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]

During COVID many parents overheard how you teach. I was pro teacher and 100% supportive of virtual during the pandemic. However, it really opened my eyes to the degree of bad teaching and lack of subject matter expertise. The kids aren’t lying.[/quote]

A ridiculous metric. You think anyone was at their best in online covid teaching?? We got NO guidance or curriculum and were teaching kids on a virtual meeting platform without cameras or sound. We couldn’t assess engagement, make them participate, they wouldn’t click the assignments, they were confused and tired. We all did what we could in a terrible situation.  If you think emergency virtual teaching for that short time frame is what teaching in the ACTUAL classroom setting looks like day to day in normal times, you’re truly stupid. [/quote]

I’m not who you’re quoting but my experience supervising my niece was that teachers were pointing the kids at videos and then during the discussion not able to answer pretty basic questions from the kids. This was winter of ‘21 so plenty of time to have a curriculum and be in the groove by then. [/quote]

No, because children do not and cannot learn online. Developmentally that is not how it works. The hardest working most diligent teacher can’t make kids learn a way they aren’t designed to learn.

Imagine you absolutely MUST have 7 key tools to do your job. If you have those 7, you’re incredible at your job.  But you only have 2. You do the best you can but it’s only 2. Once you have those 2 tools for five months, your boss assumes that means by then you should’ve learned to do the job just as well with only those two. But you can’t- more time is not a substitute for fewer tools. [/quote]

OK, but a middle school science teacher who can’t answer basic questions about science concepts in a virtual setting (when they could google the answer) does not suddenly become able to answer them in person. This happened routinely. And this was the experience of a child whose parents so prioritized school that they reached out to family during the pandemic to make sure someone was supervising digital learning. Imagine all those poor kids who didn’t have an aunt on maternity leave nearby.

Having witnessed that, I will never be convinced that there is an inherent value in sitting in a classroom versus other things which may be in the child’s best interest.[/quote]

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