Reply to s/o Gifted classes in DC schools

Forum Index » DC Public and Public Charter Schools

Reply to "s/o Gifted classes in DC schools"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]and whatever you call it, it's not a bad thing[/quote]

Except that it totally depends on having a good teacher.  Our dc was reading Harry Potter and the 39 clues at home last year and we came in for our conference to find that dc's "just right books" included Frog and Toad Are Friends.  To add insult to injury, they told us they had made that decision based on a recent eval and they did not want to retest dc (our suggestion) because dc might get "test anxiety."  The librarian knew what was up, and was allowing dc to take out books that were not on dcs "just right" list.  We had dc bring 39 clues books from home for reading time for the rest of the year, but REALLY....

the problem with this kind of system, which I approve of in the absence of ANYTHING better, is that it totally depends on the teacher to do accurate differentiation. [b] Also, the school (a JKLM) does spend a lot of time dealing with some PARTICULAR problem students, and they have been that way since they arrived at the school.  They are OOB and the teacher takes them out in the hall to speak with them privately about their bad behavior, but where does that leave the rest of the class?[/b]

PS, my dc is now finally in the highest reading/English group this year and the spelling and vocab words are a joke.  DC is capable of way more.  We joke about the "wordly wise" book because there is nothing else we can do, and try to get dc to ask when we use words dc does not completely understand, encourage the reading of newspapers, etc.  DC aces the spelling and vocab tests.  One of the more asinine exercises is spelling a word and then taking off one letter each time so that the result is a blank word instead of what you started with.  DC has to do this with each word dc already knows how to spell and knows the meaning of.

Good at math but no one would know it because dc is getting 3s - as a matter of policy this school just seems not to award 4s until the end of the year.  I honestly do not understand how so many kids from dc's school are getting into privates with their 3s until the last grading period of the year policy, and we DO have another child who is in trouble but you would never know it because the grades are the same and the comments are all positive.  With basically one teacher all year one teacher can ruin a year or make it the best year of dcs lives.

We mostly have good teachers, probably because we are  in a JKLM and the teachers who are crappy mostly wash out after a year, but this is the school cluster that everyone seems to want to get into, that feeds into Deal and Wilson.  So I just cannot imagine what is happening elsewhere where there are more problem students and less reading proficiency.  My dc has scored 100 percent on the DC CAS since the first year dc took it, so I can only conclude that it is basically a joke as well.  The idea that some schools had to cheat to get their scores up not only disgusts me because of the immorality of it, it makes me really really worried for the kids at those schools whose answers needed to be erased because they were wrong....

[/quote]

I was with you PP until you described the children in need of redirection as OOB (as if that moniker had anything to do with your point). It sort of tainted your whole post for me.[/quote]

Sorry but there is ONE child who has been OOB since K, been in my child's class every year, and is physically and verbally abusive to teachers and students alike, and has consistently taken the teacher's time away from the rest of the kids.  Furthermore, this kid thinks pulling my kid's chair out from under him/her is funny.  We had to switch tables.

Yes we also have our fair share of IB troublemakers, the difference is that when those parents get pulled in, they listen to the principal.  The kids go to the guidance counselor.  They get in trouble with their parents.  They get private counseling if necessary.  They repeat a grade if necessary.  Heck sometimes when one of our dc is having problems with a particular child, we talk to the parents ourselves and that is the end of it.

This particular OOB kid apparently has no one - father dead, mother incarcerated, cries when no one shows up for performances.  I am not saying I do not feel sorry for this child, and one of my dc is now learning a lot about dysfunctional families in one of the best DC charter schools, but I just think that this kid should not have been in the school in the first place, and the vast majority of misbehavior that happens and continues year after year is from OOB kids who do not seem to have family support to come down hard on them early.  We are talking 1st grade here folks in a JKLM school.

My dcs can learn how lucky they are to have an intact family where no one calls the police on the other parent once they get to middle school (and they have).   But we deliberately moved to this neighborhood to try to avoid this kind of dysfunctional behavior so early that one of my dc is having trouble learning how to read due not to snotty embassy kids or others who think they are better than everyone else but due to a single OOB kid (there are only like ten max in the entire school), and the worst behavior that cannot be corrected comes from them.  And yes before you ask they tend to be minority children, and so are mine.  It is, for lack of a better term, "ghetto behavior."  But please don't judge so quickly.  I don't want these kids as the "only" other blank race/color/national origin kids in with my children, so that they are lumped together by the teachers, or more often, just plain ignored by the teachers because they are so busy dealing with these single OOB kids, who are incorrigible sometimes.  Someone said a rising tide raises all boats?  One bad apple can destroy even a good teacher's ability to teach the rest of their class.[/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