. My primary thought on this though is that these students are probably working this hard in most of their classes. Could it be possible that they have 3 hours of homework a night? I'll have to ask a few of them. As an electives teacher I never give homework so students can concentrate on their non-electives class homework, and this experience is reinforcing that decision.