Kid is new and failing every class. Are we doing to get kicked out?

[Anonymous]

I had one go through public middle school, which I thought was really great, and then needed to switch a younger sibling to private middle school. I'm absolutely dumbfounded by the difference in what they are learning and feel incredibly guilty about the pointless, nothingness that was my older child's middle school education. It's actually embarrassing.

[Anonymous]

So what happened OP?

[Anonymous]

I can commiserate. My son switched in 6th grade to a private this year. The reason we did this is because I pulled him from our "excellent" public for 5th grade to home school him because I saw the massive holes in his education via the pandemic and remote learning at the end of 2020. I was shocked at how awful his education had been.

This year our private has its highest all time enrollment numbers. Many kids are new to private due to what you describe. I'm in a new parent group and every single child who came from public is struggling awfully. My suggestion is to work with tutors. When I did homeschool with my then 5th grader last year we spent a large amount of time on fundamentals with our main focus on sentence diagramming, perfecting the 5 paragraph essay, one piece of QUALITY literature a month, and spelling strategies along with handwriting (my sons handwriting was hideous!!!). We did tow very big social studies projects that involved researching a topic, and an essay with proper MLA citations.. Math wasn't so much an issue, I outsourced that to mathnasium 3xs a week and when he stepped at his private he was put in the highest math level so that worked.

Go back to the basics, roll it completely back. Focus on language arts because this is where our public schools are failing these children.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I can commiserate. My son switched in 6th grade to a private this year. The reason we did this is because I pulled him from our "excellent" public for 5th grade to home school him because I saw the massive holes in his education via the pandemic and remote learning at the end of 2020. I was shocked at how awful his education had been.

This year our private has its highest all time enrollment numbers. Many kids are new to private due to what you describe. I'm in a new parent group and every single child who came from public is struggling awfully. My suggestion is to work with tutors. When I did homeschool with my then 5th grader last year we spent a large amount of time on fundamentals with our main focus on sentence diagramming, perfecting the 5 paragraph essay, one piece of QUALITY literature a month, and spelling strategies along with handwriting (my sons handwriting was hideous!!!). We did tow very big social studies projects that involved researching a topic, and an essay with proper MLA citations.. Math wasn't so much an issue, I outsourced that to mathnasium 3xs a week and when he stepped at his private he was put in the highest math level so that worked.

Go back to the basics, roll it completely back. [/b]Focus on language arts because this is where our public schools are failing these children.[b]

+1. For all the talk about how public is superior in STEM (and in general it may be) our experience was it was woefully inferior in language arts, especially writing. I hear the refrain that “future jobs are STEM jobs”, but if you ever want to be anything other than a coding monkey, then you need to learn communication skills too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I can commiserate. My son switched in 6th grade to a private this year. The reason we did this is because I pulled him from our "excellent" public for 5th grade to home school him because I saw the massive holes in his education via the pandemic and remote learning at the end of 2020. I was shocked at how awful his education had been.

This year our private has its highest all time enrollment numbers. Many kids are new to private due to what you describe. I'm in a new parent group and every single child who came from public is struggling awfully. My suggestion is to work with tutors. When I did homeschool with my then 5th grader last year we spent a large amount of time on fundamentals with our main focus on sentence diagramming, perfecting the 5 paragraph essay, one piece of QUALITY literature a month, and spelling strategies along with handwriting (my sons handwriting was hideous!!!). We did tow very big social studies projects that involved researching a topic, and an essay with proper MLA citations.. Math wasn't so much an issue, I outsourced that to mathnasium 3xs a week and when he stepped at his private he was put in the highest math level so that worked.

Go back to the basics, roll it completely back. [/b]Focus on language arts because this is where our public schools are failing these children.[b]

+1. For all the talk about how public is superior in STEM (and in general it may be) our experience was it was woefully inferior in language arts, especially writing. I hear the refrain that “future jobs are STEM jobs”, but if you ever want to be anything other than a coding monkey, then you need to learn communication skills too.

Homeschool mom here. The year we spent on LA has paid off tremendously. It makes everything easier. He can read critically, can whip out an outline and once he completes the outline he has his framework to write his paper in no time. Even all the sentence diagramming has helped him in his foreign language studies. My sons peers in 6th grade that came from public are crashing and burning with the writing requirements. The OP needs to approach this from a remediation standpoint. I feel sooo lucky for this pandemic and how it opened my eyes and being given that full year to basically catch my son up and being his ELA education to an appropriate level.

Plus the public schools were not at all introducing the kids to quality literature. It was nice to see him get excited about books such as White Fang, Watership Down, Tom Sawyer, and Shakespeare stories by Garfield. I did get his Lexile level tested at the beginning and end of the year to make sure the books we chose were appropriate. Up until then the trash they had them reading in public school was pitiful.