My son wanted to attend a "magnet" school in Marine Biology sponsored by Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. To attend the school, he had to board a bus at 5:30 AM and return at 5:30 PM at the bus stop. The school was located in southeast San Diego. Predominantly hispanic and black student body. His aspirations to academic excellence made him the top fly on the dung heap. Frequent beatings at "recess". It was a day care center with 2 meals per day. Poor academics. Scripps? They showed up every other Thursday for 30 minutes. What a sham. We pulled him out after drive-by shootings occurred a block from the school.
It took 3 weeks for my son to "catch up" with his class in Mira Mesa. I still had to correct his math and English work as his teacher was incompetent. The only net "win" from the experience is he got some valuable total immersion Spanish language learning and it a totally fluent Spanish speaker today.
I supplemented his education at home. He was reading Einstein's Theory of Relativity. There were some references to trigonometry. He asked and I supplied instruction on the topic so he could continue.
Bottom line: don't let the idiots screwing with academic excellence destroy the education of your children. Supplement at home and leave those jackasses in the dust.
“Supplement at home and leave those jackasses in the dust”
I’ve come to that conclusion...so teaching my kid relatively advanced mathematics has been fun, but can be frustrating. But it did allow him to read the basic texts from Dr. Einstein...enough to where he wanders around now trying to understand the implications of the Lorentz Contraction and the Many Worlds Interpretation.
Explaining the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper was more fun, but I told him he gets to get himself to the point of understanding the Schroedinger equation...and then get somebody to pay him to use that knowledge.
The Common Core Integrated Math trash was beyond belief. “Lashonda and Da’Quan have two dime bags each. How much did they have to pay for them?” is the level of crap that was in those “math” books. He was never taught long division either in elementary school or junior high (er, “middle school”) so when we got to polynomial division he still gets cross eyed. Can’t exactly half ass that using estimation or partial addition, now can we?
What’s really been both fun and frustrating is beating on his math teachers. They’re used to kicking the parents around and are shocked when they run up against a guy who critiques their own work - I find so many mistakes they make, I could make a career of it - and they simply don’t know how to respond.
But I actually want to just send them into orbit, because they took a kid who was doing virtually all his arithmetic in his head when he was eight (he thought writing it down was a waste of time) and dragged him into the dirt trying to make him use ridiculous methods that no one ever uses.
There’s a lot more I could say. The world of education is really the same with respect to teachers - some are amazing, others are appalling - but what seems to be different are the administrators. They’re all hyper-politicized, and that’s why it’s so bad.
So I just try to go around them. The internet and my own background allows me to do that to some extent. But why are we paying for this stupidity? As you said, what the brick and mortar schools are actually doing is babysitting the bottom half. We could cut the property taxes in half if we didn’t “need” to do that. But that ain’t gonna happen, so like I said...I know what he needs to know, and we get there with them or without. So far, that seems to work.