Reply to Shrevewood/Kilmer/Marshall triangle - what is the cause of disparity?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Back to Shrevewood.  It's a nice school with a good sense of community and a lot of great families.  I was displeased with the academics.  There is no creativity and way too much teaching to the test.  I thought the academic expectations were way too low. I'm sure others will disagree.[/quote]

How would one promote more creativity in teaching?  I'm really curious about new ideas.

I think most FCPS would teach to the test because everyone is so bent out of shape re SOL (see this thread) - unless you can guarantee that all the kids will do really well on the SOLs then you can't really afford to move much beyond teaching to the test as a teacher.  I guess that is one benefit of a high SES school - high SES automatically guarantees adequate SOLs so the teachers have more time to teach other things.

I'm also curious as to your feeling that academic expectations are low - my kid is doing great but in the back of my mind it seems to be too easy for him.  He's at the stage of learning to read, spell and maths and the only slight challenge would be the spelling component.  Two or three other kids in the class are in the same boat academically I would imagine. [/quote]

I'm the PP you quoted.  By creativity I mean different ways for the kids to learn things other than spit out the material, cut and paste the terms a bit, fill in the blanks on the study guide and take a test.  There is a plethora of worksheets.  In my child's experience, 5 years, it was about 85-90 percent worksheet driven.  Some fine projects meant to teach would have been nice.

I found the academic expectations low.  The goal seems to be getting everyone to the benchmark, not their best.  (Maybe that's just public school but I don't think so).  There are no longer separate classes for the various levels of math so advanced math is essentially gone because the teacher can't realistically differentiate for 25-28 kids at varying levels.  They have some sort of AAP now, which might be ok.  But if your child is bright kid but you haven't pushed him into AAP, there will be no challenge.[/quote]

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