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Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?



 
 
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  #91  
Old October 28th 03, 04:03 AM
ColoradoSkiBum
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Default Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?


: Oh, my dd
: is at risk. Better threaten us with fines. I am really irate. Who
came up
: with such a stupid law?
:
:
: Blame the zero-tolerance folks, the no child left behind folks...
:
: Bush anyone?
:
:
: Bingo. And as far as I can tell, it's going to
: get worse, not better.
:

Bull. If this were true, all schools would have such restrictive policies.
They don't.
--
ColoradoSkiBum

  #92  
Old October 28th 03, 06:25 AM
Jenrose
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Default Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?


"Ericka Kammerer" wrote in message
...
Jenrose wrote:


My daughter's classes are not self-paced, per se, nor self-directed. And

the
teacher/student ratio varies from 24:1 to 28:1, although we have enough
parent volunteers that there are usually other adults around. Honestly,

when
you get a bunch of kids with different ability levels together, ditch

the
whole "letter grade" system, encourage group learning environments and

make
the curriculum one which allows children to do assignments to their

ability
rather than to one "objective" standard, then yes, you can accomplish an
education with the same basic resources any public school should have.



Ain't gonna happen in public schools as long as there's
this rabid push for "accountability" through testing and attendance
and other "objective" measurements that mean little to nothing.


Um, she *is* in a public school.

There's another public school in town, a charter school, that takes it even
further, but it's farther from my house and I don't feel like moving her. We
also have public magnet arts, public Spanish, French and Japanese immersion
schools, plus a couple magnet academic schools. I was not even tempted by
the magnet academic programs--my sister went to one and the attitude could
be summed up thusly:

"You know, college students have to do a lot of homework. So we better
prepare them in high school by giving them a couple hours per night."

"You know, high schoolers get quite a bit of homework. We better prepare our
middle schoolers by giving them at least THREE hours per night."

"You know, when that kid gets to middle school, he's going to have to do a
lot of homework. So we're going to assign him a thesis paper now, in fifth
grade, and he'll need to put in 5 hours every day after school to get it
done."

This leaves kindergarteners with eight hours of homework and caffeine
jitters at the age of five, carried to the logical conclusion. I don't want
to even think about preschool.

I hyperbolize, but you get the point. My sister spent every spare minute
working on homework (now she was undiagnosed ADD and had a hard time
focusing, but still) from the time she was in 4th grade until she graduated
high school. College hasn't been anywhere near as hard for her.

It was very important for us to find a program that let kids be kids without
the heavy homework load. She has gone from no homework in kindergarten to
not quite an hour in 5th grade on a "heavy" night, and never not been able
to get her homework done working no more than 10 min x grade level every
night. Thus, with reasonable, age-appropriate expectations (and how many
emotionally average academically gifted kids get loaded with age
inappropriate amounts of work when their "enrichments" pile on top of a
normal workload....) she's actually developed study skills which seem rare
in kids that bright.

But the point is that *all* these programs operate with the same budgets the
neighborhood schools get, per pupil.

There are some who argue that this kind of program "saps" the neighborhood
schools of the brightest kids. In my experience, neighborhood schools with a
"standard" normal curriculum rarely make enough use of the brightest kids to
justify keeping them. And the kids in the magnet programs aren't all "the
brightest" or "the richest"... plenty have struggles or issues or find some
things harder. Lots and lots of kids with single parents--all the single
parents I know well are sending their kids to magnet programs because there
tends to be more social networking for parents there. In fact, many of the
parents who send their kids to the magnet programs or charter schools would
otherwise homeschool. I would have... Also, the magnet schools share
buildings with neighborhood schools--ours works together and splits
fundraising/extra teachers with our neighborhood school. There are more
adults in the building because of the magnet program.What delights me about
this program in particular is that it manages to provide an enriched
learning environment for the same money to ALL kids at all ability levels.
Isn't that how it *should* work? Shouldn't people be looking at taking this
model out to the neighborhood schools?

Jenrose


  #94  
Old October 28th 03, 07:01 AM
dragonlady
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Posts: n/a
Default Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?

In article ,
"ColoradoSkiBum" wrote:

: Oh, my dd
: is at risk. Better threaten us with fines. I am really irate. Who
came up
: with such a stupid law?
:
:
: Blame the zero-tolerance folks, the no child left behind folks...
:
: Bush anyone?
:
:
: Bingo. And as far as I can tell, it's going to
: get worse, not better.
:

Bull. If this were true, all schools would have such restrictive policies.
They don't.


Not yet -- but from what I can see, they are all getting much, much
worse.
--
Children won't care how much you know until they know how much you care

  #95  
Old October 28th 03, 07:10 AM
Nevermind
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Default Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?

I don't think you can part-time homeschool this way, i.e., by just
keeping her out of school at random. However, lots of districts allow
part-time homeschooling of a different sort, which involves the child
doing certain subjects at school (with bright kids, that's often often
the nonacademic ones) and certain others at home. That might be ideal
for you, if your district allows it.

I agree with your perspective to a certain extent. I don't find school
to be a scintillating environment that my child shouldn't miss out on.
I also have a child who is not learning a lot *academically* at school
and who could undoubtedly do just as well on tests if he missed a day
of school a week or more. And, as I would generally only want to take
him out for enriching experiences, I would argue that his education
would benefit from the absences.

But I also sympathize with the huge organizational feat that school
is, at least in my son's very large, rigidly structured school. Every
time he misses school, work is created for his teacher. As far as I
can tell, she is not at liberty to let him just miss work, even work
that she knows he has mastered; she has to make sure he gets it all
done at some point.

Also, there are rules on the books that you need to watch out for.
Might they come after you? Sure. School administrators tend to believe
that they know what a kid needs much more than the parents do. Letting
a child miss school for "no good reason" more often than very
occasionally is tantamount, in their eyes, to not getting him/her
vaccinated: totally, wildly irresponsible. So do be careful.
  #96  
Old October 28th 03, 07:37 AM
Nevermind
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Default Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?

"toypup" wrote

I doubt they'd get her for truancy if the only reason she's been out is for
being sick, as long as you can prove it with a doctor's note. Sounds like
the other reasons you feel are more important are getting in the way of her
education.


She said they weren't. When my son was in K, I used to take him out
every now and then, and we always did stuff that was MUCH more
educational than he did at school. Now that he is in 3rd grade, I will
take him out much less frequently, due to the problems absences cause
teachers and the sheer amount of makeup work he has to do when absent,
but I will still occasionally take him out to do something great that
it would be very inconvenient to do on the weekend. (Also, my kid
tends to be pretty healthy, so I would not expect him to miss many, if
any, schooldays other than for our educational trips.)

Personally, I think you ought to either homeschool or follow
school rules. My parents would never have let me miss school to visit
family except for once when my grandma was dying, and we even got permission
for that (we had to go halfway around the world for two weeks during
finals). School is important. It is setting a precedent for how she will
be in her adult life. When she gets a job, she can't just take off because
of family unless it's an emergency.


The comparison of school to a job is flawed, I think. An employer pays
you to do work for them. Of course you owe it to them to show up, and
of course they can and should fire you if you don't do your job.
However, one does not send a child to school for the school's sake,
and one is not beholden to a school the way one is to a paying
employer. It could be argued that a child's "job" in school is to
learn, and if she is learning just as much or more out of school,
then. . . That said, I did already tell the OP that, basically, I
didn't think it was fair to the teacher to take her child out of
school at random. Though her child may well benefit from "voluntary
absences," if they are frequent and done without the teacher's prior
approval, they are probably a big PITA for the teacher, and she
doesn't need another one of those, I'm sure. The OP should investigate
official part-time homeschooling.

She will have to see what the workplace
rules are and work around that. If she doesn't like the workplace rules,
she can find another job, like you can homeschool. But you shouldn't have
her go to school and ignore the rules.

  #97  
Old October 28th 03, 12:07 PM
Chookie
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Default Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?

In article ,
"Sue" wrote:

I don't have a very high opinion of the brighter kids. It's not that I don't
think they are or that they deserve a different teaching method and I
understand that they do exist, but at our school they are segregated into
one part of the school, they don't socialize with the other kids, they don't
participate in any of the school functions and they are made to feel that
they are superior.


It may not be all one way, you realise. I was in such a class for the last
two years of primary school and my softball team was in the final. Though I
(like everyone else) socialised mainly inside my class, I had no idea that we
were resented by the other children until we were booed. And we certainly
didn't, in general, believe we were superior beings!

Even the name of the program is insulting to the other
kids. It is called the Talented and Gifted program. Well imo, every child
that attends that school is talented and gifted in some way.


No, those terms actually have technical meanings. "Talent" generally refers
to a particular thing that a child is good at while they are pretty average
for everything else (think of a talent for music or gymnastics). "Gifted"
children are highly intelligent, and there is a hierarchy of adjectives to go
with it, such as "moderately" or "profoundly", which describe their IQ range.

--
Chookie -- Sydney, Australia
(Replace "foulspambegone" with "optushome" to reply)

"Jeez; if only those Ancient Greek storytellers had known about the astonishing
creature that is the *Usenet hydra*: you cut off one head, and *a stupider one*
grows back..." -- MJ, cam.misc
  #98  
Old October 28th 03, 12:30 PM
Chookie
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Default Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?

In article ,
"Vicki" wrote:

We have discussed getting
appropriate challenge in her classroom--the teacher has been helpful, but
there is only so much she can do. We chose not to skip dd to the next grade
as she is already the youngest in her class.


I've just been reading a book about exceptionally gifted children by Miraca
Gross. She comes down heavily in favour of acceleration for the profoundly
gifted, on the grounds that children (and adults) tend to befriend their
*intellectual* peers rather than their age-peers. Her research/literature
survey indicated that profoundly gifted children are usually socially and
morally advanced as well as being academically advanced, and fit in well with
*and are accepted by* older classmates, once they are officially members of
that class. My only hesitation is that this book was written in 1989 and more
research may have changed the picture a bit.

However, I agree firmly with her that a child that is left in a class where
everything comes very easily will not learn to apply herself, may become
naughty through boredom, may underachieve through a desire to fit in, may be
socially isolated because she is developmentally and intellectually so far
ahead of the rest, or may just retreat into misery. Your DD may not be in the
"profoundly gifted" category, but the same thing is true -- just to a lesser
extent -- for gifted children in other categories.

I think you should reconsider acceleration.

--
Chookie -- Sydney, Australia
(Replace "foulspambegone" with "optushome" to reply)

"Jeez; if only those Ancient Greek storytellers had known about the astonishing
creature that is the *Usenet hydra*: you cut off one head, and *a stupider one*
grows back..." -- MJ, cam.misc
  #99  
Old October 28th 03, 02:58 PM
Rosalie B.
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Default Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?

x-no-archive:yes
"Jenrose" wrote:

"Ericka Kammerer" wrote in message
...
Jenrose wrote:

snip

I agree...but I've also been in situations myself where the teacher and the
school were not interested in making ANY adaptations, so I skated through,
bored. Mom agitated, but they mainstreamed the gifted kids to the "CP"
program from the "advanced placement" for 11th grade...and it was terrible.
They said they did it to "bring up" the level of the CP class...yet we were
getting cutsy certificates with stickers on them for acing brainless quizzes
about poor movie adaptations of literature.

I agree that anything that puts a kid up as "separate" is lousy--but when a
kid is very bright and clearly bored by the curriculum, they're both
isolated AND bored silly--might as well cure the boredom if you can't fix
the isolation.

snip

Banty and Ericka have said they were in gifted programs

I was not (I'm a member of Mensa BTW). We did have 'tracked'
elementary grades where I went to school but no G&T - that was way
after my time. We didn't even have AP classes in HS.

I do not remember being bored in school, or being isolated or any of
the other things that have been posited as problems for a bright
child. I dealt with boredom by daydreaming. I didn't even get into
trouble for that very often.

So my point is - a bright child CAN and probably IMHO SHOULD be able
to deal with boredom. Everyone gets bored sometimes - even kids in
the GT programs. It is not the end of the world. Usually the child
will have some outside interest that they spend time doing - I knew a
boy who was a ham in 9th grade for instance.

My parents did do enrichment things - we traveled, we took music
lessons, she took us to the library weekly, we did things as a family,
we were in scouts, etc. But as dedicated as my mom was to seeing that
we had everything we needed, she did not go toe-to-toe with the school
administration on my behalf except twice - once was in kindergarten
when they were refusing to use a double name (like Mary Jane), and
once was when I was put into a group in 9th grade which was
non-college prep. (It was done alphabetically and she found that
there was a girl in my homeroom who was engaged.)

If a child hates school, it almost always IME is because of something
other than the curriculum being too easy. It's because of the
teacher's attitude or bullying or some other aspect of school.


grandma Rosalie
  #100  
Old October 28th 03, 03:47 PM
Banty
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Default Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?

In article , Rosalie B. says...

x-no-archive:yes
"Jenrose" wrote:

"Ericka Kammerer" wrote in message
...
Jenrose wrote:

snip

I agree...but I've also been in situations myself where the teacher and the
school were not interested in making ANY adaptations, so I skated through,
bored. Mom agitated, but they mainstreamed the gifted kids to the "CP"
program from the "advanced placement" for 11th grade...and it was terrible.
They said they did it to "bring up" the level of the CP class...yet we were
getting cutsy certificates with stickers on them for acing brainless quizzes
about poor movie adaptations of literature.

I agree that anything that puts a kid up as "separate" is lousy--but when a
kid is very bright and clearly bored by the curriculum, they're both
isolated AND bored silly--might as well cure the boredom if you can't fix
the isolation.

snip

Banty and Ericka have said they were in gifted programs


Not really - only in 7th grade, where I was put on an accelerated track in one
school. That was in 1967 - a lot of this kind of program was just starting.

Other than that, my acceleration was by having been started early. I didn't
turn five in kindergarten until March.


I was not (I'm a member of Mensa BTW). We did have 'tracked'
elementary grades where I went to school but no G&T - that was way
after my time. We didn't even have AP classes in HS.

I do not remember being bored in school, or being isolated or any of
the other things that have been posited as problems for a bright
child. I dealt with boredom by daydreaming. I didn't even get into
trouble for that very often.

So my point is - a bright child CAN and probably IMHO SHOULD be able
to deal with boredom. Everyone gets bored sometimes - even kids in
the GT programs. It is not the end of the world. Usually the child
will have some outside interest that they spend time doing - I knew a
boy who was a ham in 9th grade for instance.


It's been sort of a siren song in recent years that 'gifted and talented' kids
will all be driven to bad behavior and worse by boredom. The U.N. Commision on
Human Rights hasn't exactly found the need to be entertained to be primary, and
Norman Rockwell didn't paint a fifth for his famous set with a title "Freedom
from Boredom". In some of this GT talk from parents I do find an attitude that
their child should not have to deal with boredom. It's very valuable to learn
to deal with boredom! Maybe even life-saving, as some of the folks in traffic
jams who act like there's a fire under their ass have demonstrated.

OK, enough with the hyperbole :-)


Nothing against having some kind of accelerated learning for bright students,
which I think is goodness, but it needs to be done in an intelligent and
balanced way. Rosalie has an impoartant point.
In myy daaay :utting on my bifocals and peering through them :-) ::
skipping grades was pretty much the only way to accelerate. That had been done
in my case, but I was still way over my peers academically. So the difference
was made up by, yes, my learning to deal with boredom, but also by supplementing
knowledge *on my own*, like poring over encyclopedias. Some teachers, with just
one student in their class who's catching on to advanced stuff would lose
themselves in it for awhile, leaving the average kids to deal with boredom for
awhile! (And discipline those days was much more strict - boredom was not an
excuse, so it wasn't a class control problem.) Like when my sixth grade English
teacher would get totally into diagramming of complex sentences, and I would eat
it up.



My parents did do enrichment things - we traveled, we took music
lessons, she took us to the library weekly, we did things as a family,
we were in scouts, etc. But as dedicated as my mom was to seeing that
we had everything we needed, she did not go toe-to-toe with the school
administration on my behalf except twice - once was in kindergarten
when they were refusing to use a double name (like Mary Jane),


Wow - I was given a middle name that would go with my first so that in Texas my
double name would fit in..

and
once was when I was put into a group in 9th grade which was
non-college prep. (It was done alphabetically and she found that
there was a girl in my homeroom who was engaged.)

If a child hates school, it almost always IME is because of something
other than the curriculum being too easy. It's because of the
teacher's attitude or bullying or some other aspect of school.


Well, common bullying of very bright kids *is* a reason to give them peers who
are bright like them, or otherwise their intellectual peers. But there's the
angle also that there shouldn't be *any* bullying and schools are now finally
dealing with that.

I do think there need to be some accelerated programs for bright kids. But on
the other hand I don't sign on to this idea that it's necessarily utter disaster
if there isn't. So - what, every farmer in a small rural district should up and
sell the farm and move to get his kid into a GT program?

There is a *lot* that parents, and especially the child herself or himself, can
do outside school to develop themselves and supplement their own learning.
Hobbies, clubs, scouts, outside reading, travel.

And, BTW, there's 180 days of school a year, covering only about 2/3 of a work
day for each day. There's *plenty* of time for that outside school. IMO by far
most of the reasons parents take their kids out of school for 'enrichment' it's
really a matter of parental convenience such as cheaper travel, etc. I can
fully understand why schools are cracking down on some of this.

Banty

Banty

 




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