Reply to It’s so hard to figure things out

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "It’s so hard to figure things out"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I happened on this thread from Recent Topics. My kids are in MCPS, and the same could be said of that school system!

OP, the truth is that education starts at home. Kids with highly-educated parents who prioritize their kids' education already start with a distinct advantage. These parents will encourage their kids to read great books at home, they will engage them in discussion at the dinner table or elsewhere, expose them to current events, history, science, etc outside of school. They will do their best to live inbounds for the best schools, and be aware of any special programs their kids can benefit from. Since they pay attention to their children's progress, anytime their kid's content mastery fails, they will be ready to re-teach or hire a tutor, because they know learning builds on itself year after year. These parents are informed about the newest college admissions strategies and statistics, and plan their children's tracks through middle and high school according to their child's level and what they can realistically achieve.

So in this context... it doesn't really matter what teachers fiddle with which copies of what textbooks! I deplore the fact that MCPS has no textbooks except in AP classes. I had beautiful and engaging full color textbooks in my private school. But this is decor. It's illusion. Real instruction can and does happen without all these nice extras. YOU need to be on the ball, OP. The school is just one of the tools in your toolbox. You need to fill in the gaps and teach your children whatever you want them to know that the school is not addressing. This is how my kids learned to write in cursive and read the classics, because God forbid MCPS delve into these things!
[/quote]
I'm the OP of the textbooks thread. To a great degree, I agree with what you say. And as parents, we do try to engage our kids in discussions on current events and academic topics outside school. Not necessarily in structured basis, but as it comes up (except for during COVID, when we had to take on a more active role in teaching). The problem isn't a desire or an inability to teach our kids outside of the classroom...it's that we also want our kids to have a life. If we have to reteach everything our kids should be learning in school, they'd never have any time to play with their friends. FCPS' absolutely asinine bell schedule means our elementary age kids, who consistently wake up at 6:30am regardless of what time they go to sleep, don't start school until 9:20am and don't end until 4:05pm. We have to get ready and leave for work, so the dead time between when they're up and ready till when they leave for school isn't an effective time for teaching them. Since school ends so late, and one of ours takes a bus, he doesn't get home till close to 5pm...during a good chunk of fall through now, it's dark, or close to it by the time we get home. If we teach right when he gets home, it means he'll have no time to play with friends or participate in any sports, so we let them both play till around 6:00-6:30pm, then they do home work until dinner, then finish homework and are in bed by 8:30pm. If elementary schools started at a more reasonable hour, like around 7:45-8:00am, We'd have no problem letting them play for a bit, then spending an 1-2 hours teaching them after school, but as it is, I think it's wrong to screw over our kids and take away any fun they have because their school system can't get its crap together. 
Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of having one of us stop working to home school or to send our kids to a private school. I admit, we screwed up when we moved here and didn't do any research on the schools. I just remembered when I grew up here in the 1980s, the school I went to in the same neighborhood we're in had very good teachers and a challenging curriculum (that included textbooks :-) ). I remember back then FCPS was considered one of the best schools systems in the country. So we failed to consider the changes that had happened over the intervening 30 years when we moved back to my old neighborhood...shame on us. It's all still so frustrating to hear one of your kids say they're bored and feel like they're not being pushed to their full potential. At least the one in AAP feels somewhat challenged; we just hope the others get in when they're old enough.[/quote]

So your main issue is that you need childcare earlier?! Unbelievable. Not everyone is an early riser. We trained our kids at an early age to sleep in. No one was even allowed to be out of bed at 6:30 am. 
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics