Lack of Text books
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Anonymous
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My DC attends a upper NW school that does not use text books. I may be an old fart ( 40ish) but I don't remember getting so many hand-outs when I was in school, during the stone ages. She is in 3rd grade and was given a packet to do over the Holidays. The math homework is pretty much a review from the last couple of months. It would help me , if I could refer to chapters that she has gone over already.Also, it seems that, all everyone is concerned about is the DC-CAS test.
Is this the norm for 3rd grade to 12th grade? |
Anonymous
| Wow! A newbie to the DCPS world, it is so refreshing to read the fresh meat post. |
Anonymous
Actually, I'm not fresh meat  . I attended DCPS schools from pre-K to 12th grade. My dad taught for 38 years in DCPS from Ballou to Banneker. And, my DH is a counselor and sports coach at S.E. DCPS school. I was amazed that THIS school didn't offer text books.
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Anonymous
| Personally I much prefer a textbook to hundreds of scraps of paper, but that's just me. |
Anonymous
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Not sure if this helps you, but this is a problem in DCPS. There is no standard texts, across the district- much less in a school. I understand not wanting teachers to teach from scripted lessons, but often teachers in DC are completely writing their own curriculium.
It brings about problems like the one you mentioned and others. |
Anonymous
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I agree 100% and I purchased standard math textbooks for my children. I don't understand how children can learn to learn without a reference place. When my children bring homework home they don't understand, I refer them to textbooks first to see if they can review the lesson and figure it out.
I think it is ridiculous that DCPS has not adopted standard textbooks for at least upper elementary math. And I hate all the worksheets and online print-outs that are homework. |
Anonymous
To answer your question, yes this is typical of DCPS now. 3rd-12th grades are DC-Cas testing grades and since teachers jobs rely so heavily on their students' success on this test many teachers teach to the test, while writing their own curriculum based on the standards. Yes, it sounds like a hot-mess, because it is a hot-mess. |
Anonymous
Ditto! |
Anonymous
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Ask if they have books in there storeroom. Some schools have hundreds of unopened boxes of new unused books in their storerooms. Unfortunately, once they are distributed the majority of the books are never returned, so no one wants to assume that responsibility. Other school districts might withhold diplomas until the books were returned or the schools were compensated for the losses, but that would never fly in DCPS.
Perhaps they have indeed moved to online books for these and other reasons. |
Anonymous
And they wonder why scores are not improving through out the city. Teaching to the test have been long debated. I have tutored kids on the Southside. It is extremely difficult fumbling through hand-out after hand-out to find out what my kids are learning week to week. Books are so important. They give kids and parents a reference point. It is a gateway to children learning independently. One of the major issues with DC-CAS is the math word problems. The kids can do fluency in +,-,x and ( I can't find the division key on this laptop) very well. But breaking down word problems so they can just visualize the numerical problem is more difficult. Students definitely need text books in elementary school. By the time, they enter middle school, they are overwhelmed doing multiple chapters for homework. |
Anonymous
| We have a kid in a Ward 3 school and I asked about this also. Apparently the issue is that they don't allign with the new core curriclumn and the district does not have the money to buy the books that will and a lot of schools are distrustful of the new text books because as previous posters have noted they have tons of them in storage rooms. |
Anonymous
| It's madness for everyone - parents, students and teachers - not to have better resources available. Parents have nothing to review at home. Students have nothing to look back on if they get confused (assuming that not all upper elementary students are great note takers, yet). And for teachers, time that could go towards differentiating, tutoring, or planning lessons for other subjects goes towards recreating the wheel and searching for resources online. |
Anonymous
| Teacher here: the problem is that there are no resources the align with what we are teaching. We would need so many books for each child that it is a lot more efficient (believe it our not) to create our own materials. Is it ideal? Of course not. |
Anonymous
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Well, some teachers "create" material, many of them go to teacher resource stores, buy a bunch of workbooks and photocopy them. Different schools or different teachers do things differently, pass the work to kids and then act like "facilitators" which in most cases translates into students helping each other. With the most dedicated teachers, it probably works. But for the rest, it has become somewhat of a lackluster or even a mediocre teaching environment. The schools which are doing best are the ones that use the textbooks regularly and suppliment and enrich with photocopied or teacher made worksheets. The DC-CAS is a joke. At my child's grade level last year 57% was proficient and 69% advanced. So an "F" is proficient and a high "D" is advanced. So unless kids score high advanced (85% or more) they have not really mastered grade level expectations. |
Anonymous
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I don't have a problem with it. I have much more faith in our teachers than in the district to make the right decision. We have been in public (here and out of state) and in a local charter. All of them used Everyday Math which I think is crap and over utilized by lazy schools and school districts. We are now in a DCPS school without a math text book. Have been in just about every grade in the school and am totally impressed with how creative the teachers are and how well my kids are doing.
Now I say that knowing out teachers are great. I guess if you are in a crappy school with a crappy teacher you will have a problem -- though I am not sure a textbook in that case would help either. |