s/o If You Left APS this Past Year for Private, What Differences Did You Notice?
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Anonymous
| The lack of text books is an APS central office problem. Teachers aren't being offered text books and deciding to ignore them. PTAs that want to buy text books (or even pool monies from PTAs across APS to buy text books for all schools) are told they can't use PTA monies for text books. There are budget issues and changing SOLs and finding text books that align with Virginia standards. Basically its all ridiculous. |
Anonymous
| Hold on - there are no textbooks in APS??? My DS is starting K and we are keeping him at current preschool for the K year because of small class and were then planning to move to an APS ES school. I'm going to date myself here, but kids don't have workbooks like "Wordly Wise," etc or books for social studies reading or math problems? What do they have? I have a PhD in the humanities and my main way of learning was reading independently - hate group work etc. Is that all there is in APS? Tell me more! |
Anonymous
No textbooks that that I know of in elementary school. My kids did do worksheets. They went to Oakridge. |
Anonymous
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Private school was open and in person. APS wasn’t.
No other comparisons need to be made if you don’t both showing up. |
Anonymous
| For those in private school, is your school on track to finish the year's syllabus? If not, which school? |
Anonymous
We had science and math textbooks at Claremont. Well, the math may have been more of a workbook? But the science one is a real text book. I personally don't remember having textbooks until middle school. My oldest is now in 3rd grade and he gets Xeroxed pages (like articles to read) and then work sheets. |
Anonymous
What I find hardest is helping my 3rd and6th grader with math. Most of the instruction now is having them watch youtube videos to explain a concept, I'm sure the teacher is there explaining examples after, but it's in this wierd way of solving that we have no idea of why they are doing it that way when there's a more standardized way of solving a problem back when we solved it. I'd like to understand these new methods as I can't even help because they're sometimes asked to solve something in a very specific "method" Then he gets 1/2 of the practice questions wrong and we spend an hour trying to teach them how to solve it how we learned it and they would get the right answers. 
Also language has been awful. My 6th grader has only had 1 writing assignment all year that was more than 1.5 typed pages. Rest were short writing assignments. My younger student has more work than my older. My older's handwriting has deteriorated so much, it's like he's writing worst than when he was a 1st grader. |
Anonymous
APS has no math text books. I don't know about other subjects across the board. |
Anonymous
The last math textbook adoption in Arlington was for the 2010-11 school year. Some schools may have old books sitting around, or maybe teachers have purchased some on their own, but nothing from the central office. since 2010-11. |
Anonymous
For real. It's awful. The only time I ever saw a textbook was one time when I had a sick child who had to miss a few weeks of school. There are limited textbooks, so they tend not to be used, plus they don't match up with what is being taught. Don't expect spelling lists, either. Or handwriting skills. See the discussion about moving copiers out of schools because APS is moving away from paper. This is Murphy's legacy. I hope it turns around. Some schools are probably better. Does ATS use textbooks? That's probably your best bet. The math thing is horrible. When my oldest was learning how to do long division, they taught five different ways to do it and she never mastered any of them. I see the value in different brains work different ways so it's good to have options, but where APS failed us was we didn't get enough repetition at one way so the kids could really learn. And because their grades were fine, I never really realized the deficits. That's on me, I should have been paying closer attention, but I believed the line that "all APS schools are good." We switched to private this year. If I had known then what I know now, we would have done it much sooner. |
Anonymous
| I have kids who have been in APS for 7 and 9 years. They are learning just fine. Without textbooks. The obsession with textbooks from the elementary parents on this thread is bizarre. Hardly worth private school tuition and hardly the lynchpin of education. Save yourself tuition money and buy a set of textbooks for your kids if it’s so important to you! Very weird point of emphasis. |
Anonymous
| What is so great about textbooks? |
Anonymous
A good textbook can make up for poor teaching instruction, and helps kids to improve on their reading and comprehension. It's way better than having a teacher put on a video of BrainPop in accelerated mode and calls it a lesson. |
Anonymous
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or if your child is struggling and you want to help ... really nice to have a textbook to understand where they are and what they need to learn.
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Anonymous
My impression as a parent is there isn't much of a curriculum in APS elementary. It's what caused so much chaos in distance learning last spring. There are standards of learning but each teacher is expected to reinvent the wheel and develop their own ways to meet the standards. It seems so exhausting for teachers and so wasteful of their time. |