Reply to Melanie Meren's FB post about the calendar

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Reply to "Melanie Meren's FB post about the calendar"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]According to the FCPS Grade 3 math pacing guide, Quarter 4 is about 9 weeks long, but only about 2 weeks cover clearly new content (time and money). The remaining 7 weeks—roughly 75–80% of the quarter—are continuation of multiplication/division concepts introduced earlier, SOL review, testing, and flexible instructional time, meaning the vast majority of core material has already been taught before the final quarter even begins.

Why do more parents do not realize this?[/quote]

With the combination of the snow days, early releases (my kids’ school does not do math on the 3 hour early release days, only Benchmark/language arts), scheduled days off, and unplanned absences/sick days, are the teachers even getting to where they need to get to in the official “pacing guides?” Or are some concepts being glossed over or they just aren’t getting to it entirely?

I grew up in a much snowier area of the country and I can remember a year in high school where we missed the first three days after winter break due to snow, then went to school for 2 days before another storm hit the next weekend and we were out for 4 days. By this point it was already mid-January. We did have MLK day off (can’t remember if it was a holiday for everyone or a teacher work day). And they cancelled midterms for everyone because we just didn’t get through enough material due to the snow days. I look at their calendar this year and it reminds me so much of back then. We just had to leave some material behind and start on new stuff when we finally got back to it in mid-late January. [/quote]

The pacing guides are built to go slow. Teachers could cover the content of a week in a day and a half if needed. [/quote]

In elementary.  In secondary math they are jam packed. We are currently 2 weeks behind the pacing guide, but since the majority of our kids don't need to pass an SOL (once they pass algebra 1 they have checked the box) we are able to use all of May to teach new content, review a week in June, and then do final exams. By the end we teach it all, just not on their pace.

Honors sometimes has to skip an extension topic or two because they have even more crammed in there, but they are able to pick and choose the important topics that are foundational for higher math and not explicitly taught in higher levels.[/quote]

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