College Assignment (please respond to 2 questions)

As the american school system ranks lowest in the western world, i would have to say i don’t think they are meeting any student’s needs adequately as a general rule or we would rank way up there with Finland.

I myself was mainstreamed out as soon as i could read the most basic of texts. before that i was in a regular class for first grad spent second and third in special ed did more than 5 years of work in that 2 year period and went on to fifth grade in a special ed class that year i spent half the time in a regular class half the time in a special ed class. In 6th grade, my scores on standardized tests were sooooo high i was one of 50 kids offered a special excelorated program at Long Fellow school in Cambridge MA for gifted students. It had a much more academic focus. I was not interested, instead i opted to go to a private school to focus on the arts. In highschool, they started slamming me with all this resource bullox because to me school was horrendously unconstitutional and i just had other areas of interest. Which ofcourse, the school offered nothing on. So to get educated on the subject i cared about i was forced to embrace truancy on a frequent basis. I would spend whole days on occasion in the library not attending class reading very educational works on ancient societies. Today i am an archaeologist working towards another degree in egyptology i have worked in my field and am very happy i was not around in my senior year when for the 8th time that year alone we had to read that horrible book, The Catcher In The Rye. Which may i add we read ateast a half dozen times every year from 6th grade on. I still can not fathom the educational value of that, unless they wanted us all to grow up to be serial killers or something….. But that also makes no sense so i really just don’t get it.

1. Not really. In high school much of the instruction requires you to listen. My son is a visual/kinesthetic learner with ADHD (medication does help that some). A few of his teachers use visuals while they talk, but not all. It’s a public HS and they pretty much use generic teaching methods, so he attends tutorials for the small group/one-on-one time with the teacher to pick up whatever he didn’t catch in class.
2. He’s in reg. ed classes with ‘in class support’. In the lower grades he was in a resource room for math and reading, then moved to co-teach. In order to be ‘more prepared’ for the state assessment tests in HS he had to go to ICS.

Thanks for your input. I wish the schools would recognize just how important it is to provide hands-on learning rather than lectures.

I like lectures….Depending on the subject. What kills me is busy work and i have a deep hatred for homework. Kids need time to be kids too. I think in our zealous need to do the best thing for our kids we have over looked their kid needs way too much. For example, when i was in junior high, i had to read 50 books over 1 summer. I couldn’t pick the books. They were all assigned they all sucked. Then i had to write a 5 to 10 page paper on each one. That was entering 6th grade….
By highschool i had over 7 hours of homework every night and double that over the weekend. Seriously, theres this pesky lil thing called over kill… Schools need to recognize that. Kids need to run around and play. They need to interact socially and have life experiences outside of busy work and books as well. I am not saying chuck all reading and writing stuff…. But come on, i think an hour in any grade should be sufficient. In Finland, on average the kids in highschool get about a half hour of homework. Total. It isn’t stressed so much. They rank at the top of the most well educated children in the western world list we rank at the bottom. I find it interesting to note as well that a recent study found Finnish children in the top 5 most happy children in the western world, while once again american children ranked at the bottom. Dutch children ranked at the top. But what do you want from alot of self medicators…. just kidding…

When i was in highschool… I had to be at my desk at 7:45 am. ready to learn. In Finland studies have shown teenagers do better with more sleep i do believe school doesn’t start till like 9 am. In Finland they usually get an hour for lunch. We had when i went to school thousands of people 1 lunch period and 2 small caffeterias. We had 5 minutes between each class to get across a very large campus. Many had to cross that campus for lunch too. That lunch period in itself, was 5 minutes long. And then there was the 5 mins between it and our previous class and it and our next class. Not even 15 minutes to wait in a line of a thousand people and eat. Almost none of us got to eat. I just find it so interesting that in an effort to make us smart they starve us in every way you can imagine. I can’t eat in the morning. I throw up. Even in highschool, before about 8 am my system is still sleeping i can’t eat… So they set us up to fail rather than succeed then they get more agressive the more we fail. I think the system has it’s head screwed on backwards. Subsistance is critical to the development of the brain. If they want to educate our developing brain we should have a 2 hour lunch to make sure that developing brain is fed and fully functional. They should insist that we sleep enough to have functional brains. Instead i find these 2 practices actually abusive….

I am very pleased with our school system in NJ. My son was in the preschool disabled program for language delay and sensory and low muscle tone. He received speech and OT. He also had Selective Mutism and was not able to speak in school. The speech therapist had to go on the conference to learn how to work with my son. He started talking in school the end of kindergarten and beginning self contained special education first grade. He is in a special education self-contained third grade class. He has low langugage and low memory scores. He gets regular classes for gym, music, art and computers. He does well in math and he might have an opportunity to be in a regular math class. In addition, we are paying for vision therapy for convergence insufficiency.

My daughter entered the preschool disabled. She had low muscle tone and language delay. She is currently declassified and went to a regular kindergarten class.

Our school does the DIBELS twice a year on grades k-2 to determine any problems with reading or writing. There is a pre-first grade set up. Kids placed in pre-first are not progressing for whatever reason. Most of those kids continue onto special education classes. We also have the SOS program which is a before school tutoring program. Kids not progressing in this program are referred to Child Study Team and are classified as special education.

I think our school does a good job identifying and classifying kids. About 20 percent of our total student population is classified as special education.
[Modified by: annette10dance on August 05, 2008 12:52 PM]