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#151
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Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?
On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 08:16:47 -0800, "Circe" wrote:
My neighbor, who is a kindergarten teacher herself, just took her first grader out of school for a little over a week on an independent study contract. I have a hard time believing she would do this to another teacher if she thought it would create a huge burden for that teacher. I would suggest that the early grades are easier to do this in than the later grades. If a child is reading well in first grade and is up to speed on math skills some time off might not cause a problem. But it sets a precedent. And I have found that most kids cannot take so much time off once they are past the elementary level and still manage to understand the work, particularly in mathematics. -- Dorothy There is no sound, no cry in all the world that can be heard unless someone listens .. The Outer Limits |
#152
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Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?
On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 17:24:25 GMT, dragonlady
wrote: I wish we had a better way to accomodate everyone's needs, both cultural and religious. In elementary school, if a child is doing well I think they ought to be able to be more flexible. By high school, I don't see how a child CAN miss two extra weeks without it having an effect on thier schooling. But even if the schools WANT to be more flexible, current political climate is making it more and more difficult. I wish that this worked, but I also see an advantage to attempting to help those who immigrate to accept that this is a new country with a new culture and that some things must be adapted to and not fought over. I did have one high school student who went to Mexico for a period of four weeks in honors geometry who returned with every assignment finished (with help from her uncles in Mexico), but she was an exception to the rule. She ended up being valedictorian of her high school class too. -- Dorothy There is no sound, no cry in all the world that can be heard unless someone listens .. The Outer Limits |
#153
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Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?
"toto" wrote in message ... On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 08:16:47 -0800, "Circe" wrote: My neighbor, who is a kindergarten teacher herself, just took her first grader out of school for a little over a week on an independent study contract. I have a hard time believing she would do this to another teacher if she thought it would create a huge burden for that teacher. I would suggest that the early grades are easier to do this in than the later grades. If a child is reading well in first grade and is up to speed on math skills some time off might not cause a problem. But it sets a precedent. And I have found that most kids cannot take so much time off once they are past the elementary level and still manage to understand the work, particularly in mathematics. In addition, starting in grade 3, standardized test scores count against the school. Depending on the state, it could be every year, or just specific ones. The real crisis years here are 3rd, 5th, and 8th, although students are tested in grades 1-8, with exit tests in high school subjects. -- Dorothy There is no sound, no cry in all the world that can be heard unless someone listens .. The Outer Limits |
#154
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Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?
In article , Barbara Bomberger
says... On 29 Oct 2003 07:45:10 -0800, Banty wrote: 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 Im a little ambivilant about this. We use a department of defense school. They dont allow unexcused absences. They do however, consider the opportunity to travel the continent in which we live (Europe) a valuable education in and of itself. Therefore, we can take children out with prearrangement, and I have done so. Yes, one can travel in the summer and school facations, but that doesnt always work with our parent schedules, or with the crowds. So I would say I have taken my son out about two weeks in the past year. It has been well worth it. We do the planned assignments in advance, and it has never been a probleem. Having been in schools with only military kids myself (but stateside), I'd wager that the privelege of pulling kids out for truely imporant reasons hasn't been abused as much. I don't' take the position that it's *never* appropriate to take kids out of school. When I was a kid :utting on my bifocals:: , I remember kids getting off for an opporunity to see a Saturn V launch, or for truly once-in-a-lifetime travel. There has to be some flexibility anyway since lots of kids are always transerring in and out. (One thing, though, families would fit travel around the transfers often, taking some time off before having to depart or after having to arrive.) I dno't recall hardly any of this "hey here's a package for Disney the week before Thanksgiving let's go" stuff. Or "we have a time-share in Vail for the last week of January we're gonna do this every year". Yeah yeah I know I'll get the 'but how can *you* say the skiing isn't as important as a SaturnV launch!". But hey, this is what you get if willingness to be flexible is strained by demands of too many folks having no concept of what is appropriate and what it not. So *everyone* gets cracked down on. Banty |
#155
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Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?
In article , dragonlady
says... In article , Penny Gaines wrote: Banty wrote in : 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. Doesn't that depend on whether you think the relative will still be around for Thanksgiving? If they are really ill, maybe that four weeks is too long to wait. I would add that the four days we got off for Thanksgiving might not be enough time. At least for me, getting TO my relatives takes a full day and costs a lot of money; spending the $$ to spend only two days there is problematic. However, by adding 3 days out of school and work, one could travel on a Saturday, stay for a full week, and travel back on a Sunday. Oh - well, yanno what? Need more travel time?? Just sooo happens that the VERY NEXT MONTH, right after the 5 day Thanksgiving break, there's whooooole long two-week - what do they call it now? - WINTER HOLIDAY break. Very handy for those longer trips, unless said relative truly is at death's door. Sorry to be snide, but there's ALWAYS going to be reasons like this that people give that they just haaaave to take the kids out now or this-or-that won't work out just as conveniently as can be. If it's important, you work around it. Maybe said relative really should have been visitied in August. Death's door ain't exactly the time to make those last connections anyway in just about all but immediate-family cases. But, hey, since some folks think they can take the kids out just ANY time, why bother to have planned that. When the reasoning gets weak, it's apparent that this is rationalizing that's going on. Some families will do whatever, whatever the consequences, and that's the problem. Banty |
#156
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Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?
In article ,
Banty wrote: In article , dragonlady says... In article , Penny Gaines wrote: Banty wrote in : Amazing what use can be made of summer and spring and holiday and other breaks. Say - Thanksgiving break is coming right up in a scant few weeks! What a wonderful time to visit a family member who may not be with the world much longer. Doesn't that depend on whether you think the relative will still be around for Thanksgiving? If they are really ill, maybe that four weeks is too long to wait. I would add that the four days we got off for Thanksgiving might not be enough time. At least for me, getting TO my relatives takes a full day and costs a lot of money; spending the $$ to spend only two days there is problematic. However, by adding 3 days out of school and work, one could travel on a Saturday, stay for a full week, and travel back on a Sunday. Oh - well, yanno what? Need more travel time?? Just sooo happens that the VERY NEXT MONTH, right after the 5 day Thanksgiving break, there's whooooole long two-week - what do they call it now? - WINTER HOLIDAY break. Very handy for those longer trips, unless said relative truly is at death's door. Sorry to be snide, but there's ALWAYS going to be reasons like this that people give that they just haaaave to take the kids out now or this-or-that won't work out just as conveniently as can be. If it's important, you work around it. Maybe said relative really should have been visitied in August. Death's door ain't exactly the time to make those last connections anyway in just about all but immediate-family cases. But, hey, since some folks think they can take the kids out just ANY time, why bother to have planned that. When the reasoning gets weak, it's apparent that this is rationalizing that's going on. Some families will do whatever, whatever the consequences, and that's the problem. Banty No need to get snotty to me; I was merely pointing out that the 4 days of Thanksgiving break is not always enough time to visit family when a family visit is necessary. Sometimes, family is a LONG way off. Since my kids started school, I have not been faced with a need to make a trip home to see a dying relative one last time. I have NOT gone home for my father's surgeries, though had they not gone well I might have. However, I have had friends in that position: when a call comes that says Mom or Dad are terminal, and only expected to live another three months at best, I, for one, would be hard pressed to criticise someone for taking their kids out of school for a few days to see them one last time. If they try to use a llong weekend (and that's all Thanksgiving break really is) to minimize the time away from school and still make the visit long enough to make sense I think that's probably a good idea. The winter break may well be pushing it too far off, plus that can be an extremely difficult (and more expensive) time to try to travel with kids. meh -- Children won't care how much you know until they know how much you care |
#157
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Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?
"Donna Metler" wrote in message
. .. "toto" wrote in message ... On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 08:16:47 -0800, "Circe" wrote: My neighbor, who is a kindergarten teacher herself, just took her first grader out of school for a little over a week on an independent study contract. I have a hard time believing she would do this to another teacher if she thought it would create a huge burden for that teacher. I would suggest that the early grades are easier to do this in than the later grades. If a child is reading well in first grade and is up to speed on math skills some time off might not cause a problem. I agree with that assessment. In addition, starting in grade 3, standardized test scores count against the school. Depending on the state, it could be every year, or just specific ones. The real crisis years here are 3rd, 5th, and 8th, although students are tested in grades 1-8, with exit tests in high school subjects. Well, unless I see some evidence that the new California tests are a vast improvement, both in content and scoring, over the old Stanford 9s, my kids won't be taking them, so no one need worry that their non-attendance will negatively affect test scores (not that I plan on taking them out, mind you). While I realize that the school is under a mandate to test 95% of its students, sitting the test is optional for any individual student. And by the time my kids are graduating high school, I'm pretty certain that the fallacies of NCLB will be wildly apparent to everyone because every single school in the US will be failing by its standards and much of this testing mania (including the exit exams) will have passed. But perhaps I'm too much the optimist... -- Be well, Barbara (Julian [6], Aurora [4], and Vernon's [19mo] mom) This week's special at the English Language Butcher Shop: "Use repeatedly for severe damage." -- Directions on shampoo bottle Daddy: You're up with the chickens this morning. Aurora: No, I'm up with my dolls! All opinions expressed in this post are well-reasoned and insightful. Needless to say, they are not those of my Internet Service Provider, its other subscribers or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itchin' for a fight. -- with apologies to Michael Feldman |
#158
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Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?
"Donna Metler" wrote in message .. . "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. Mmmm. We travelled this way from 7th grade thru graduation. We were all mostly A students. Missing the two weeks didn't seem to hurt any of us. It helped for Spanish class. After visiting Mexico we never felt sorry for ourselves that we were "poor" b/c we had seen what real poverty was. The experiences in Mexico were likely the impetus for one child doing Rotary Exchange in Bolivia senior year, another going to Guatemala in a summer program, and our families involvement having three foreign students live with us at different times. I did have one teacher who graded me down for not being in class, but I didn't care--I knew the materials as well as anyone else in the class, and if the teacher felt better giving me a B it didn't change what I had in my head. IME, teachers in high school & jr high rarely went beyond the textbook. It wasn't that hard to catch up. If you read the materials in advance you could pretty much tune out for most classes and not miss that much. I did have one English lit teacher who I hated to miss, b/c she was truly intelligent and took the class beyond the basics. And one economics teacher who was great. But b/c I loved these classes, I did well in them... still, hated to miss them. This idea that learning only takes place in the classroom is just crazy. My parents should have homeschooled us if they wanted to take us out for these family trips?! Ha! My mother graduated from high school, my dad got his GED. They worked multiple jobs. I wonder when they would have found time to homeschool us! Those poor teachers--we expected SO much from them. They didn't do anything extra--they told us what they'd be covering, i.e., chapters 5 thru 8. It was our responsibility to figure it out. I don't think one of us ever had a problem not hearing the golden words directly from the teachers' lips. What nonsense. Perhaps teachers today take themselves too seriously. Or parents & kids worry too much about a grade. "Give us complete control over your children. If you don't like it you can homeschool" Wow. It was not like this 20 years ago. |
#159
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Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?
"toto" wrote in message
... On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 08:16:47 -0800, "Circe" wrote: My neighbor, who is a kindergarten teacher herself, just took her first grader out of school for a little over a week on an independent study contract. I have a hard time believing she would do this to another teacher if she thought it would create a huge burden for that teacher. I would suggest that the early grades are easier to do this in than the later grades. If a child is reading well in first grade and is up to speed on math skills some time off might not cause a problem. But it sets a precedent. And I have found that most kids cannot take so much time off once they are past the elementary level and still manage to understand the work, particularly in mathematics. I found mathematics to be the easiest to understand without a teachers help. Picking up on symbolism in readings for English lit was much more difficult--maybe b/c there were fewer aids for this, and you couldn't check your work. |
#160
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Bright 2nd grader & school truancy / part-time home-school?
"Banty" wrote in message
... Oh - well, yanno what? Need more travel time?? Just sooo happens that the VERY NEXT MONTH, right after the 5 day Thanksgiving break, there's whooooole long two-week - what do they call it now? - WINTER HOLIDAY break. Very handy for those longer trips, unless said relative truly is at death's door. Sorry to be snide, but there's ALWAYS going to be reasons like this that people give that they just haaaave to take the kids out now or this-or-that won't work out just as conveniently as can be. Well, we wouldn't have gone to Italy last year at all had we not gone during a week when school was in session. THAT'S when the conference my husband wanted to attend was being held, so we either went then or not at all. And, I'll admit it, I thought a chance for my son to see another part of the world and learn a bit about its history was at least as likely to be educational as having him go to school and spend a big chunk of his time coloring (which he could do in the car anyway, right?). I certainly don't plan on taking my kids out of school for a week at every whim, but I also believe that the school doesn't OWN my children. I am increasingly troubled by the assumption that school is always so important that it trumps any OTHER important thing we might do. I am already struggling with this when it comes to homework--the school seems to think that dictating what my kid does with his time for 6 hours each day isn't enough, so they need to assign plenty of homework to dictate what he does with at least a good chunk of the remainder of his time. When the reasoning gets weak, it's apparent that this is rationalizing that's going on. Some families will do whatever, whatever the consequences, and that's the problem. And if there *is* no consequence? What if the kid still gets A's and scores well on all the standardized tests despite missing a few weeks of school here and there? I'm not saying most kids could do this, mind you. I'm just saying that if a parent has such a child, it is hard to make a rational claim that the choice to have the child out of school for a week is really a significant issue. -- Be well, Barbara (Julian [6], Aurora [4], and Vernon's [19mo] mom) This week's special at the English Language Butcher Shop: "Use repeatedly for severe damage." -- Directions on shampoo bottle Daddy: You're up with the chickens this morning. Aurora: No, I'm up with my dolls! All opinions expressed in this post are well-reasoned and insightful. Needless to say, they are not those of my Internet Service Provider, its other subscribers or lackeys. Anyone who says otherwise is itchin' for a fight. -- with apologies to Michael Feldman |
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