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

"Vicki" wrote in message
...
"Jenrose" wrote in message
s.com...
snip
Thank you so much for your posts. Your school situation sounds ideal.
You
are hitting on exactly the issues we have. It is not that we want more
homework for our child, or want her pulled from her classroom, or pulled
out
of social time for more academics... we want her to learn how to meet
challenges, how to learn, how to be persistent when she DOESN'T know the
answer. She's not learning this at school, b/c she usually knows the
answer. The worksheets she brings home are fodder for our pre-schooler,
not a challenge for our 2nd grader... What state are you in?
Vicki

Oregon

Jenrose

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


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?


Of course not. I see it both ways. Yes, *any* child should
be able to cope with some boredom and learn to develop some initiative
to find something constructive to do. I am totally unswayed by the
boredom argument.

Our rule is "If you're bored and you tell me, it means you want a job to
do."

However, I also believe that children ought to
receive a reasonably appropriate education, and children who are
way out there on the bell curve really aren't being served without
some accommodation. With a little flexibility and willpower,
most gifted kids *can* be accommodated, at least to some degree,
in a normal classroom. I was in a "normal" classroom for all
of elementary school (several different schools) and most of
my teachers were willing to make all sorts of arrangements to
keep me learning in a reasonable way. Sure, I was occasionally
bored, but I don't see that as a downside. However, in most
cases I *was* able to do more than just slog along with
material I'd mastered years before.

This is my pet peeve, and can be summarized by a rant I had with some old
school friends a couple years ago. I said to my friend who is now an English
teacher, "Do you realize that someone taught the class I was in the
difference between nouns and verbs every single year from the time I was in
second grade until I hit 12th grade lit class?"

Another friend who was listening (whose mother *was* an English teacher...)
said, "But I still don't know the difference..."

I knew the difference in 2nd grade, the first time they taught it. She never
did learn. And there is the problem in a nutshell. WHY should a kid who
already has learned something several times over, sit through it one more
time because many kids will *never* get it? Why do schools keep teaching the
same thing in the same way year after year, constantly reviewing, rather
than looking for another method which might work better? An operational
definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over again while
expecting different results.

I was ready for more challenging work. It took until 7th grade to really get
it--I felt like I spun my wheels from 4th through 6th grades because there
was so darn much repetition. Three wasted years. I would have loved to go
into advanced math really young... algebra was fun for me and I adored
calculus--but could not get the school to let me go ahead. It takes me about
1/4 the repetition it takes most people to "get" a math concept--I finally
quit doing homework until the night before a test because it drove me nuts
going over the same things day after day. So I read science fiction books in
class, crammed for the test, and aced it, then promptly forgot what I
learned. I "played the system" and ended up with great grades and *no*
academic discipline.


What I see today, though, is that while there are
still some teachers/administrations willing to be flexible
and make these accommodations, much of the flexibility has
disappeared. I'm not sure why that is. Some is due to
these accountability and standardization programs. Some
may well be due to other factors. And, of course, I'm
sure there are many people who *do* find acceptable
accommodations and are reasonably happy with the results.
I do seem to hear from more people now, however, that
they've tried to find reasonable accommodations and
haven't been successful.


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.


Absolutely, and I've always been a big proponent of that.
Still, that doesn't totally excuse allowing school to be a
waste of time when there are usually simple and not-too-intrusive
things to do to alleviate at least *part* of that problem.


Exactly. One thing a wise teacher allowed me to do was to pretest out of
given units. She'd hand me something else to do if I aced the pretest--and I
usually did.


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.


I also agree with that. I don't really get the notion
that every child must be catered to as an individual in every
single way.

I agree with this too. Because the majority of my daughter's education is
interesting and challenging for her, I tell her to suck it up and take it as
a speed challenge when someone gives her an assignment that is ludicrously
easy. Orchestra for example... they handed out a basic music theory
worksheet on note values. She's been playing for 4 years and sightreads
better than most adults. She's got incredible pitch and an innate sense of
rhythm and she's a natural at math and she *knows* this stuff. She griped
about it being too easy, and so I said, "See how fast you can finish it."
She was done within 5 minutes. And then we let the orchestra leader know
that he can feel free to toss extra challenges her way.

If that's your definition of an acceptable
education, homeschool or hire a tutor. (I realize that in
some cases, that really *is* the only way to get any sort
of acceptable education, but that doesn't apply to the
majority of kids.) If you are part of a class, I think
it's reasonable for students and parents to be thoughtful
about the effects of their requests/actions on the teacher
and other students in the class. Some things are just too
intrusive to be reasonable, IMO. Other things, however, are
quite reasonable, and should be implemented wherever necessary
to provide the best education possible.

For me, seeing how incredibly well the teachers manage to bring together a
wide range of skill levels at my daughter's school, it really seems like a
shift to a different model might really help a lot of these classroom
situations. Shouldn't all the kids be getting a richer education?

Jenrose

In article ,
(chiam margalit) wrote:

As the parent of a PG child, one who is radically accelerated and
having the time of his life socially, I'd have to agree with Gross
that socially acceleration is a G-dsend. *However*, we're having a
*terrible* school year this year, and I'm really at my wits end, as is
the school, with my PG child. I'm not going to go into details, but
having a child who is 2-3 years younger than his classmates who are
all going through puberty at a rapid clip, whereas my kid is not, has
really been difficult for all concerned.

This actually sounds really interesting and I would like to hear the details
-- partly because PG children are so rare and partly because I don't watch TV
soaps ;-) Perhaps you could vent about it in another thread? Even offlist?

In the process, you might answer another question I have had at the back of my
mind. One tends to hear of very bright primary-age children being good at
mathematics/sciences rather than literature, and I wondered if that was
because some aspects of literature are closed to prepubescents? One cannot
imagine children making much of (say) 'The Flea' or 'To his Coy Mistress',
even if they understand the words and even the concepts. Or am I completely
wrong?

--
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

"Jenrose" wrote in message
s.com...

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



Um, she *is* in a public school.


Then I would prepare to see the school's flexibility
whittled away, little by little. (Sorry to be cynical, but
I'm afraid I'm not all that optimistic on this front.) I
think our public school system is quite good and I am happy
with the education my children are getting there, but I
keep seeing more and more flexibility taken away by both
state and national initiatives.


Actually, the school itself is getting whittled away. We lost a teacher
this
year due to funding cuts, so we're running 5 grades with 4 teachers plus
an
assistant for math hired by the PTA directly through draconian
fundraising.
That is, they lined parents up at the plasma center and had them donate
plasma to raise money for the schools. Voluntarily of course, but I'm not
kidding when I say that parents actually pay for this school in blood...

That means you have a very small school. My campus has more teachers in a
single grade than your entire school has.


But a nearby charter school is doing okay, with a similar concept and
fewer
"hurdles" to jump... a lot of kids who would have been at our school go
there now because the parents are tired of the funding crisis. Why is ours
in funding crisis and theirs not? Hard to say, but the different
requirements for charter vs. regular schools might be one factor.
Or, it may be sheltered for the first few years. Charter schools get
additional start-up funding from a lot of sources when they first open, but
after a few years, this tends to trickle away.


snip
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.


Absolutely. This is a very common attitude and getting
more and more common.

Makes me crazy and it won't happen to my kids, period.


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.


I agree with you 100 percent. I just think that public
schools like this are going to get more and more rare in the
current legislative environment.


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


This is a red herring in most cases. The big player
in funding for public schools is often how many "special"
cases the school has to deal with (e.g., language barriers,
severe learning disabilities, etc.). Schools that don't
have to deal with these issues effectively have much more
money to spend on the population at large.

There is a special needs program and ESL program in the building, not
affiliated with our school, but affiliated with the building as a whole.
And
special needs programs do get extra funding, though never enough.

So, IOW, your special program doesn't have to deal with these issues. How
nice for you. How does the building as a whole fare, compared to your little
special program?

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.


Except that the brightest kids drive up the test scores,
and with test scores becoming so all-fired important, lowered
test scores have very real impacts on all the students in a
school. There's also a secondary effect--the brightest kids
generally bring more affluent and more involved *parents* to
the table, which translates into more money for the school
(through the PTA) and all sorts of other advantages.


We've got some very well off families at the school, but our area is
INCREDIBLY depressed right now, economically (Oregon is still in a
recession, whatever's going on elsewhere) and the labor market is only
just
now starting to ease a little. We're talking a lot of previously well-paid
people out of work. That's part of our "flight" problem...people are
leaving
for Portland to get work, which is ironic, actually. We have a lot of low
income families in the school. But yes, our parents are more involved. But
local schools CAN get that kind of involvement if they structure things in
such a way as to encourage it.

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?

If your parents are lining up and donating blood to pay for the program, it
is NOT recieving the same funding support. Period. It is unlikely you'd get
this in my school. Too many of the parents are already donating plasma to
feed their children (or have histories which would make them poor candidates
for blood donation).


Absolutely. Programs that are working well should
be looked at and their ideas co-opted wherever possible.
However, I would be cautious about the money issue. If
your school is really serving the full gamut of abilities
on the same dollar, that's wonderful. Odds are, however,
that it's not, nor is it likely coping with as high a
percentage of the more difficult to educate children
(extreme poverty, etc.). That's not to say that other
schools shouldn't be taking a page from your school's book.
From many of the things you've said, it sounds like there
are a bunch of very valuable things that likely *would*
help with no downside whatsoever. I'm just suggesting that
sometimes the problem is a little more complicated than
it first appears--and all these relatively recent
legislative attempts towards accountability through
testing and other "objective" standards are complicating
the situation significantly. (I'm not against
accountability per se, but I have a lot of heartburn
with the way it's often implemented.)

Yep. We are faced with the twit-head accounting too... our school is
listed
on the "bad" list for *one* issue--that our well-educated and involved
parents tend to be very political and flat out refuse to allow their kids
to
do the testing. So we get less than 90% testing compliance and therefore
dinged. It's kind of refreshing, actually. That is NOT part of our
attrition
problem. The economy and budget cuts are.

Which means, in three years, you'll be facing takeover. Just the same as if
you'd failed every standard. I'd suggest you make it clear to the parents
that they will lose this great program if the students are not tested.


Jenrose

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 09:54:41 GMT, "Jenrose"
wrote:

But a nearby charter school is doing okay, with a similar concept and fewer
"hurdles" to jump... a lot of kids who would have been at our school go
there now because the parents are tired of the funding crisis. Why is ours
in funding crisis and theirs not? Hard to say, but the different
requirements for charter vs. regular schools might be one factor.

The fact that the charter schools pay their teachers less is a factor.

But even so, we recently heard stories of teachers leaving in the
middle of the year and charter schools closing because they are
not making a profit.


--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 01:09:58 -0600, "Vicki"
wrote:

My parents took us out of school for two weeks every winter, right after
xmas holidays. We'd drive down to Mexico and stay 4 weeks. This was our
family vacation and our xmas present. We missed hearing about what everyone
got for xmas, we reconnected with family, got away from the pressure of
teenage groups--helped us keep balanced. And my father got sun, which
reduced his seasonal depression (even tho we didn't know what that was
then,) and this made our winter with him bearable. I think it's hard to
judge accurately what is best for another family. Under the laws now, I
think we'd all have been truants and my parents would have been served
notice. Yee haw. Long live the totalitarian state.

Unfortunately, we had families like this in the high school I taught.

Guess how many did not get the math homework in algebra and geometry
because they missed so much? I'm afraid that I don't believe that
*most* students can afford to miss so much of these classes at least
once they hit middle and high school.




--
Dorothy

There is no sound, no cry in all the world
that can be heard unless someone listens ..

The Outer Limits

In article , toto says...

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 01:09:58 -0600, "Vicki"
wrote:

My parents took us out of school for two weeks every winter, right after
xmas holidays. We'd drive down to Mexico and stay 4 weeks. This was our
family vacation and our xmas present. We missed hearing about what everyone
got for xmas, we reconnected with family, got away from the pressure of
teenage groups--helped us keep balanced. And my father got sun, which
reduced his seasonal depression (even tho we didn't know what that was
then,) and this made our winter with him bearable. I think it's hard to
judge accurately what is best for another family. Under the laws now, I
think we'd all have been truants and my parents would have been served
notice. Yee haw. Long live the totalitarian state.

Unfortunately, we had families like this in the high school I taught.

Guess how many did not get the math homework in algebra and geometry
because they missed so much? I'm afraid that I don't believe that
*most* students can afford to miss so much of these classes at least
once they hit middle and high school.

And what other needs are not being tended to because the teachers are trying to
catch the kids up. Or arranging those all important take-with assignments and
grading separately said take-with assignments, that parents who pull kids out of
school are so proud of themselves for arranging?

Banty

Jenrose wrote:

our school is
listed on the "bad" list for *one* issue--that our well-educated and
involved parents tend to be very political and flat out refuse to
allow their kids to do the testing. So we get less than 90% testing
compliance and therefore dinged. It's kind of refreshing, actually.

I've been following the thread but don't have school age kids so I've just
been taking it all in. I'm curious though...how do you guys plan on
handling this long term? My understanding is that if you go x amount of
time without showing improvement then someone comes in and takes over. It
sounds like you have a nice program and I'd want to protect it by not having
anyone force their way in to mess things up.
--
Nikki
Mama to Hunter (4) and Luke (2)

"Banty" wrote in message
...
In article , toto says...

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 01:09:58 -0600, "Vicki"
wrote:

My parents took us out of school for two weeks every winter, right after
xmas holidays. We'd drive down to Mexico and stay 4 weeks. This was
our
family vacation and our xmas present. We missed hearing about what
everyone
got for xmas, we reconnected with family, got away from the pressure of
teenage groups--helped us keep balanced. And my father got sun, which
reduced his seasonal depression (even tho we didn't know what that was
then,) and this made our winter with him bearable. I think it's hard to
judge accurately what is best for another family. Under the laws now, I
think we'd all have been truants and my parents would have been served
notice. Yee haw. Long live the totalitarian state.

Unfortunately, we had families like this in the high school I taught.

Guess how many did not get the math homework in algebra and geometry
because they missed so much? I'm afraid that I don't believe that
*most* students can afford to miss so much of these classes at least
once they hit middle and high school.

And what other needs are not being tended to because the teachers are
trying to
catch the kids up. Or arranging those all important take-with assignments
and
grading separately said take-with assignments, that parents who pull kids
out of
school are so proud of themselves for arranging?


If your parents want to have you with them for 4 weeks every winter-fine.
This is what homeschooling is for. However, I don't think it's fair to ask
the teachers to come up with two weeks of individualized assignments for a
given student (when a child is on homebound, the homebound teacher takes
over most of the planning, only occasionally consulting with the classroom
teacher), the grading, and trying to get the child caught up, or for the
teacher to be assessed and blamed based on the child's performance on tests,
when the parent has chosen to pull the child out of school for several weeks
at a time. Two weeks is 1/3 of a grading period, 1/18th of a school year.
Coupled with other absenses (and every family I've known who does big yearly
vacations also thinks nothing of a few days before Thanksgiving, a few extra
days on each 3 day weekend, lengthening Spring break, and the regular
illness absenses), the child can end up missing a LOT of school.

If you want that much flexibility, homeschool. Or find a private school
which caters to parents. Don't ask a public school to do the work of
homeschooling for you so you can take your child anywhere you want to take
them.


Banty

In article , Donna Metler says...



If you want that much flexibility, homeschool. Or find a private school
which caters to parents. Don't ask a public school to do the work of
homeschooling for you so you can take your child anywhere you want to take
them.


Hear-tell private schools get a lot less of that.

Once a parent has paid dearly for the specific setting and paid the teacher for
his or her curriculum and teaching work out of pocket, the whole
vacation/family/play vs. mean-ol'-inflexible-school outlook changes
considerably!

Amazing what use can be made of summer and spring and holiday and other breaks.
Say - Thanksgiving break is coming right up in a scant few weeks! What a
wonderful time to visit a family member who may not be with the world much
longer.

Banty