Reply to Your experience with a 40% FARMS rate Middle School

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I’ve taught in 5 MCPS MS schools by now and student taught in a sixth. I also have two kids who went through a seventh. So from the perspective of seven MS ranging from high income to low income, the similarities were surprising. And while the actual problems differed, the high income schools actually had a wider array of issues and many of the additional ones originated with entitled parents.

The lower income schools tended to have the same small set of issues:
1. Students with an acute poverty-related issue like no winter coat on a freezing day or limping with a bad sprain that hadn’t been seen by a medical professional. Those we can usually address pretty easily, but they do create a distraction in the first class of the day.
2. Students with chronic poverty-related needs. Like a kid who smells bad because his mom can’t afford the laundromat or one who is falling asleep in class because he lives with nine other people in a three bedroom apartment and it is loud until 3 am. Again, these are distracting but we can often work with families to ameliorate things.
3. Students who are suffering trauma. While MC and UNC kids can also face parental substance abuse, DV and CSA, poor kids are more likely to do so and also to deal with other traumas such as parental incarceration, eviction, etc. Traumatized kids are often unavailable for learning and may react strongly to perceived threats that untraunatized kids ignore. This is a problem that needs a whole school approach to handling. I can’t tell you how many times I calmed a kid down and got her back to work, only to have another teacher trigger an explosion the next period by trying to prove a point to the child.
4. Children can overcome poverty-based lags in skill development and we know that [b]IQ is not fixed, but rather can be increased through intensive means[/b]. I see that all of my low income kids have gifts, including out of the box problem solving ideas and far more grit/resilience than the wealthier kids I have taught. I make my classroom a place where thinking and effort are rewarded, not just memorization and exposure to arbitrarily-valued cultural experiences. I agree a child should know the word waltz, but I can also use a different term in tandem while asking about the attitude of a character in the passage entering a room. That way, the student can answer the question “He acted like he didn’t care” AND learn that the waltz is a dance that appears effortless, so we use it to mean someone is doing something with a carefree attitude.[/quote]

That's basically the opposite of all research out there, but carry on.  There are some interventions that show IQ gains when the kids are young, but these inevitably fade out as the kids get older.[/quote]

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