Reply to How is Westland these days?

Forum Index » Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS)

Reply to "How is Westland these days? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
Ignore the thread derailment, OP. I hope you know that MCPS has a very firm bullying policy in place and that harassment of any kind, including and most specially sexual harassment, will not be tolerated.

My friends with kids at Westland are happy with it, especially this year, as many local children were shut out of the middle school magnets and MCPS opened some advanced classes to cater to their needs in 6th grade.

I encourage you to contact the school to ask whether your child, coming from private, could be eligible for these classes, and whether they need to register for the magnet middle school test in order to be considered (not that you want your child in a magnet, but that MCPS may only place those rejected from magnets into these special classes, if you see what I mean). Hurry, because I believe the test registration deadline may be quickly approaching.

My own child is at North Bethesda Middle School, and I also know kids at Pyle. These are all large, but decent schools.

I will say two things in general:

1. Writing. It is what you and your child make of it. Teachers provide the guidelines and examples of good writing, sometimes in minute detail, but they do not have the time to go over each student's writing with a fine-toothed comb and coach them to write better. This is because they have too many students. Parent involvement goes a long way toward ensuring that your child becomes a good writer.

2. Math. There are advanced tracks that offer a lot of material and end in high school with two years of AP classes or the possibility of taking a college class if the student has exhausted all MCPS math. However, they don't teach too much critical thinking in the sense that there aren't a lot of brain-teasers that force students to really SOLVE A PROBLEM. This is an issue that exists across the board in all K-12 education in the US (and perhaps in the world), with a few exceptions - the math magnets do expose students to higher-order thinking, for example.

Personally, I have not noticed that private schools teach writing and math better than the good public schools that my children have attended. In all cases, you need to engage in the process anyway.
[/quote]

Can we please have more responses like this one?[/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