Reply to Fcps elementary school time change

Forum Index » Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS)

Reply to "Fcps elementary school time change "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It was consistent and it did have structure.  Every Monday was the same.  Now we have random days off scattered throughout the year.  And the kids are not learning more because of full day Mondays.  They've added remedial time at the end of each day which appears to be time for most kids to do whatever they want.  They've counted 10 minutes of arrival time as instructional time.  And they've introduced the worst foreign language experience.  I've not heard a single kid who enjoys it at our school.

It boggles my mind how people on this board cannot understand that others may think differently about things.  [b]Some wanted full day Mondays.  Others did not.[/quote]
[/b]
+100.

And now that we have had one full week of school since December (I think that's right). we're now heading into the dead zone of SOL prep. Last year my son's class stopped with almost all new material in favor of review starting in APRIL![/quote]

I agree with PP.  I'll admit that when we first moved here, I hated the idea of half-day Mondays, even though I was fortunate enough to work from home.  But it wasn't too long into living here that I began to appreciate the time it gave kids to recharge and get into their week.  One season of sports, particularly once travel teams started, and you see how quickly weekend down time disappears....

Also, when you have older kids, your realize that switching to full-day Monday and adding all these random teacher work days actually takes instructional time away from them.   I'd be surprised if my high schooler has had a full week since December -- I know even last week, he was away from school two weeks doing reskedded state sports championships (postponed twice because of school cancellations).  By the time yet another random teacher work day rolled around this Monday, we were done.

The funny thing was that our HS used this Monday for touching bases.  So I got to go in and listen to teachers complain about how all the days off had affected their ability to teach and kids' abilities to focus.  I did not think it was possible for new leadership to come in and so thoroughly trash a school system.   I'm all for decisiveness, but we need to peddle back and ask how we have gotten all these days off (and I include 2 weeks at Christmas when they know we're going to lose multiple days in January and February to snow).   How did these things ever pass into policy to begin with?   [/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