Reply to Why does mcps do a crappy job with magnet/enriched opportunities

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My kid is in a CES this year, and the program is just awesome. They teach the way I think almost all kids should be taught, and the curriculum and activities they use are absolutely stellar. I appreciate that my child is in a class with academic peers, but really, he would be pretty happy if he could have even half this program, “watered down” at his home school. A key thing I see about the activities they do is that they allow the kids to reach their own limits. An example: they begin writing a poem and the teacher has them write down all the words they can think of that have to do with the topic. Then, they have to write their poem without using a single one of those words. This would work in ANY classroom, and is a wonderful way to let an assignment allow natural differentiation. This doesn’t happen once a week, this kind of teaching seems to happen throughout the day, every day. Too many of the “regular” classroom activities in the current ELA curriculum are rigid and limited, so that many kids feel trapped instead of inspired.

MCPS has been looking for a new curriculum for ELA and I really think they should look to the CES programs for fantastic ideas. I also think that there is comparatively little pressure on the CES teachers to get test scores up, and as a result, the teachers and kids have a real joy of teaching and learning together. Less worksheets, less drilling, more doing and talking and experiencing together. I, for one, would happily give up CES if all those things could come back to all the home classrooms. [/quote]

But in the home classroom the teacher would be busy trying to get the lower performing students up to speed and would be drilling etc..that is the whole point of having a separate program.[/quote]

I have seen the kids who “need” drilling back at the home school and their bright spark is dying. I cannot think of many kids who actually need endless, boring, repetitive drilling. That is just poor curriculum or lazy teaching. You can hide drills in engaging activities that allow kids to slow down or reach further. [/quote]

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