Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Neither of my kids are going tomorrow now. One had already announced it because she has no more assignments and she would rather sleep in and then read her book in a more comfortable chair than in the classroom. The younger one caught wind of this and decided she’s out, too, now, because she is routinely taking the bus in before 7 am only to have her first teacher say it’s “another free day”. This is torture on parents and kids. My kids are lucky I’m home during the day and would rather they sleep, read, or help out at home. It’s never been this bad! Teachers, can’t you do a Kahoot? Play I-spy or 20 Questions? Talk about current events in the news? I refuse to believe not a single activity of value can be done with these days. Shame on FCPS for scheduling our kids’ lives around zero instruction days. MANY more families will be headed on vacation next June!

My kid is going and is well aware that he doesn’t get to announce that he is not going to school. School is where he goes when it is in session, just like I go to work. Even on the days when most of my colleagues have it off, I go to work. I do what little I have to do on those days and read at work because that is my job for the day.

It isn’t torture. It is a part of life. Sometimes you go to work/school when nothing is happening and you make the best of it. That is life. Deal with it. This attitude is why you see people complaining about your kids and their work ethic when they graduate from college. They can’t figure out how to enjoy days at school with nothing to do? They think that they can just not go? They are going to use all of their PTO fast in a bunch of years.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It’s funny that they harp on school attendance but then all instruction is basically over by April 30. It makes the last 6 weeks a slog.

This is not the case at my kids' schools. Which FCPS school are you speaking about?

Anonymous wrote:It’s funny that they harp on school attendance but then all instruction is basically over by April 30. It makes the last 6 weeks a slog.

Anonymous wrote:Neither of my kids are going tomorrow now. One had already announced it because she has no more assignments and she would rather sleep in and then read her book in a more comfortable chair than in the classroom. The younger one caught wind of this and decided she’s out, too, now, because she is routinely taking the bus in before 7 am only to have her first teacher say it’s “another free day”. This is torture on parents and kids. My kids are lucky I’m home during the day and would rather they sleep, read, or help out at home. It’s never been this bad! Teachers, can’t you do a Kahoot? Play I-spy or 20 Questions? Talk about current events in the news? I refuse to believe not a single activity of value can be done with these days. Shame on FCPS for scheduling our kids’ lives around zero instruction days. MANY more families will be headed on vacation next June!

Anonymous wrote:I get it that there has to be some lessening of academic expectations in the last few days, but is it really as bad as people are reporting? My kid is in 4th grade and seems to still mostly be in same routine, but it sounds like that won't be the case in future years. How do principals/teachers justify not teaching for several days or weeks?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MS teacher here. We need to end school earlier (Memorial Day or first week of June) and then expect real learning/work until the second to last day. Otherwise behavior problems and absenteeism are huge. Teachers who show movies are doing so because student computers are being collected, you can't do a summative (real) assessment without giving 2 weeks to retake, and a large portion of kids have stopped coming or are there but out of control and refusing to do work.

Put 2-3 teacher work days at the end of the school year for grading so that teacher can TEACH until the end and still have time to finalize gradebooks.

There are two teacher workdays on June 18 and 19th.

Grades were due 6/10 at our ES. It has been said before. Teachers can't work on grades on June 18.

The 19th is not a workday.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MS teacher here. We need to end school earlier (Memorial Day or first week of June) and then expect real learning/work until the second to last day. Otherwise behavior problems and absenteeism are huge. Teachers who show movies are doing so because student computers are being collected, you can't do a summative (real) assessment without giving 2 weeks to retake, and a large portion of kids have stopped coming or are there but out of control and refusing to do work.

Put 2-3 teacher work days at the end of the school year for grading so that teacher can TEACH until the end and still have time to finalize gradebooks.

There are two teacher workdays on June 18 and 19th.

And yet grades are due a week before those two days! There are two days where the students are gone and the teachers still have nothing to do but are required to be in the building

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MS teacher here. We need to end school earlier (Memorial Day or first week of June) and then expect real learning/work until the second to last day. Otherwise behavior problems and absenteeism are huge. Teachers who show movies are doing so because student computers are being collected, you can't do a summative (real) assessment without giving 2 weeks to retake, and a large portion of kids have stopped coming or are there but out of control and refusing to do work.

Put 2-3 teacher work days at the end of the school year for grading so that teacher can TEACH until the end and still have time to finalize gradebooks.

+1 from another MS teacher. I'm not showing movies but we're doing a lot of filler activities that are mostly ungraded. Behaviors are out of control. We've had more fights the past two weeks than we've had all year. A lot of the well behaved students have stopped showing up and I don't blame them one bit.

All this will still happen earlier if you end the year earlier.

Why? It's clear the kids know it's just filler now. If it ended sooner, all of this would be avoided.

No you’d still have to have a week of filler for the teachers to wind down, get the last minute grades in, etc. All this stuff would just be pushed earlier - how do you not see that? Nothing would change except we’d have a longer summer. The last few weeks would still be like this.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:MS teacher here. We need to end school earlier (Memorial Day or first week of June) and then expect real learning/work until the second to last day. Otherwise behavior problems and absenteeism are huge. Teachers who show movies are doing so because student computers are being collected, you can't do a summative (real) assessment without giving 2 weeks to retake, and a large portion of kids have stopped coming or are there but out of control and refusing to do work.

Put 2-3 teacher work days at the end of the school year for grading so that teacher can TEACH until the end and still have time to finalize gradebooks.

There are two teacher workdays on June 18 and 19th.