Curriculum Night
Oct. 6th, 2004 12:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsSo, I took off from work a little early to drive over to Yamaarashi-chan's daycare, pick her up and allow her at least an hour with her sister. That was all the spare time we had as later that evening her school was hosting curriculum night, where the parents get to meet the teachers and discuss with them the curriculum and expected outcome for the rest of the year.
Yamaarashi-chan and I stopped for dinner at a local high-end delicatessen I know, Husky Dely, one of Omaha's and my favorite places for food and ice cream and curious groceries one can't get anywhere else, at least not easily. A Ben & Jerry's opened nearby; I hope it doesn't hurt Husky's business too much. We ate sandwiches and talked about why I would go there rather than the McDonald's across the street. We also discussed her homework situation for the next year.
I came away from the meeting with her teacher feeling very impressed and honestly hopeful for her progress. The teacher really seemed to have her act together, was very cheerful and energetic, and the expected syllabus was sufficiently comprehensive for a second grader. She's sharing the class with third-graders, and my only concern is that she's so smart and fast that by the time she's halfway through third grade she may have run out of things for the system to teach her, become board the way all bright kids do, and start to fail out. I know lots of us went through that period.
They have multiple literacy tracks, and are concentrating on letterforms for writing; they don't have too much computer stuff, which I think is good as long as we need to be able to communicate with pen and paper. Her teacher said that subtitled foreign cartoons were a clever way to get her to read, but probably didn't count towards her daily reading homework. There's not a strong arts track, but there are art requirements, mostly receptive.
The math track looked pretty good. My one concern is this whole "whole numbers" concept, where instead of teaching the kid one algorithm for doing a process, say, addition, they let the kid "figure out on her own" how to do it. I can grok what she's saying; I have multiple strategies for doing basic arithmetic, but I don't know that I would have had the confidence to use any of them if I hadn't had one pre-determined way of checking my results.
I also ran into my old manager from my CompuServe days. It turns out that his kids go to Yamaarashi-chan's school as well. He seemed to be doing pretty well. A little grayer than I was, even though he's younger.
The one curious sense I got the whole time I was there was this notion that the school and its teachers have a surprising degree of independence, but at the same time they're hemmed in one side by state regulators and federal curricula requirements, and on the other by apathetic parents who can turn enraged without warning if the school teaches anything the parent doesn't like. It can't be a comfortable place for them, and it does become least-common-denominator driven. I understand a bit better now why public schools are the way they are.
Yamaarashi-chan and I stopped for dinner at a local high-end delicatessen I know, Husky Dely, one of Omaha's and my favorite places for food and ice cream and curious groceries one can't get anywhere else, at least not easily. A Ben & Jerry's opened nearby; I hope it doesn't hurt Husky's business too much. We ate sandwiches and talked about why I would go there rather than the McDonald's across the street. We also discussed her homework situation for the next year.
I came away from the meeting with her teacher feeling very impressed and honestly hopeful for her progress. The teacher really seemed to have her act together, was very cheerful and energetic, and the expected syllabus was sufficiently comprehensive for a second grader. She's sharing the class with third-graders, and my only concern is that she's so smart and fast that by the time she's halfway through third grade she may have run out of things for the system to teach her, become board the way all bright kids do, and start to fail out. I know lots of us went through that period.
They have multiple literacy tracks, and are concentrating on letterforms for writing; they don't have too much computer stuff, which I think is good as long as we need to be able to communicate with pen and paper. Her teacher said that subtitled foreign cartoons were a clever way to get her to read, but probably didn't count towards her daily reading homework. There's not a strong arts track, but there are art requirements, mostly receptive.
The math track looked pretty good. My one concern is this whole "whole numbers" concept, where instead of teaching the kid one algorithm for doing a process, say, addition, they let the kid "figure out on her own" how to do it. I can grok what she's saying; I have multiple strategies for doing basic arithmetic, but I don't know that I would have had the confidence to use any of them if I hadn't had one pre-determined way of checking my results.
I also ran into my old manager from my CompuServe days. It turns out that his kids go to Yamaarashi-chan's school as well. He seemed to be doing pretty well. A little grayer than I was, even though he's younger.
The one curious sense I got the whole time I was there was this notion that the school and its teachers have a surprising degree of independence, but at the same time they're hemmed in one side by state regulators and federal curricula requirements, and on the other by apathetic parents who can turn enraged without warning if the school teaches anything the parent doesn't like. It can't be a comfortable place for them, and it does become least-common-denominator driven. I understand a bit better now why public schools are the way they are.
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CompuServe
Date: 2004-10-06 03:32 pm (UTC)~Erin
Re: CompuServe
Date: 2004-10-06 05:02 pm (UTC)CompuServe was actually very resistent to the Internet, and that's one of the reasons that they got bought by AOL. They bought Spry because they wanted "Internet experienced people," and then they ignored everything we told them.
Re: CompuServe
Date: 2004-10-06 05:41 pm (UTC)Thanks for replying to a stranger’s curiosity. I apologize for the awful grammar and spelling of the original post. I had just woken up and had been so surprised to see you mention CompuServe that I had dashed off a message before I had properly awakened and had been properly caffeinated.
~Erin
[Who now returns to lurking mode]
School system
Date: 2004-10-07 05:19 am (UTC)Did I mention that she's in the local "magnet school" for children with psych problems? And she's the only teacher at her grade level (4th) that can ride herd over these kids, so she gets _all_ of them?
Nevertheless, one year she wound up doing some curriculum design, and applying for (and getting) a small grant from the state.
This year, 3/4 of her class has psych problems, she's got a new curriculum director, a new shrink, and an auxiliary shrink whose job it is to trail 3 kids and make sure they don't wind up killing someone. And all of these pple (plus her assistant) hang around a room with 25 kids.
-Malthus