Reply to Increase Absenteeism in Midle/Upper SES students not due to illness?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Yes, it's a huge problem, and growing. Mostly school avoidance and mental health issues. No one is sure exactly what the cause is. I think the rolling gradebook and the required 7 assignments and 2 tests per quarter might have something to do with it - work just piles up and up and quickly becomes overwhelming.[/quote]

7 assignments and 2 tests per quarter is not a lot of work.  It's very little work.

The attendance is bad because of the crappy schedule and residual effects of how FCPS implemented covid computer learning and post covid computer learning and grading scales.

Ask any parent of teens

Fcps made consistent in person school and deadlines irrelevant for the current crop of kids. It will be like this for a few more years.[/quote]

I am a parent of a teen. I am also a teacher. 7 assignments is much more graded work than we ever had when I was in school. We usually had one or two tests per quarter, and max one other thing to hand in. Maybe some small homework assignments that were stuck together into one grade. 7 graded assignments is actually a lot. As teachers, we sometimes have trouble getting them all in. When a student misses some school, they are almost certainly going to get far behind in assignments, and just getting them caught up becomes a major thing. There is no way a kid who missed a week or two of school can easily catch up in all their classes. So they start avoiding work and avoiding school, and the problem spirals. We watch it happen over and over.

We don't even want to give that many separate assignments. [/quote]

7 assignments? My kids have anywhere from 20-30 graded assignments in private MS & HS per quarter, and usually a whole lot of quizzes and a few tests.[/quote]

That seems unlikely. 30 grade assignments per class per quarter would mean a graded assignment almost every day, or at the very least every other day. For the teacher, that would mean grading nonstop, and even in private school there aren't enough hours in the day to grade that much work and also plan lessons and teach. [/quote]

DP. Mine are in public in the Northeast and usually have more than 20 assignments per quarter. Quarters last 45ish days.[/quote]

My ruby red states nieces have much more rigorous education than FCPS.
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That's because the parents in red states know better and demand better for their kids.[/quote]

As a parent of a kid taking APs in Freshman year and has 3 next year, I’m honestly confused by your view.  My child has vastly more APs and elective selection than I did as a kid or my friend’s kids do who still live in my home county.  They also have lots of quizzes, papers and graded assignments.

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Parents of kids who don’t do schoolwork are convinced there’s no schoolwork . They also believe none of the teachers teach! [/quote]

As a teacher it amazes me why these parents believe all these lies the kids tell them. You really think we are doing nothing, even one day? The honors and AP classes are really just made up of the kids actually doing the assignments and the regular classes are 50% of kids that don’t want to do anything and the other 50% do the work but want to have breaks while we help the kids who weren’t paying attention the first time or were absent. [/quote]

My child is in all honors and APs. When I say her teaching team is terrible, it doesn’t literally mean that they’re sitting around twiddling their thumbs all day long.

In one case, it means that what the teacher does teach makes no sense. Then she gets mad when she asks the kids if they understand and they say no. Or the kids ask for clarification and she just yells at them for not understanding in the first place. The pacing of the class was also so off that they were done with the mandatory lessons by the end of February and moved on to optional material.

In another, the teacher spends more time on stories about his time as a youth than on lessons. Then the lessons are all crammed into shorter sessions and two weeks away from the AP exam, they are not done with all the units, so there is no time to review. Other teachers have been reviewing materials and giving their kids practice for the last couple of weeks.

In another, the teacher’s material is outdated and does not correlate with the syllabus. So what they learn and what they should learn are decoupled. When kids are concerned about their outcomes, he basically tells them how he screwed around all through HS and college and still turned out fine, and to not worry so much about grades.

In all these classes, my child and classmates are essentially teaching themselves the materials. So after getting home from school, they’re spending hours going over YouTube videos, calling each other to see if anyone else has figured out what’s going on, and then do homework and prepare for quizzes and tests. The amount of work this piles on when compared to the one well taught class is startling. She easily spends 10x the amount of time on her poorly taught classes as the well taught one, and has worse results to show for it. [/quote]

A secret that teachers know but most parents don’t is the really good teachers who do skills based, structured , direct instruction are the ones teaching the lower level academic / co taught classes. Our students need the skills so we have to do that kind of teaching and differentiation. The teachers who teach the upper level courses are often put there because there’s less for the kids to lose if they suck. It’s viewed as “they’re AP kids, they’ll be ok with the weaker teacher.” I am not saying all honors/AP teachers suck. But I will say most of the ones at the secondary level are [b]a) men who b) aren’t good at direct, skills based instruction and c) think they’re cool because they teach on ~vibes~[/b]. The actual teaching you want your kids to get is happening in the cotaught classes. [/quote]

Haha single female teacher alert. At my school I have had 3 students go through, one is still attending, and I will say the best teachers (non football coaches) at our school are the male teachers. I will say they did have one that was young and left the profession that matched your basis but most have been great. I never had to worry about fairness, passive aggressive, and or moodiness. They liked them a lot and I liked them on back to school night(yes I’m one of the few that still go). The one co taught class my oldest son was in was so dumbed down and so boring I made sure none of my kids ever took a non honors core class ever again. My son told me that the one teacher would walk around and do the problems for them, so if that’s what you mean by direct instruction then great.[/quote]

Both of you need to stop with the stereotyping. My daughter has had good and bad teachers of both genders. Her best teacher ever has been female. So has the worst. The majority of her teachers have been female, so this does not surprise me.[/quote]

Obviously there is great and bad teacher of both genders and it is a little surprising for a teacher to say that about male teachers but she probably is in a situation thats frustrating. We have all been there.[/quote]

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