No Textbooks in Elementary School; All of FCPS, or Just Schools Near Me?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It's weird that people think the lack of textbooks says something about the curriculum in FCPS. I taught there. It wasn't like, hey we have no books, teach what you want. It was more like, hey, teach the full SOLs for 4th grade social studies and don't forget all the FCPS POS points, and oh, by the way, we don't have any textbooks or resources for you so you'll have to find all the information online at the VDOE website and then make all your own handouts.

Lol and they encourage you to create the mini lesson on slides. All they seemed to give teachers were the standards in the order they wanted them taught. Occasionally they’d suggest a resource but then you had to track it down and usually another teacher had it checked out of the school library or another school had it!! Like thanks for suggesting I use a specific lesson from a specific book next week, but I probably won’t find it since it’s checked out by another teacher at a completely different school towns away. Thanks for the idea though!

Where I am now, if a school wants a teacher using Fundations or a HMH book, that teacher is given their very own copy to keep in their room. If you can’t find it it’s your own fault. Keep it somewhere safe and you’ll always have access. No need to spend hours after school waiting for a free copier to run off a billion copies of anything.

But textbooks are so antiquated! Isn't it much more modern to have professional who are paid $70,000+/year to spend hours every week in front of a photocopier?

That's what student 'volunteer' hours are for.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Essentially the FCPS teachers are creating their own versions of textbooks every year by getting worksheets off of TPT and Super Teacher Worksheets and other homeschool websites. They have to combine this random assortment into a textbook/workbook trying to follow a pacing guide. None of this is complete nor sequential. They are jumping from standard to standard. There are many, many gaps. They are all recreating materials and some of it is not great. It’s not vetted by others. It’s fraught with errors and spelling mistakes (it’s material lifted from the internet after all and not edited, nor tested). The learning is not sequential as only a specific strand is taught and not the surrounding material. No one even knows what gap is missing because the material is so poorly tied together and the worksheets did not build in a smooth, logical fashion. It’s very disappointing.

+10. It’s a boon for Kumon, Mathnasium, Russian Math, tutoring places, tutoring clubs, etc. There is an utter explosion of these businesses all over bc of the poor quality education.

[Anonymous]

I’ve seen so many mistakes on TPT materials. I hated when my grade level ran them off and handed them to me. I’m now in another state, with elementary reading workbooks. We just read a selection where there were questions in the margins for kids to answer right there, with plenty of room for writing. They wrote a prediction, wrote a sentence about the author’s point of view about the topic, and had to underline supporting text evidence. They circled the main idea of another paragraph, reviewed a timeline and answered a question, found highlighted words and circled the prefixes, and ended with some other comprehension question. I didn’t have to go check out copies of the book, write questions out, or have kids hunt for paper to write on. The story was brightly illustrated and the questions matched the state objectives and built on earlier lessons. So much time saved, so easy for kids who arrived late from speech class to understand what we were doing and to catch up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I’ve seen so many mistakes on TPT materials. I hated when my grade level ran them off and handed them to me. I’m now in another state, with elementary reading workbooks. We just read a selection where there were questions in the margins for kids to answer right there, with plenty of room for writing. They wrote a prediction, wrote a sentence about the author’s point of view about the topic, and had to underline supporting text evidence. They circled the main idea of another paragraph, reviewed a timeline and answered a question, found highlighted words and circled the prefixes, and ended with some other comprehension question. I didn’t have to go check out copies of the book, write questions out, or have kids hunt for paper to write on. The story was brightly illustrated and the questions matched the state objectives and built on earlier lessons. So much time saved, so easy for kids who arrived late from speech class to understand what we were doing and to catch up.

This sounds like heaven.

[Anonymous]

So are we saying that teachers in FCPS have too much autonomy to develop and select materials that work for their students and aligns to the standards?