Help us make a difference for incoming U.S history students.

November 15th 2021

To whom it may concern,

My name is Zoe Mouchyn and I am advocating on the behalf of the students who were taught by Rodney Wellman. 

Mr. Wellman is well known to his students to be unpredictable and unreliable. He has on many occasions missed weeks of school and also left classes unattended for the majority of the period. Having a teacher gone for this amount of time is extremely worrying for the students who are trying to get a meaningful education.

Mr. Wellman does not use original work for his notes, assignments, reviews or tests.They can all be found online. This would not be as problematic if the material he used matched up correctly. Often, students are left having to google answers because Mr. Wellman’s notes do not include the information they are tested on. To go along with this, Wellman also recycles or throws away tests after they are taken and graded, giving the students no opportunity to see what they missed.

Unlike other U.S history teachers in our school, Mr. Wellman does NOT allow test corrections for the reason that, “This is an advanced class”. Although that is true, Mr. Wellman’s policies do not align with other teacher’s, which is very unfair.

Speaking from personal account, Mr. Wellman has refused to grade late work papers even though my other AP classes accept work up to a week late for a sixty. (see below). This was specifically frustrating for me because he lost my paper and refused to grade it when I redid the assignment. 

Studying and retaining information is nearly impossible due to his strong policy that notes should only be taken in class. I do understand where he’s coming from, but everyone has to miss school at some point and they have no way to obtain the information learned in class. Mr. Wellman only posts the powerpoints he found one or two days before the test, forcing students to either find the information from someone else or wait until the last minute to prepare for tests. 

On a much more serious note, Mr. Wellman allows students to use racial slurs in propaganda projects simply because it is a part of history. This is overwhelmingly concerning because the weight of those words should not be used so lightly in high school history projects.

Recently, as of today, he failed a student because she had her backpack on the floor and threatened the student that if she told anyone he would punish her more. She was in no way cheating but is suffering the consequences, like the rest of us, of Mr. Wellman’s harsh and unfair treatment. 

I could go on and on with how stressful and difficult the class is but I think I’ve said enough. We, as students, just want to be able to reach our full potential. We want to be able to do well on assignments and tests but we are simply unable to, and if we are able to do well, it is because we took the learning into our own hands. Please help us get to the bottom of this and help us create a better future for incoming U.S history students.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aUZpax2NNVKbvBcyzfI0L7KGuQUDGEKw6RW5LWFcXUg/edit?usp=sharing