Posted on 09/03/2006 10:52:22 AM PDT by roostercogburn
The New First Grade: Too Much Too Soon? Kids as young as 6 are tested, and tested again, to ensure they're making sufficient progress. Then there's homework, more workbooks and tutoring.
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.msn.com ...
A group of parents in our district tried to split out of our district. I think smaller districts are more successful, and can generally respond better to the people in their area. Big districts have a lot of political power, and I think are more responsive to money and politics.
Although my oldest could read young he never really wanted to. He always wanted me to read to him. It bothered me a little that he wouldn't read on his own until I read about Robert Frost who liked his mother reading to him until he was 14.
They were fairly new (FORTRAN and BASIC was all they taught) -- I did have a TP Monitor on my college computer (timeshared from the Clairemont colleges) but my professional programming (COBOL) was on cardpunch.
True, ten years before that they would have been more rare.
As has been pointed out, it is all about discipline. There is nothing more tragic than intelligence without discipline.
This is nuts. Put your children in school develope various programs to grill them to learn the ABC's and to read before they start Kindergarten. Make 'em have homework plus soccer, dancing, music lessons, basketball, football, on and on. When summer comes and after that "quality" vacation to Disney or somewhere similar put them to work or plop them in front of the TV or computer with a babysitter while Mommy and Daddy are at work. Get them back in school and fast, preferrably all year to make the schools cost-effective. Keep them there until their early 20's and then it is time for them to hurry up and get out there in the real world and work until they die. What is going on here? We are running our little people in the ground with OUR expectations. Let them be kids, life and the responsibility that goes along with it begins all too soon and the working years lasts oh so long and some want it to last even longer. This competition that began with pro sports has filtered to the elementary school levels and it makes me sad. When can they just be kids--little kids--kids who misbehave, kids that are not medicated because of some thought up syndrome to make the drug companies more money. This all just makes me sad.
They are fat because they eat too much.
Period.
Their parents are the pigs sitting at green lights and not proceeding because their Big Mac is blocking their view.
Do not blame public school for these oinkers being oinkers.
I went to public school and so did my kids and none of us are fat. Further I have a very good job as does my son and my daughter has lettered every year in high school as well as carrying a 4.0 average.
A public school too.
Yeah, I was just speaking from my own experience. I picked up reading quickly, and I just figured it's because my parents pushed it from the time I was 2 or 3. But you are probebly right, one size might not fit all for children.
My DIL is a long-term sub in a Kindergarten class, they have 11 children from "My Little School", a preschool for handicapped children and they are supposed to learn to read by the end of the year. They have a little girl who was raised like a dog until last year, kept tied to the kitchen table, feed in a bowl on the floor and taken outside to go to the bathroom, she has serious deficits but the expectations, more like demands, are that she finish this year just like any other child. Schools do need to do a better job but they've gone from one extreme to another.
This is just a political attack on President Bush's No Child Left Behind program.
While Newsweek is promoting first grade as being too tough, I'll bet they're in full support of all day kindergarten for even younger children.
I do agree that 1st graders should have homework, but only about 10 minutes or so. This is time that the child should ideally spend with a parent to review what was taught that day--never, ever to introduce new concepts.
As far as who is complaining--parents, parents, and then parents. These would be the very same ones who will then turn around and blame the schools when Susie or Johnny doesn't do well on the state-tests.
The article mentions kids falling asleep at their desks at 11 am? Well, I'm betting the problem is that they didn't go to bed at a decent hour! When I taught 6th grade, the overwhelming majority of my kids did not go to bed until 11 or 12. I had one that went to bed at 9. This in a school district where school started at 8:15 am and some of my kids were getting on the bus at 7:00am. In my 11:20-12:10 class, I had to be very inventive with lessons to keep them moving just so I could be sure they would stay awake.
Why are they not doing the homework assigned? Well, I asked one of my 8th graders that question on Thursday--as to why didn't you do your science, geography, English or reading homework? He said, "It cuts into my play time." I then asked him what time he went to bed and he told me between 1 and 1:30 am, normally. Sometimes he stayed up later and every now and again, he would not go to sleep at all. Where in the world are his parents? Got me--I don't know.
I checked with his 7th grade teachers and they said that will pretty much be the way the year will go. He will pass his classes with D's and maybe actually fail one, but he will do well enough to pass on to the next grade. The problem is that when the yearly SOL's (Standards of Learning) he will not pass. So, who will get the blame when he fails? The schools of course.
So, as his teacher, what do I do? I'm pretty much stripped for answers. If I pull him out of class to help him on homework, he misses class. If I pull him out of gym or electives, he will be surly and refuse to work. He will turn 15 this year and the school will pass him on to high school next year. I can't ask him to stay late because no one can come to get him and by law I am not allowed to take him home. I do work with him one-on-one as much as I can during the day, but he is one of 12 kids and I have 11 others who also need one-one-one. (I teach special education, that is why my classes are so small.) I have already requested a meeting with mom and she told me she is too busy to come in. I already have an incentive chart for kids to earn prizes to do their homework, but he told me th only thing that would motivate him would be if I bought him an XBOX 360 to replace his old XBOX. Yeah, I'm on top of that one! So, he doesn't care, his mom doesn't have the time and I am out of ideas.
Catch-22 all the way.
Hi, LuckystarMom. In Texas, your brain-damaged daughter would have an IEP, and the modifications on it would include shortened assignments, among others. Also, in Texas, public schools don't really bother to meet the needs of gifted students. It's a crime, but all they're [not the teachers--the bureaucrats] legally concerned about are the slow, the minorities, and the poor. The bright kids are expected to survive on their own and maybe help the slow ones. Disgraceful.
My daughter has an IEP. However, we disagreed with what the school district wants to do for her.
They'll modify her work, but they won't help her reading scores go up. They are perfectly happy with her reading at the 50% range, even though she has phonemic awareness and word attack scores in the less than 25% range. (Basically, she has memorized a lot of words, but can't decode words well.)
I don't want my daughter to be given easier or shortened assignments. I want her to be taught how to read better. Thank God, the private school has a program for kids like her that uses the Orton-Gillingham method of reading to teach kids like my daughter. At the end of the year, we'll be able to tell if it has worked. At least, we feel like we are trying to help her, and there is a lot of research that says this is a good program for her.
I personally don't think you need to do anything really special for gifted kids. They just need a good education with lots of variety. However, that can also be said for just about any kid.
At my girls new school, they have already used playdoh to draw Heiroglyphics to show how the Egyptians used Heiroglyphics. They have made a salt-dough map out of the state of California. In science, they have used all sorts of tools to measure different things. Both of my girls have been thrilled to do those things.
This is what I figured out after watching the system for 12 years as a parent. Many, many parents are being practical by pushing their kids into sports from a young age. Why? To get them a scholarship to college. Boys, especially, who aren't achieving high grades in school, can go to college thru sports. Girls, too. The cost of college is enormous, especially for families with more than one kid. The thing that bothered me most is that all of these families are sold on the idea that their kids have to go to college. Very sad. And equally sad is that the kids who are average could be doing much better work in school if only taught in the old school style.
As the mom of a gifted child, I can tell you nothing is further from in the truth. In fact very good gifted education is hard to find and needs to resemble special education more than one thinks. There are some school districts where the gifted kids have documents that resemble IEP's documenting their progress.
Gifted kids need massive one-on-one time so that an adult can make sure that the leaps they make are accurate, so that they are directed in the right way to assimiliate information and encouraged to think out of the box, instead of just giving the right answer.
My favorite teacher my kids ever had is an English teacher at their high school. She tells the kids (and parents) "if I have to tell you how to be gifted, then you are not." Gifted kids challenge every assumption because they see different ways that the conclusion can be reached. Teachers have to be patient with these kids as they work through theory after theory and they must never give them repetitive work. Some types of kids NEED to do their times tables and flash cards over and over to learn them, the gifted figured out the theory of multiplication the first time they hear of it and learn their tables in a NY minute.
I too had a gifted and a learning disabled child. It has been a joy to watch both of them grow--my older who is LD is currently in college and doing well as I, the ever nervous mom, hold my breath. She does not envy her gifted sister, in fact she feels sorry for her as she knows the demands that the younger places on herself.
But, both are happy in their own skin and I feel great pride in both of them!
This all leaves me with the question--Why is anyone having kids at all if their goal is to push them out as early as possible? People used to have kids to help out on the farm or in the family business but it was all family oriented. Not today--it is selfishness, the politically correct thing to do and yet at the same time demand the PUBLIC school teach to all learning levels. Public school should be teaching to the average and the parents of the students above and below that average should be responsible for anything MORE they want. It is not society's obligation unless these same folks want to admit they are politically correct in their demand that "Special" treatment is an entitlement. All are treated equal--All are NOT equal!!
That is life.
Competition is the driving force (perpetuated by the Sports programs) but who and what are these kids competing with and for--they don't even know--it is the parents that are competing to be best, first, most, the cheapest, easiest, etc. And I agree--all do not need and are not college material.
All I can say is it gives me great joy to see my 4 year old grandson ride his trike down the sidewalk without a care in the world. His mother is holding him from school until he is 6--I am grateful. I only wish she would home school. Only a few years of innocences. It is so short and becoming shorter all the time. My grandson has a lifetime to put his nose to the grind stone (whatever it may be) and I don't believe the pressure is as necessary as the parents make it out to be. The little years are when they can be innocent, ignorant and free. Society even wanting to take that time from them is selfish and more importantly self-centered. It makes my heart ache with sadness that my grandson will have to face 90 years (if he is lucky) of hard labor as his future?
Our district has a GT program - about 1000 kids total - k-12. ( I wish it were a better, stronger one, but it is there.)
"Oh, yes, there is nothing here but this young gentleman's library," said Lucy, moving a pile of ragged, coverless books on to the table. "I hope he'll forgive me for moving them."-- Anthony Trollope, Framley Parsonage, Ch. XXII"They are not Bob's,—at least, not the most of them,—but mine," said the girl.
"But some of them are mine," said the boy; "ain't they, Grace?"
"And are you a great scholar?" asked Lucy, drawing the child to her.
"I don't know," said Grace, with a sheepish face. "I am in Greek Delectus and the irregular verbs."
"Greek Delectus and the irregular verbs!" And Lucy put up her hands with astonishment.
"And she knows an ode of Horace all by heart," said Bob.
"An ode of Horace!" said Lucy, still holding the young shamefaced female prodigy close to her knees.
"It is all that I can give them," said Mr. Crawley, apologetically. "A little scholarship is the only fortune that has come in my way, and I endeavour to share that with my children."
Our district has such a program, as well. It's smoke and mirrors. The program serves them in the regular classroom. [That's a joke.] Teachers have to have 30 hours of basic training to teach them, plus 6 hours [I think it's 6] per year thereafter. This is just my opinion [as a classroom teacher], but I believe the program doesn't really serve them well at all. It does, however allow schools to say that they have a GT program.
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