Post by formerlyak on Mar 18, 2016 17:29:43 GMT -5
On the topic of kids being unprepared for college, I see that every day. I work in higher ed and 6-year graduation rate is a big deal. Unfortunately, unless you are looking at a top tier school, that rate is much lower than it should be. One thing that schools are seeing is that, while the kid might look good on paper, grades are inflated so students can get into colleges, which makes that high school and that district look good. They can now say they got some crazy percentage of kids into 4-year colleges. When in reality, the kids aren't ready. This adds to the issue @kirkette is talking about - need to add more remedial courses in college because kids aren't ready. Then people complain they have to go to college for 5 years because they "can't get their classes", when many times it's that they don't qualify for the classes they need and need to take classes on things they should have learned in high school first. And they take out loans to cover these cost, but 40% of them don't finish school because they can't handle the course load and then they are stuck paying back loans and no degree to help them get a leg up in the job market.
The other thing that is frustrating to me personally about this is, with grade inflation, kids who have a 4.0 on paper but maybe aren't really 4.0 students and possibly aren't ready for the college coursework, are taking spots at good school that could go to a student with a 3.8 GPA whose grades are true and not inflated and would have succeeded.
Just as an aside (ahem, @kirkette - lol) did you see the post that donorschoose.org is matching donations for the next two days. If there are schools in need in your district and you're looking to help out, find a school with a project that interests you. Every dollar you donate is matched by # bestschoolday up to the tune of $14M.
Honestly, I wish more teachers in our area used this. I found one in our district that I'm working on fulfilling and have requested that my friends active in our better-funded schools also help where they can. A friend of mine is a teacher in an underserved school and I'm sure she'd have projects she would LOVE to do and have funded.
I always wonder about colleges saying how the high school kids come in totally unprepared. How much of it is really academically unprepared vs. kids going a bit crazy at their first chance of freedom? I graduated in the 90's from what is now considered a great high school, but back then it was known for being a bit of a dump and people avoided sending their kids there. I took 1 AP class and 1 college prep class my senior year, then some of my other classes were things like ASB (cheer) and being a TA. I kicked ass at college. My college GPA was higher than my high school GPA, and this was at the top public university in the state. I felt totally prepared. Anecdotes, I know, but still.
I'm a teacher an my daughter attends my school. It is not our neighborhood school, but I brought her here to save $ on daycare. Plus this is the neighborhood we would ultimately like to live in.
If money was no object (hahahaha) I think a lot of school issues could be fixed with smaller class sizes. Even just dropping from 25 to 18-20 kids would make an amazing difference in what I could do and how much time I could spend with each kid. The problem is that now on paper it looks like that's what the class sizes are here because they include the ELL and Resource Teachers. So basically, they take the total number of kids and divide it by the total number of certified teachers in the building, and boom! We have a class size of 17 kids/teacher on paper. But in reality I have 25 kids with groups of 2-3 kids that get pulled for 20 minutes sporadically throughout the day. It would be totally different if there really were enough teachers (and classrooms!) to actually have 17 kids per class.
OK, I think I'm rambling. It's been a long week with second graders...
It's academically unprepared. Many universities have had to scramble to add more remedial courses because students aren't coming in at college level reading, math, ELA, and analysis levels. Those are the colleges that don't recind offers after placement tests begin to show gaps between college and high school.
If you graduated in the 90s, you didn't feel the brunt of NCLB changes, which really impacted the public education system. It's a completely different educational landscape between pre and post NCLB. The general public can't rely on nostalgia to compare the two models.
Good point about getting out of school before the NCLB changes. I was always so thankful that we didn't have high stakes testing. We had yearly tests, but they had no real impact as far as I remember.
So, I grew up having recess 3 times a day, PE and music every other day, no high stakes testing, and the teachers had freedom to do things like have the students write and perform a play that took all trimester but we learned a ton about getting things done, and I kicked ass at college. Now kids have 1 recess a day (unless the teachers take them out on their own), extremely rare PE and Music (like once a month in K-2 grade), are tested to death, and the teachers have no freedom to teach anything other than the common core, and kids are sucking at college. Well then, that sucks.
I love my job. I will not do anything else. I work my ass off for these kids. But damn... I'm tired.
Post by RoxMonster on Mar 18, 2016 17:48:44 GMT -5
I have a lot to say on this topic, but not sure where to start. I am incredibly frustrated and honestly, burnt out. I don't know how much longer I will stay in teaching.
I am so tired of the focus being on graduation rates, test data, prep for the test, TECHNOLOGY. I am burnt the fuck OUT on technology. That is pretty much our entire focus.
I agree with others in this thread saying let's focus more on other things that enrich kids' lives, like what about bringing back field trips? It is so frustrating to me that we just dropped hundreds of thousands so every kid has a laptop but now pretty much don't allow any field trips. One teacher had just finished teaching Of Mice and Men and they had been discussing living in poverty, etc., so she wanted to take them to the soup kitchen/food pantry to volunteer for part of an afternoon. She was told no because the bus would cost $41 to take them there and back. FORTY-ONE DOLLARS is what we are fighting over. This is so ridiculous to me. (And some schools may truly not be able to afford that, I know, but when you just spent thousands on computers and a huge technology push?)
What are the educators and counselors in this thread going to do with their own children's education? killercupcake? @kirkette? tators?
My mom taught in an inner city school and can echoes so many of these stories. Buying pencils and notebooks, trying to help kids who's parents are nowhere to be found, always having a drawer of sandwhich bread and jelly on her classroom for kids who didn't have food, getting yelled at when calling parents to ask about a student being absent for two weeks, etc. So many kids have no chance to succeed in life. It's infuriating and so sad.
I currently live in Boston. Our boys are in private preschool now and we will be enrolling them into private elementary school. Schools in MA are rated pretty highly overall, but the city schools are not. I worry that even with involved parents like we would be, the boys would not get a decent education because of so many of the stories in this thread. Plus experiences that echo them told to me by people who have children in. public school here.
Even the stellar districts have their issues with over crowding and manipulation of data. Parents hire tutors even in those districts.
I was prepared for college but I went to a mix of private schools, schools abroad, and one of the top 100 public schools in the U.S. I was amazed at some of my fellow freshman who could not write a 5 paragraph essay. I was blown away and so naive about education back then.
Im lucky that I teach in such a good district. I don't live in one right now, so if we have kids they will go to school with me. If we move, it will be to the district I teach in and they would go to public school where we live. I used to think I would put my kids in montessori school, but public schools NEED kids with parents who can do everything they can to help the school. I'm lucky enough to be able to do things other parents can't. Public schools need support. I understand the want to give your kid the best education possible, but these schools are never going to get better when everything is stacked against them and the "good kids" are dropping out like flies.
Yes! I couldn't have said this better.
ETA: My husband and I are both in public education (he's a teacher, I'm an administrator) and our daughter will go to an elementary school in our district next year.
On the topic of kids being unprepared for college, I see that every day. I work in higher ed and 6-year graduation rate is a big deal. Unfortunately, unless you are looking at a top tier school, that rate is much lower than it should be. One thing that schools are seeing is that, while the kid might look good on paper, grades are inflated so students can get into colleges, which makes that high school and that district look good. They can now say they got some crazy percentage of kids into 4-year colleges. When in reality, the kids aren't ready. This adds to the issue @kirkette is talking about - need to add more remedial courses in college because kids aren't ready. Then people complain they have to go to college for 5 years because they "can't get their classes", when many times it's that they don't qualify for the classes they need and need to take classes on things they should have learned in high school first. And they take out loans to cover these cost, but 40% of them don't finish school because they can't handle the course load and then they are stuck paying back loans and no degree to help them get a leg up in the job market.
The other thing that is frustrating to me personally about this is, with grade inflation, kids who have a 4.0 on paper but maybe aren't really 4.0 students and possibly aren't ready for the college coursework, are taking spots at good school that could go to a student with a 3.8 GPA whose grades are true and not inflated and would have succeeded.
Last week, there were reports that something like only 5% of UCLA students graduate within 4 years. Most undergrads there are on the 6+ year track for a 4 year degree. They don't even publish the 4 year rates, unless it's for transfers ( which all things being equal,should take two years not 4). This is UCLA. One of the most, if not the most, applied to higher education institutions in the world, and they are having this matriculation problem.
I can only imagine how bad it is at other universities, and colleges.
Colleges and Universities aren't required to disclose a 4 year graduation rate and aren't evaluated on that for anything like accreditation. They all look at 6 year grad rate. That allows them to account for people taking a year off for personal reasons, going abroad and courses not transferring, etc.
One of the issues that big state schools face, and this is something that was already going on when I was at UCLA in the mid-90s, is that students are very particular about which courses they take for the GEs and what times they take other required courses. They want the GPA booster GE course. And they don't want to have class on Friday. And they don't want to start class before 9 or 10 am. That severely limits which classes you can enroll in. So they take 12 units figuring they will make it up next quarter. But they still don't want to take an 8 am class, or a Friday class, or one that doesn't have published study notes. So a 4 year degree takes much longer than 4 years. When I enrolled at UCLA, I was warned that no one graduates in 4 years. I graduated in 3 and a half. As did many of my friends. And the only people I know who took longer than 4 years were people who did a year or a semester abroad and had units not transfer. But we took 8 am classes and Friday classes and obscure classes like Early Spanish History as a GE so that we could get 16 units each quarter and graduate on time.
I went to a huge state school, so I think my problem was that my first year classes were all huge lecture hall type classes where there was no interaction with the professors. My classes in high school were all honors and AP, and they weren't big classes and we had a ton of attention from the teachers. I would say that we had our hands held to an extent, and we got continuous feedback. To go from that to nothing was a tough transition for me. As dumb and entitled as it sounds, I think my privileged upbringing was what made the transition hard. I had parents and teachers who were always praising me and on top of me to make sure that I understood everything and wasn't struggling. And that was great - I did very well and learned a lot. But it was a different style of learning than the independent learning that is expected in college, and especially in a big college.
What are the educators and counselors in this thread going to do with their own children's education? killercupcake ? @kirkette ? tators ?
My mom taught in an inner city school and can echoes so many of these stories. Buying pencils and notebooks, trying to help kids who's parents are nowhere to be found, always having a drawer of sandwhich bread and jelly on her classroom for kids who didn't have food, getting yelled at when calling parents to ask about a student being absent for two weeks, etc. So many kids have no chance to succeed in life. It's infuriating and so sad.
I currently live in Boston. Our boys are in private preschool now and we will be enrolling them into private elementary school. Schools in MA are rated pretty highly overall, but the city schools are not. I worry that even with involved parents like we would be, the boys would not get a decent education because of so many of the stories in this thread. Plus experiences that echo them told to me by people who have children in. public school here.
Even the stellar districts have their issues with over crowding and manipulation of data. Parents hire tutors even in those districts.
I was prepared for college but I went to a mix of private schools, schools abroad, and one of the top 100 public schools in the U.S. I was amazed at some of my fellow freshman who could not write a 5 paragraph essay. I was blown away and so naive about education back then.
This is a huge dilemma for me.
I taught for the beginning of my teaching career in urban public schools and I was good at it. I loved the kids. I could get them. I worked my ass off and those kids had a ton of successes in my class.
I burnt out. I could not sustain the hours, the frustrations, the disappointments and, frankly, the emotional brainspace teaching in those schools took for me. I left. I now teach in a somewhat cushy private (Quaker) school. I live in Philadelphia. My kids go to my school, and they are getting a superb education.
I want badly to be one of those parents who changes public school from the inside, but I just cannot make my kids the guinea pigs when a free, awesome school is the option.
"Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you've got a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies-"God damn it, you've got to be kind.”
so, i'm the educational newbie but i wanted to inject a little hope. LOL! i'm in two 9th grade reading intervention classes in a TOOOOOUGH high school, which sounds ridiculous for my area but is true. i have two homeless students, lots of students in gangs, a girl who is being raised by her stepdad because her mom abandoned them both and she never knew her dad, a girl being raised by her grandmother because both of her parents are in jail, a boy who leaves the tags on his jeans to show that they all cost over a thousand dollars (because he "sells stuff" and can afford them), etc. it's insane. that's not including my resource kids or american history kids. the kids in reading intervention all read on a level somewhere between third and fifth grade. some of them are legit disabled and some of them are the kid who never gave a shit and just kept getting passed along.
they had to write poems this week. POEMS! AND they had to recite them in front of the class for a speaking grade. some of them were crap written by kids who don't give a shit, but some of them were amazing. one kid (who is 14 and has a PO and multiple tattoos) wrote about being afraid of his dad who is a big cheese in an international gang and is grooming the kid to take over. he wrote about how he has to do well in school because his dad is going to throw him out when he finds out he doesn't want to be in the gang when he gets older. it was seriously beautiful.
the special ed teacher i work with keeps telling me not to get discouraged because "we are saving lives" teaching these kids to read. he was recently panhandled by a former student and it REALLY got to him. he is a man on a mission now. it's not about data or grades for him, it's about giving our kids options for their lives that they won't have if they leave high school and can't read.
Just as an aside (ahem, @kirkette - lol) did you see the post that donorschoose.org is matching donations for the next two days. If there are schools in need in your district and you're looking to help out, find a school with a project that interests you. Every dollar you donate is matched by # bestschoolday up to the tune of $14M.
Honestly, I wish more teachers in our area used this. I found one in our district that I'm working on fulfilling and have requested that my friends active in our better-funded schools also help where they can. A friend of mine is a teacher in an underserved school and I'm sure she'd have projects she would LOVE to do and have funded.
Thanks for posting this! I just changed schools and districts last month and am now teaching 2nd grade after years of teaching middle school. My 2nd grade classroom library is so pathetic right now and I can't afford to buy an entire new library all at once. I'll be setting up a project on Donors Choose tonight!
Post by formerlyak on Mar 18, 2016 19:17:34 GMT -5
Schools with a good 4 year grad rate still publish them and use it as a selling point. Most schools track 4, 5 and 6 year. But as far as I know, 6 year is what they use now for most things.
Post by Jalapeñomel on Mar 18, 2016 19:22:41 GMT -5
Maybe if people stopped saying things like those who can't teach or teachers have the entire summer off so they can't complain, people would actually value the work we do and start investing in it.
If you have an active enough PTA, consider approaching them about a book drive (or have your principal do so.) Normally when I do our book drives I let the first year teachers pick several for their classroom libraries before I distribute to the other schools. Or check with your district for grants.
What are the educators and counselors in this thread going to do with their own children's education? killercupcake? @kirkette? tators?
My mom taught in an inner city school and can echoes so many of these stories. Buying pencils and notebooks, trying to help kids who's parents are nowhere to be found, always having a drawer of sandwhich bread and jelly on her classroom for kids who didn't have food, getting yelled at when calling parents to ask about a student being absent for two weeks, etc. So many kids have no chance to succeed in life. It's infuriating and so sad.
I currently live in Boston. Our boys are in private preschool now and we will be enrolling them into private elementary school. Schools in MA are rated pretty highly overall, but the city schools are not. I worry that even with involved parents like we would be, the boys would not get a decent education because of so many of the stories in this thread. Plus experiences that echo them told to me by people who have children in. public school here.
Even the stellar districts have their issues with over crowding and manipulation of data. Parents hire tutors even in those districts.
I was prepared for college but I went to a mix of private schools, schools abroad, and one of the top 100 public schools in the U.S. I was amazed at some of my fellow freshman who could not write a 5 paragraph essay. I was blown away and so naive about education back then.
Im lucky that I teach in such a good district. I don't live in one right now, so if we have kids they will go to school with me. If we move, it will be to the district I teach in and they would go to public school where we live. I used to think I would put my kids in montessori school, but public schools NEED kids with parents who can do everything they can to help the school. I'm lucky enough to be able to do things other parents can't. Public schools need support. I understand the want to give your kid the best education possible, but these schools are never going to get better when everything is stacked against them and the "good kids" are dropping out like flies.
I can't tell if you are criticizing or supporting our decision to send our kids to private and not public school. You said your kids will go to the better school district you teach in and not the poorer performing one you live in, yet saying public schools need support and the good kids are dropping out.
If H and I send our kids to a public school we are zoned for, we would have to supplement 75% of their education at home. I'm talking about the basics like math and science. We don't have the hours in the day to do that on top of work. I'm very active at their current school and support a lot of city programs that benefit the public schools but I don't feel comfortable sending my kids to one we would be placed in based on the city's lottery system knowing the amount of teaching we would have to do at home.
Maybe for high school when they already have the foundation built for how to learn and be able to think critically, but not elementary school.
Our other option is to leave the city, which I don't see much different because we would be doing so for better public schools.
This thread is so disheartening. I didn't realize the system was so much more broken than when I graduated in the 90s, as @kirkette has pointed out.
Thank you to all the teachers in here who continue to teach and love it despite the obstacles.
What are the educators and counselors in this thread going to do with their own children's education? killercupcake ? @kirkette ? tators ?
My mom taught in an inner city school and can echoes so many of these stories. Buying pencils and notebooks, trying to help kids who's parents are nowhere to be found, always having a drawer of sandwhich bread and jelly on her classroom for kids who didn't have food, getting yelled at when calling parents to ask about a student being absent for two weeks, etc. So many kids have no chance to succeed in life. It's infuriating and so sad.
I currently live in Boston. Our boys are in private preschool now and we will be enrolling them into private elementary school. Schools in MA are rated pretty highly overall, but the city schools are not. I worry that even with involved parents like we would be, the boys would not get a decent education because of so many of the stories in this thread. Plus experiences that echo them told to me by people who have children in. public school here.
Even the stellar districts have their issues with over crowding and manipulation of data. Parents hire tutors even in those districts.
I was prepared for college but I went to a mix of private schools, schools abroad, and one of the top 100 public schools in the U.S. I was amazed at some of my fellow freshman who could not write a 5 paragraph essay. I was blown away and so naive about education back then.
This is a huge dilemma for me.
I taught for the beginning of my teaching career in urban public schools and I was good at it. I loved the kids. I could get them. I worked my ass off and those kids had a ton of successes in my class.
I burnt out. I could not sustain the hours, the frustrations, the disappointments and, frankly, the emotional brainspace teaching in those schools took for me. I left. I now teach in a somewhat cushy private (Quaker) school. I live in Philadelphia. My kids go to my school, and they are getting a superb education.
I want badly to be one of those parents who changes public school from the inside, but I just cannot make my kids the guinea pigs when a free, awesome school is the option.
The lottery system here and the very little number of good public school options led to a group of parents joining together and selecting a crap neighborhood school as their top lottery pick. The system allows parents of x number to form a group and be placed at the same place. They created a very strong parent group that has done amazing things within the school. It is one of the top 3 public schools in the city. To the point where everyone lists it as their top choice and people get a waitlist number like, #146. 146. Sorry. I can't take that chance with twins.
Lottery numbers and school assignments were dealt last week. I post on another local board that has a thread started about doing the same thing as the parent group did 10 years ago with a different very poor performing school in the neighborhood. It's a great thing to do, but Like you, I don't want my kids to be the guinea pigs when I don't have the time to supplement so much at home. If I did, I might be willing to send them.
Is this a good place for my rant? I've seen repeated complaints throughout this thread of high school kids still reading at an elementary level. Up to 20% of the population is dyslexic and our teachers and our schools are not trained to spot it or remediate it.
Before this year I would have sworn our school was one of the good ones. There is very little focus on testing. The academic requirements and expectations are fine. It's an open air school so the kids are outside all the time. Lots of P.E., extra recess every Friday, lunch spent outside, etc.
Then my kid was diagnosed with dyslexia. The school didn't diagnose him. In fact when I brought my suspicions to the school they completely dismissed me. He has a high IQ and could fake his way through reading the paragraph required for benchmark testing. However, if you sat down and had him read you a simple chapter book he struggled mightily. It was clear that no one at the school was really reading with my kid. I said F.U. to the school and paid $2700 for an independent evaluation which diagnosed him as a classic dyslexic. I brought that diagnosis back to the school, thinking now they would take me seriously, and their response was "so what?"
DH and I are lucky enough to afford private intervention. There is a proven, very successful method for remediating dyslexia. I now drive DS 3 days a week to the California Youth Services office to receive this remediation. The CYS program was created by a local mother with a dyslexic son who realized the school would not help her and now aims to provide low cost or free tutoring to as many kids as she can reach. By the end of the 2 - 3 year program DS will be fully remediated and able to read at at least a 9th grade level.
I can't help but think about all the other kids at DS's school, up to 20% of them(!), that are going overlooked. The kids who don't have parents at home reading to them and recognizing the signs. If they don't have the IQ to fake it like DS has, they end up in RTI or some other school provided service that does jack shit to help with dyslexia. Those are the kids that end up in 9th grade with a 3rd-5th grade reading level. Those are the kids that get mistaken for not giving a shit because it looks like they aren't trying when the reality is that they can not learn to read through traditional methods. Those are the kids that drop out of high school. It blows my mind that schools are not all over this.
I went to a huge state school, so I think my problem was that my first year classes were all huge lecture hall type classes where there was no interaction with the professors. My classes in high school were all honors and AP, and they weren't big classes and we had a ton of attention from the teachers. I would say that we had our hands held to an extent, and we got continuous feedback. To go from that to nothing was a tough transition for me. As dumb and entitled as it sounds, I think my privileged upbringing was what made the transition hard. I had parents and teachers who were always praising me and on top of me to make sure that I understood everything and wasn't struggling. And that was great - I did very well and learned a lot. But it was a different style of learning than the independent learning that is expected in college, and especially in a big college.
I think the big lecture style classes aren't very good for any incoming freshman. I withdrew from UCONN my freshman, part of my leaving was this large lecture hall type of class. My husband, who went to another university, also had large lecture classes and didn't like the style of education either.
Is this a good place for my rant? I've seen repeated complaints throughout this thread of high school kids still reading at an elementary level. Up to 20% of the population is dyslexic and our teachers and our schools are not trained to spot it or remediate it.
Before this year I would have sworn our school was one of the good ones. There is very little focus on testing. The academic requirements and expectations are fine. It's an open air school so the kids are outside all the time. Lots of P.E., extra recess every Friday, lunch spent outside, etc.
Then my kid was diagnosed with dyslexia. The school didn't diagnose him. In fact when I brought my suspicions to the school they completely dismissed me. He has a high IQ and could fake his way through reading the paragraph required for benchmark testing. However, if you sat down and had him read you a simple chapter book he struggled mightily. It was clear that no one at the school was really reading with my kid. I said F.U. to the school and paid $2700 for an independent evaluation which diagnosed him as a classic dyslexic. I brought that diagnosis back to the school, thinking now they would take me seriously, and their response was "so what?"
DH and I are lucky enough to afford private intervention. There is a proven, very successful method for remediating dyslexia. I now drive DS 3 days a week to the California Youth Services office to receive this remediation. The CYS program was created by a local mother with a dyslexic son who realized the school would not help her and now aims to provide low cost or free tutoring to as many kids as she can reach. By the end of the 2 - 3 year program DS will be fully remediated and able to read at at least a 9th grade level.
I can't help but think about all the other kids at DS's school, up to 20% of them(!), that are going overlooked. The kids who don't have parents at home reading to them and recognizing the signs. If they don't have the IQ to fake it like DS has, they end up in RTI or some other school provided service that does jack shit to help with dyslexia. Those are the kids that end up in 9th grade with a 3rd-5th grade reading level. Those are the kids that get mistaken for not giving a shit because it looks like they aren't trying when the reality is that they can not learn to read through traditional methods. Those are the kids that drop out of high school. It blows my mind that schools are not all over this.
you know what? you're absolutely right. 80% of my kids have IEPs and not one of them mentions dyslexia. i'm going to ask the SpEd teachers about this next week. i put it in my phone so that i remember. thank you for this!
Back to solutions and involvement, I think another thing that would help would be for people to get involved in their local schools, when they move there, instead of waiting until their kid hits Kindergarten. It could just be trying to understand local Ed issues. It could be participating in community days. It could be supporting a team, donating some box tops, or being a career day guest speaker. If you know it's going to be your school, go to an open house or a board meeting (he'll watch one on tv or online) you can start building the relationship now. As a plus, you won't be sidelined when your kid enters Kinder. If you don't plan on having kids, you can still be involved as a concerned tax payer.
I always thought I would send my kids to private schools because that was my school experience. My H went to public schools and wanted us to give the public schools a chance if they were comparable to our private options. So we did and so far it's mostly been good, and I've gotten pretty involved. I didn't really ever think this would be something I'd be into but I plan to stay involved even as my kids get older and move on because I think it's so important.
This year I even took on something that is so far out of my comfort zone (science lab) because no one else would. I lucked out and someone else who has more science related experience offered to help too, but it's honestly really rewarding and it's enjoyable to revamp this program our PTA does. I'm excited about it. And even more excited about possibly partnering with my H's place of employment so that we can help expand it and replicate it in other nearby schools. Our program is pretty dependent on parent volunteers but if it works out how we hope, parent volunteers won't be as necessary and it will be easier to implement in other schools that don't have the large number of parent volunteers we have.
Anyway my point is - I think this is great advice. Sometimes PTAs and school communities can be kind of clique-ish but it's worth taking a chance and getting involved. I'm an introvert who is not to into people but I am so glad I have done this.
I went to a huge state school, so I think my problem was that my first year classes were all huge lecture hall type classes where there was no interaction with the professors. My classes in high school were all honors and AP, and they weren't big classes and we had a ton of attention from the teachers. I would say that we had our hands held to an extent, and we got continuous feedback. To go from that to nothing was a tough transition for me. As dumb and entitled as it sounds, I think my privileged upbringing was what made the transition hard. I had parents and teachers who were always praising me and on top of me to make sure that I understood everything and wasn't struggling. And that was great - I did very well and learned a lot. But it was a different style of learning than the independent learning that is expected in college, and especially in a big college.
I think the big lecture style classes aren't very good for any incoming freshman. I withdrew from UCONN my freshman, part of my leaving was this large lecture hall type of class. My husband, who went to another university, also had large lecture classes and didn't like the style of education either.
I went to UConn. The huge lecture halls were insane and so impersonal!
Is this a good place for my rant? I've seen repeated complaints throughout this thread of high school kids still reading at an elementary level. Up to 20% of the population is dyslexic and our teachers and our schools are not trained to spot it or remediate it.
Before this year I would have sworn our school was one of the good ones. There is very little focus on testing. The academic requirements and expectations are fine. It's an open air school so the kids are outside all the time. Lots of P.E., extra recess every Friday, lunch spent outside, etc.
Then my kid was diagnosed with dyslexia. The school didn't diagnose him. In fact when I brought my suspicions to the school they completely dismissed me. He has a high IQ and could fake his way through reading the paragraph required for benchmark testing. However, if you sat down and had him read you a simple chapter book he struggled mightily. It was clear that no one at the school was really reading with my kid. I said F.U. to the school and paid $2700 for an independent evaluation which diagnosed him as a classic dyslexic. I brought that diagnosis back to the school, thinking now they would take me seriously, and their response was "so what?"
DH and I are lucky enough to afford private intervention. There is a proven, very successful method for remediating dyslexia. I now drive DS 3 days a week to the California Youth Services office to receive this remediation. The CYS program was created by a local mother with a dyslexic son who realized the school would not help her and now aims to provide low cost or free tutoring to as many kids as she can reach. By the end of the 2 - 3 year program DS will be fully remediated and able to read at at least a 9th grade level.
I can't help but think about all the other kids at DS's school, up to 20% of them(!), that are going overlooked. The kids who don't have parents at home reading to them and recognizing the signs. If they don't have the IQ to fake it like DS has, they end up in RTI or some other school provided service that does jack shit to help with dyslexia. Those are the kids that end up in 9th grade with a 3rd-5th grade reading level. Those are the kids that get mistaken for not giving a shit because it looks like they aren't trying when the reality is that they can not learn to read through traditional methods. Those are the kids that drop out of high school. It blows my mind that schools are not all over this.
you know what? you're absolutely right. 80% of my kids have IEPs and not one of them mentions dyslexia. i'm going to ask the SpEd teachers about this next week. i put it in my phone so that i remember. thank you for this!
I don't know if it is the same where you are than where we are but dyslexia isn't a diagnosis term that we use anymore. Students are identified with a learning disability in "Communication - Reading".
The terms dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia simply mean 'broken' reading/writing/math. As it was explained to me, there was a move away from using dyslexia when wording the identification because people have very specific pre-conceived notions about what dyslexia presents as (writing letters backwards, for example) and as a result, if a child didn't present those kids of behaviours, the presumption was that their was no reading LD. In reality, reading disabilities can present in a variety of ways, and can be greatly affected by the overall intellectual ability of the person, as mentioned by PP.
Anyways, all this to say, it is possible that your kids with IEPs have dyslexia but their identifications may read differently.
you know what? you're absolutely right. 80% of my kids have IEPs and not one of them mentions dyslexia. i'm going to ask the SpEd teachers about this next week. i put it in my phone so that i remember. thank you for this!
I don't know if it is the same where you are than where we are but dyslexia isn't a diagnosis term that we use anymore. Students are identified with a learning disability in "Communication - Reading".
The terms dyslexia, dysgraphia and dyscalculia simply mean 'broken' reading/writing/math. As it was explained to me, there was a move away from using dyslexia when wording the identification because people have very specific pre-conceived notions about what dyslexia presents as (writing letters backwards, for example) and as a result, if a child didn't present those kids of behaviours, the presumption was that their was no reading LD. In reality, reading disabilities can present in a variety of ways, and can be greatly affected by the overall intellectual ability of the person, as mentioned by PP.
Anyways, all this to say, it is possible that your kids with IEPs have dyslexia but their identifications may read differently.
oooooohhhh.....yeah. we do have kids with that. okay.
and this is why coursework starts this summer. LOL!
I think the big lecture style classes aren't very good for any incoming freshman. I withdrew from UCONN my freshman, part of my leaving was this large lecture hall type of class. My husband, who went to another university, also had large lecture classes and didn't like the style of education either.
I went to UConn. The huge lecture halls were insane and so impersonal!
What are the educators and counselors in this thread going to do with their own children's education? killercupcake ? @kirkette ? tators ?
My mom taught in an inner city school and can echoes so many of these stories. Buying pencils and notebooks, trying to help kids who's parents are nowhere to be found, always having a drawer of sandwhich bread and jelly on her classroom for kids who didn't have food, getting yelled at when calling parents to ask about a student being absent for two weeks, etc. So many kids have no chance to succeed in life. It's infuriating and so sad.
I currently live in Boston. Our boys are in private preschool now and we will be enrolling them into private elementary school. Schools in MA are rated pretty highly overall, but the city schools are not. I worry that even with involved parents like we would be, the boys would not get a decent education because of so many of the stories in this thread. Plus experiences that echo them told to me by people who have children in. public school here.
Even the stellar districts have their issues with over crowding and manipulation of data. Parents hire tutors even in those districts.
I was prepared for college but I went to a mix of private schools, schools abroad, and one of the top 100 public schools in the U.S. I was amazed at some of my fellow freshman who could not write a 5 paragraph essay. I was blown away and so naive about education back then.
This is a huge dilemma for me.
I taught for the beginning of my teaching career in urban public schools and I was good at it. I loved the kids. I could get them. I worked my ass off and those kids had a ton of successes in my class.
I burnt out. I could not sustain the hours, the frustrations, the disappointments and, frankly, the emotional brainspace teaching in those schools took for me. I left. I now teach in a somewhat cushy private (Quaker) school. I live in Philadelphia. My kids go to my school, and they are getting a superb education.
I want badly to be one of those parents who changes public school from the inside, but I just cannot make my kids the guinea pigs when a free, awesome school is the option.
I don't blame you a bit. The PSD is so incredibly broken and I simply don't see a way to fix it. I just try to give to as many DonorsChoose projects as I can and curse the ghost of Arlene Ackerman. If we have a kid, we'll send him or her to the parochial school in town and then to either of the private high schools that H and I attended since we have legacy status.
I dread the thought of sending my kids to NYC public schools, especially elementary schools.
It just depends on the school. My daughter is thriving in her NYC public elementary school and I'm really happy with the school, not just as an NYC public school, but as any elementary school. Now, of course, some are terrible, but that's certainly not a universal statement.
Just as an aside (ahem, @kirkette - lol) did you see the post that donorschoose.org is matching donations for the next two days. If there are schools in need in your district and you're looking to help out, find a school with a project that interests you. Every dollar you donate is matched by # bestschoolday up to the tune of $14M.
Honestly, I wish more teachers in our area used this. I found one in our district that I'm working on fulfilling and have requested that my friends active in our better-funded schools also help where they can. A friend of mine is a teacher in an underserved school and I'm sure she'd have projects she would LOVE to do and have funded.
Thanks for posting this! I just changed schools and districts last month and am now teaching 2nd grade after years of teaching middle school. My 2nd grade classroom library is so pathetic right now and I can't afford to buy an entire new library all at once. I'll be setting up a project on Donors Choose tonight!
In addition to Donors Choose and a PTA book drive, contact the local libraries. They often get donations of books and sometimes they are high quality children's books. I am friends with a librarian and received about six boxes of books because they were donated by a retired teacher. My other source of books is a right place and time thing. Twice I have been at schools that updated their libraries and had to get rid of books.