How do you supplement if public school education not meeting student's needs?

[Anonymous]

I second the motion, PP. I've been appalled by how little kids are expected to read in the upper ES grades in DCPS, but maybe that dates me. I'm a 50-something mom who grew up in the days before cable TV and video games. I routinely read fiction for fun for hours in the afternoons in elementary school.

We've been signing our children up for weekly Loyola Univ of MD reading classes (book club discussion format, grade level books) since the pandemic started. They fought the classes at first, but now ask us to sign them up again. The teachers are great, very interactive and experienced with the age group, and the groups aren't too big, a dozen kids. They offer MS reading classes, too.

https://www.loyola.edu/school-education/community/summer-reading-program#:~:text=Summer%20Reading%20and%20Writing%20Programs%20for%20Children%20and,Entering%2012th%20Graders%2C%20College%20Students%2C%20or%20Adults.%20

[Anonymous]

Loyola's a good program for reading. I know families in my neighborhood who have used it for kids in grades 4-8. Classes run you around $20/hour for a session with live instruction. Not as expensive as tutoring.

[Anonymous]

I asked my child who was on team Gogogogo at Deal. They remember two *entire* books assigned for reading.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would start here

Why are you only requiring 4 anchor texts per year?
What is the rationale for these choices?
Why are you only assigning excerpts of each book?
Do you consider this ELA curriculum to be sufficiently challenging?
Is this curriculum something you would choose for your own child?
How does this ELA curriculum compare with charter and independent schools in this area?

in the abstract some of those choices make sense- an entire year on 4 seminal texts (especially something with layers like Moby Dick or that defines an archetype like the Odyssey) makes a ton of sense. What doesn't make sense if focusing on 4 and then barely reading them let alone concentrating on them

there is nothing comparable to Virgil or Melville on the list of anchor texts. I would hardly call Tuck Everlasting or Inside Out and Back Again seminal.

OMG, do you want your kid to hate reading? Tuck Everlasting and Inside Out and Back Again are wonderful middle grades literature? Do we have to be stuck in previous centuries reading inappropriate literature by dead white guys?

Tuck and Inside Out are charming little books, definitely staples for choice reading, but not terribly challenging. And yes, Virgil is dead and probably white, but that doesn't seem like a good reason to deny the delights of the classical epics to Middle Schoolers, especially when so many of them relish Greek mythology, which I must admit, can be terribly inappropriate.

Moby Dick is a great way to make sure a middle schooler never touches a book again. Also the point of the anchor text is not to be a challenging read - it should be an accessible text that is used to teacher more difficult concepts about literature and writing so that more challenging texts become easily accessible.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Moby Dick is a great way to make sure a middle schooler never touches a book again. Also the point of the anchor text is not to be a challenging read - it should be an accessible text that is used to teacher more difficult concepts about literature and writing so that more challenging texts become easily accessible.

Trust me, no Middle School teacher would ever attempt to teach Moby Dick because of its title.

I don't buy the "use an easy text to teach a difficult concept" nonsense. The truth is you never get to a more challenging text and you end up boring students to death. Many of our 6th graders have already Roar and Tuck in earlier grades. And the ones that haven't can blast through them in a week.

[Anonymous]

read

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would start here

Why are you only requiring 4 anchor texts per year?
What is the rationale for these choices?
Why are you only assigning excerpts of each book?
Do you consider this ELA curriculum to be sufficiently challenging?
Is this curriculum something you would choose for your own child?
How does this ELA curriculum compare with charter and independent schools in this area?

in the abstract some of those choices make sense- an entire year on 4 seminal texts (especially something with layers like Moby Dick or that defines an archetype like the Odyssey) makes a ton of sense. What doesn't make sense if focusing on 4 and then barely reading them let alone concentrating on them

there is nothing comparable to Virgil or Melville on the list of anchor texts. I would hardly call Tuck Everlasting or Inside Out and Back Again seminal.

OMG, do you want your kid to hate reading? Tuck Everlasting and Inside Out and Back Again are wonderful middle grades literature? Do we have to be stuck in previous centuries reading inappropriate literature by dead white guys?

Tuck and Inside Out are charming little books, definitely staples for choice reading, but not terribly challenging. And yes, Virgil is dead and probably white, but that doesn't seem like a good reason to deny the delights of the classical epics to Middle Schoolers, especially when so many of them relish Greek mythology, which I must admit, can be terribly inappropriate.

Moby Dick is a great way to make sure a middle schooler never touches a book again. Also the point of the anchor text is not to be a challenging read - it should be an accessible text that is used to teacher more difficult concepts about literature and writing so that more challenging texts become easily accessible.

This former middle schooler devoured Moby Dick in the 7th grade without having been required to read it. My kid plowed through one chapter at my behest (with bribery in the mix) and refused to read on. Anchor texts don't sound inspiring for much of anybody.

[Anonymous]

Call me Ishmael

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I asked my child who was on team Gogogogo at Deal. They remember two *entire* books assigned for reading.

Team Port-au-prince did not read any full books. 🙁 has But they also had an ELA teacher who rarely showed up

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The comments about Deal ELA are discouraging. I am a teacher and it is not that difficult to craft a decent and thematic or otherwise integrated course of study in these subject areas (reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar etc). Ugh.

I also find they’re a bit misleading: even in virtual 7th grade last year, my kid’s ELA class read four books as a group (same as in-person 6th grade) and many many short stories (especially for the sci-fi unit) and nonfiction writing, and they did all kinds of writing of more than a paragraph, which they were also required to quite frequently for history last year (invent your own religion, talk about sociopolitical aspects of ancient civilizations etc.) Additionally, there’s the National History Day project for which research is required; in my kid’s case, reading two nonfiction books and a series of articles. Some of the experience, as always, depends on the teacher and the student. It was really easy to do nothing and make up work all summer but that isn’t on the teachers, but on DCPS which sets that policy.

In terms of the language, though, I can’t fathom why my kid got an A in French when he’s clearly not all that proficient after two years, and his pronunciation is painfully bad. That seems like grade inflation to me.

I do think American schools in general simply do not teach grammar at all and that’s been going on for a while. I studied a foreign language in college and I had a good understanding of English grammar, which made learning grammar in another language much easier.

My Deal 8th grader last year did not read a single book. There were none assigned. The kids read a few online passages (less than 5 pages each) in Canvas. That was it. She/He never got under a 98% in any quarter. I know because I followed along closely last year and we just bought the books for private 9th grade (7 of them) and she/he discussed at length how little she/he read last year. I like Deal and I love public school but the ELA is not good. She/he is coming out way ahead in math but is barely able to write, even as a very top A student.

Well, I guess 8th grade is different (as we will find out this year) but I saw my son reading yes, actual books for school. One of them was Call of the Wild, which fostered a lively debate of whether they should keep it on the curriculum, one was Roald Dahl’s Boy, which they read partially together in class and partially finished at home, and one was Nelba Marquez-Greene’s account of the integration of Little Rock High School. As I said earlier, the final unit was sci-fi and they read stories by Ray Bradbury and other more recent ones. I also know this because I was sitting in the same room with him during virtual school, so my experience is obviously very different to yours. There was a lot of writing as well because I kept having to show him how to upload things into Canvas to submit. He’s also done the summer reading - two books off a list - every year including this one.

Did they read the entirety of the books you mentioned? It's not quite clear and while I wouldn't have thought to ask that last week...

Yes they did. Some of it was in class reading with the teacher and then they were told to finish up to chapter or page whatever until they finished the whole book. They had in-class reading responses as well as assignments that were checks on whether they were actually doing the reading.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would start here

Why are you only requiring 4 anchor texts per year?
What is the rationale for these choices?
Why are you only assigning excerpts of each book?
Do you consider this ELA curriculum to be sufficiently challenging?
Is this curriculum something you would choose for your own child?
How does this ELA curriculum compare with charter and independent schools in this area?

in the abstract some of those choices make sense- an entire year on 4 seminal texts (especially something with layers like Moby Dick or that defines an archetype like the Odyssey) makes a ton of sense. What doesn't make sense if focusing on 4 and then barely reading them let alone concentrating on them

there is nothing comparable to Virgil or Melville on the list of anchor texts. I would hardly call Tuck Everlasting or Inside Out and Back Again seminal.

I didn’t read Virgil or Melville until *high school* so I don’t know what middle school you think is assigning Moby Dick in 6th grade or 7th grade. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which they read in 6th grade, actually IS a classic. Even though it wasn’t written by a dead white guy at least a century ago. 🙄

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The comments about Deal ELA are discouraging. I am a teacher and it is not that difficult to craft a decent and thematic or otherwise integrated course of study in these subject areas (reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar etc). Ugh.

I also find they’re a bit misleading: even in virtual 7th grade last year, my kid’s ELA class read four books as a group (same as in-person 6th grade) and many many short stories (especially for the sci-fi unit) and nonfiction writing, and they did all kinds of writing of more than a paragraph, which they were also required to quite frequently for history last year (invent your own religion, talk about sociopolitical aspects of ancient civilizations etc.) Additionally, there’s the National History Day project for which research is required; in my kid’s case, reading two nonfiction books and a series of articles. Some of the experience, as always, depends on the teacher and the student. It was really easy to do nothing and make up work all summer but that isn’t on the teachers, but on DCPS which sets that policy.

In terms of the language, though, I can’t fathom why my kid got an A in French when he’s clearly not all that proficient after two years, and his pronunciation is painfully bad. That seems like grade inflation to me.

I do think American schools in general simply do not teach grammar at all and that’s been going on for a while. I studied a foreign language in college and I had a good understanding of English grammar, which made learning grammar in another language much easier.

My Deal 8th grader last year did not read a single book. There were none assigned. The kids read a few online passages (less than 5 pages each) in Canvas. That was it. She/He never got under a 98% in any quarter. I know because I followed along closely last year and we just bought the books for private 9th grade (7 of them) and she/he discussed at length how little she/he read last year. I like Deal and I love public school but the ELA is not good. She/he is coming out way ahead in math but is barely able to write, even as a very top A student.

Well, I guess 8th grade is different (as we will find out this year) but I saw my son reading yes, actual books for school. One of them was Call of the Wild, which fostered a lively debate of whether they should keep it on the curriculum, one was Roald Dahl’s Boy, which they read partially together in class and partially finished at home, and one was Nelba Marquez-Greene’s account of the integration of Little Rock High School. As I said earlier, the final unit was sci-fi and they read stories by Ray Bradbury and other more recent ones. I also know this because I was sitting in the same room with him during virtual school, so my experience is obviously very different to yours. There was a lot of writing as well because I kept having to show him how to upload things into Canvas to submit. He’s also done the summer reading - two books off a list - every year including this one.

Did they read the entirety of the books you mentioned? It's not quite clear and while I wouldn't have thought to ask that last week...

Yes they did. Some of it was in class reading with the teacher and then they were told to finish up to chapter or page whatever until they finished the whole book. They had in-class reading responses as well as assignments that were checks on whether they were actually doing the reading.

PP again, and I made sure that my kid was doing the assignments as described. And I read him more challenging books (archaic vocabulary etc) if I think he’d like them. It was something we started doing during the pandemic.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I would start here

Why are you only requiring 4 anchor texts per year?
What is the rationale for these choices?
Why are you only assigning excerpts of each book?
Do you consider this ELA curriculum to be sufficiently challenging?
Is this curriculum something you would choose for your own child?
How does this ELA curriculum compare with charter and independent schools in this area?

in the abstract some of those choices make sense- an entire year on 4 seminal texts (especially something with layers like Moby Dick or that defines an archetype like the Odyssey) makes a ton of sense. What doesn't make sense if focusing on 4 and then barely reading them let alone concentrating on them

there is nothing comparable to Virgil or Melville on the list of anchor texts. I would hardly call Tuck Everlasting or Inside Out and Back Again seminal.

I didn’t read Virgil or Melville until *high school* so I don’t know what middle school you think is assigning Moby Dick in 6th grade or 7th grade. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, which they read in 6th grade, actually IS a classic. Even though it wasn’t written by a dead white guy at least a century ago. 🙄

What is your definition of “classic”?

[Anonymous]

OK, I'll help you out.

Classic: the author is not dead, white, or male

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OK, I'll help you out.

Classic: the author is not dead, white, or male

Oh stop the culture war bait. That has nothing to do with whether kids are expected to read books or are just being given excerpts. There ae classic books by almost every variety of human out there. Nobody is saying they should read Rudyard Kipling.