"Joni Rathbun" wrote in message
...

On Fri, 31 Oct 2003, Circe wrote:


Well, I agree that the disruption is unfortunate, but I also think it
was
the teacher's *choice* to delay the material until all the students were
in
class. The teacher presumably knew what the material was. The teacher
presumably could have given the material to the parents of the students
who
were going to be out and had them impart it to their children. We're not
talking about calculus here, are we? We're talking about curriculum for
third graders, and I'm sure most parents in affluent schools are
perfectly
capable of homeschooling third-grade material for a few days.


I'm in the middle on all of this. Flexibility must exist on both
sides. Both sides are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
And we all have examples of responsible behavior and abuses of
the system, etc., etc., etc.

I think it's the attitude toward what is being taught and
how it's being taught that bothers me -- a little.

In nearly 20 years of teaching, I've never used a textbook
or generated a mass of worksheets to be used. Much of what I've
done has been process-based. For example, when we did a multi-
class social studies unit on community and government with
second graders, we visited all the city government offices,
developed our own community, our own government and community
infrastructure, court system, etc. Each student played an integral part
in our community and government. Their counterparts
in the city came to the school on a regular basis to work
directly with them. And what we planned for next week was highly
dependent upon what happened this week... Not the same thing
as working your way from chapter one to chapter two in a
textbook.

That sort of thing is not easily packaged in a hand-out
that can be sent home with parents to duplicate.

And that's one reason why I rarely take my daughter out of school for
anything but illness (and I just flat out won't send her to school with a
fever--I hate it when parents do...) Because her teachers *don't* use a
canned curriculum and it's really interesting and involved and my kid
*wants* to be there. But our teachers are flexible enough that they have
never *once* blinked or seemed like they minded in the least when I *did*
take my daughter out early for an afternoon or to extend a weekend for a
trip. It's rare... maybe once a year that I take her out for a full day,
twice a year that I get her out of school early for something. If her work
consisted of worksheets and textbook reading (her classes don't have any
textbooks, as far as I know...) as the majority of her education, we
wouldn't bother with school at all, period.

Jenrose