Benchmark, almost one year done. How are people feeling about it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Benchmark is terrible. My students hate it, my colleagues hate it, I hate it. It's poorly written and makes language arts an unpleasant experience. It won't be better next year.

Why can't we get back to having teachers creating lesson plans at tge school level instead of the district pushing down one worthless program after another?

Give them metrics like mandating phonics instruction in the early childhood grades, creative writing in the middle elementary grades, and writing process plus grammer in tge upper grades, then let our talented teachers have at it at a school level, only stepping in and micromanaging low performing schools that are not hitting benchmarks?

I bet achievement would improve everywhere is FCPS did this, including the struggling schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Benchmark is terrible. My students hate it, my colleagues hate it, I hate it. It's poorly written and makes language arts an unpleasant experience. It won't be better next year.

Why can't we get back to having teachers creating lesson plans at tge school level instead of the district pushing down one worthless program after another?

Give them metrics like mandating phonics instruction in the early childhood grades, creative writing in the middle elementary grades, and writing process plus grammer in tge upper grades, then let our talented teachers have at it at a school level, only stepping in and micromanaging low performing schools that are not hitting benchmarks?

I bet achievement would improve everywhere is FCPS did this, including the struggling schools.

This is what they were doing and it was TERRIBLE

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our teacher has converted all the benchmark stuff to online stuff. We never see anything on paper returned.

Liar. They are required to use the workbooks.

Teacher here. There are two workbooks. One is the consumable that has the readings and some questions. There is also an online workbook as well. I did not use that at all this year, but some teachers may have.

Oh gosh, thank goodness our school is requiring the paper workbook.

It’s required across the county. PP says online is extra. But the consumable is expected to be used and worked in by all students.

Another reason to believe that there is a troll on here trying to convince parents how horrible Benchmark is and we should all demand CKAL or whatever.

I have three kids in ES and I've talked to their teachers and their friends' parents. The teachers are frustrated by the script but have all said their teams are working together to make things a little more flexible for next year. The families are all really happy with Benchmark. I haven't heard any of the complaints that I've heard here from actual people that I know.

Teacher here. My AAP students hate it. They actually want to start a petition for the school board. I have the most behavior problems during LA. I would like it more if readings were of higher interest, novels were included and the vocabulary instruction was better.

[Anonymous]

I'm a parent of a 3rd and 5th grader and I find it depressing. It takes the teacher out of the equation and makes language arts instruction dull and rote. I guess time will tell on how successful it is but my kids hate it. I mean, in the 5th grade they spent weeks reading about corn!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our teacher has converted all the benchmark stuff to online stuff. We never see anything on paper returned.

Every student gets a “workbook” for each unit that you should see. That can’t be done online.

Yes it can. She converted the questions to a document in schoology and they type their answers there. Thus, they are just getting more screen time and we have no way to get or see feedback if the answers are correct.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our teacher has converted all the benchmark stuff to online stuff. We never see anything on paper returned.

Liar. They are required to use the workbooks.

You’re an effing idiot. Teachers can take the questions from the workbook and type them onto a document that the students can then type on. They can also scan in the readings.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our teacher has converted all the benchmark stuff to online stuff. We never see anything on paper returned.

Liar. They are required to use the workbooks.

You’re an effing idiot. Teachers can take the questions from the workbook and type them onto a document that the students can then type on. They can also scan in the readings.

Heaven forbid you allow the teacher to use any creativity or training she may have had to make her own questions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our teacher has converted all the benchmark stuff to online stuff. We never see anything on paper returned.

Liar. They are required to use the workbooks.

You’re an effing idiot. Teachers can take the questions from the workbook and type them onto a document that the students can then type on. They can also scan in the readings.

Heaven forbid you allow the teacher to use any creativity or training she may have had to make her own questions.

I don’t think converting it to online is good. And then parents can’t see any feedback. Online is dumb.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our teacher has converted all the benchmark stuff to online stuff. We never see anything on paper returned.

Every student gets a “workbook” for each unit that you should see. That can’t be done online.

Yes it can. She converted the questions to a document in schoology and they type their answers there. Thus, they are just getting more screen time and we have no way to get or see feedback if the answers are correct.

She’s just giving herself more work but I see what you mean.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our teacher has converted all the benchmark stuff to online stuff. We never see anything on paper returned.

Liar. They are required to use the workbooks.

You’re an effing idiot. Teachers can take the questions from the workbook and type them onto a document that the students can then type on. They can also scan in the readings.

Our school does not do that. They did a presentation on Benchmark at the beginning of the school year and several parents asked about if any of it would be online and they very clearly said that they were required to use the workbooks. So, maybe your school does things differently, but I was relaying what I was told by our school.

Thanks for the name calling, though, how incredibly mature of you.

[Anonymous]

Well friends, unfortunately you are stuck for it. I still am going to be curious to see how the kids who do it K-6 turn out. Probably much better than current 6th graders since they used it from the start. The 6th grade classes now can barely write a paragraph, even the ones in AAP came in this year not knowing how to write an essay. It was a mess.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Our teacher has converted all the benchmark stuff to online stuff. We never see anything on paper returned.

Liar. They are required to use the workbooks.

You’re an effing idiot. Teachers can take the questions from the workbook and type them onto a document that the students can then type on. They can also scan in the readings.

Heaven forbid you allow the teacher to use any creativity or training she may have had to make her own questions.

I don’t think converting it to online is good. And then parents can’t see any feedback. Online is dumb.

A big piece of it is annotating the passages with pencil. How do you do that online?

[Anonymous]

My AAP students look zoned out. They hate the dull readings and “discussion questions.” Very short passages and no novels or digging deeply into topics. They participate, but there’s no passion in LA.

[Anonymous]

I don't know if it's benchmark or just my K kids teacher, but my kindergartner has absolutely blown me away with her reading. The ways she sounds out words, last night she sounded out marshmallow and then asked me it the ar was an r controlled vowel. She then went on about all kinds of vowel related rules and idiosyncrasies. She will read words like take and start sounding it out as "tack" and then say oh there's an e that makes the a say it's name so it's take, if it didn't have that e it would be tack.

She still has more practice to do to be more fluent, but I'm blown away by the deeply engrained phonological rules that she is learning. All while seemingly maintaining comprehension too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Benchmark is terrible. My students hate it, my colleagues hate it, I hate it. It's poorly written and makes language arts an unpleasant experience. It won't be better next year.

Why can't we get back to having teachers creating lesson plans at tge school level instead of the district pushing down one worthless program after another?

Give them metrics like mandating phonics instruction in the early childhood grades, creative writing in the middle elementary grades, and writing process plus grammer in tge upper grades, then let our talented teachers have at it at a school level, only stepping in and micromanaging low performing schools that are not hitting benchmarks?

I bet achievement would improve everywhere is FCPS did this, including the struggling schools.

This is what they were doing and it was TERRIBLE

+1
Parents complained at no end about it.