Posted on 10/31/2005 9:04:55 AM PST by SouthernBoyupNorth
Yes, but bored bright kids turn into trouble makers as well. I know, I was one in 8th grade and my husband was in HS. Our 2nd grader is bright, but gets into trouble when bored.
I have no problem with the basic premise of NCLB - but it also needs to be applied to the best and brightest and it is not.
My dad said when he was in school, if a student seemed to be behind by 8th grade they would usually go to a trade school, rather than a traditional high school.
The results would be staggering.
If your son is at a highly advanced level, is there a way he can test out or do correspondence courses through the district to get his credits to graduate early?
Well, the wife is busy converting herself to a stay at home mom this month, so at least the foundation is being laid. I was starting to lose hope that that would happen. We'll just see what the coming year brings.
Hey, No sweat on the 2 cents thing, my bad for not catching it to begin with.
"And, I'd love to talk to H.S., and particularly college kids today. I'd just tell them - if you think that you have hard teachers now, wait 'til you have a boss. Or clients."
I think that very sentiment is why so many kids come out of college today and wonder why they cannot start out making 75 grand a year. There is some kind of mentality that makes them think a degree is everything. The part they fail to learn (some of them anyway) is that very point you make here. They find out quickly the education in a frame means very little if they cannot apply it to those clients and or bosses.
Along those lines is why I favor year round schooling. Today we form a pattern of summers off for kids that get a shock when those several months turn into 2 weeks ( if they are lucky).This is the wrong pattern to set imho.
The "No Child Left Behind" policy is pure demogoguery. For more on the subject and on education, in general, see Public Schools: Issues & Reality.
Hopefully, President Bush's new appointee to the Supreme Court will provide a partial atonement for his (the President's) pushing such unconstitutional and counter-productive nonsense.
William Flax
I read stories every day or see them on TV where kids, repeat KIDS, are earning money providing help to adults in how to use tech gadgets or some other program. In additon, thousands of kids are raising money for toys or books in the Arab world or Africa, is your son missing out on this?
I think you have me mixed up with another poster.........my daughter is 7 and in the 2nd grade.
(oops hit the wrong button)
My problem at this moment is that the school district is not allowing her to advance at her pace, they've killed the program the principal instituted to do just that. and I have the idea the school is being closely monitored by the district peole to make sure the teachers and principal are not doing it "behind their backs" so to speak.
I'm running into some road blocks getting concrete answers to my very straightforward questions..which to me is far more telling than any answer I could get.
I don't know the context of the comment so I may be off base right here, but tje brighter ones can become an incentive in my own class. BUT the way I use it menas being an INSPIRATION, not as a tutor. Last year I had a girl who went up 3 grade levels in one month in reading. You can bet I made a big deal out of it. Pretty soon a bunch of other students wanted to be just like her. They went home and made sure they read each night and soon started to improve rapidly. Not many got up where the girl was, but many made very good individual progress (2nd grade or above--I teach first grade). Only one person didn't get a second grade level, but she was very close and had made amazing progress too. I love having above-average reading students. It sure doesn't hurt.
sorry thought your reference to 8th grader was your child not you. senior moment.
Teaching to the lowest part of the class is only taking it one step further than what I was told to do when I taught - I was supposed to teach to the "middle third" of the class.
That formula pretty much ensured that the really bright kids would get bored, and the really dumb ones would fail.
(Which is why I never followed it, and kept hellacious long office hours.)
Summers off made sense 50 - maybe more - years ago, when kids needed to work at home in the summer. It still makes sense in some farming communities. But, there aren't too many inner city schoolchildren that are working on a farm pitching haybales or chopping up wood for the winter.
Come to think of it, that might be the problem with inner city schools. Hard work builds character, and needing to put up wood in the winter so that you don't freeze is a good motivator.
I can see how the 'degree is everything' mentality is pitched to kids. I was sort of brainwashed into thinking that my BS in Engineering would open all sorts of doors, and people would think that I was a genius because of that piece of paper. It's an elite mentality that the schools -particularly engineering schools - encourage.
The reality? I'm in a tech field. A 4-year-degree opens doors, but I could just as easily gotten one in basketweaving, and just as many doors would have opened. Nobody has fallen at my feet, yet, to worship my intellect. I imagine I'll be waiting for that, for awhile. :-)
I think that the engineering degree *did* prepare me to overcome more challenges, and accept more and harder work than, say, a BA in a 'soft' discipline. I'm drawing on the differences in courseload and work between the two, and don't think it's the elite mentality kicking in. For instance, I took an economics course as an elective. Prof touted this class-end paper as "A real Bear" and talked it up all semester. The paper turned out to be only 3-5 pages. I was getting 4x as much every night in each of my other EE classes. I knocked the paper out the morning it was due and got an A. The sad part was that I was one of a very few to pick up an 'A'.
Virginia kids ARE tested on parts of speech, complete sentences and mathematics. Just because they are tested on computer technology doesn't mean they are not tested on other things.
The best and the brightest should be going to private schools, on scholarship if the family doesn't have the money.
Many of my brothers and sisters were among those best and brightest. Actually, all of them were. I was a good student, but I'm kind of the dumb one of the family:). We all received good educations (including the present time) and have done well in our chosen fields. My mother and father knew that THEY already controlled what type of education their sons and daughters received and what values they were taught.
Maybe, but people control how much they get out of a class--there's something called individual effort that we seem to forget about--it's too easy to blame the system or others for our problems. Besides, I'm dumb because of myself, not because of what others did. :)
The main problem is the public school system and its monopoly, but NCLB aggravates the problem by strengthening that monopoly.
That's the first I've ever heard anyone say that:)
HEHEHEHE:)
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