I’ll never forget my seventh grade science teacher, a young man not very long out of college. I was in a higher class, (we were all tracked), but no one did very well on the first test because we had never learned how to study for a test. So, this young man ran after school classes teaching us how to study and then ran a study class after school before every test, all on his own time.
When was the last time that you ever saw a teacher do something like that?
My daughter's math teacher did that this past year, and my understanding is he has always done it. He does it because he is teaching 8th grade math to 7th graders, but they still have to know the 7th grade math because that is what the standardized test is about. He offers the extra classes to them as insurance, I guess. They all obviously did well enough with 6th grade math to just skip the 7th grade class.