Book report for 7th grader

To my observation as a teacher and a parent, I think this is sadly more and more common in modern education. Teachers give perplexing, complicated assignments that can only by done by students with parent support at home.

We have sadly gotten away from fundamentals in our schools and this odd assignment typifies that. Teachers devote more time to typing up the assignment than to teaching it.

I did not see the learning value in these assignments. I see the value in reading a book but not in dissecting the book. I see the value in learning to access information and write that information up but that doesn’t need to be a highly complicated process.

Some parents go the route of discussion and/or protest with a teacher. As a teacher at the same school my son attended, I knew such discussion and/or protest was to no avail. Your school might be different but the lack of clear thought underlying these ridiculous assignments speaks for itself and speaks for the potential success of discussion around it.

While strongly encouraging my son to read the book and follow along with me, I simply took charge of such silly projects and did them myself.

I hold several graduate degrees and it was a great source of amusement in our family when my efforts consistently earned a B+.

My son’s 7th grade year was more arduous than my first year of graduate study at an Ivy League university and far more arduous than my first year of college.

I hope it’s been better for you and your son. Good luck.

Sara, thanks for the answer. I had a feeling I was trying to whip a dead horse here. I don’t understand why more parents don’t object to this type of teaching. This particular teacher has taken any pleasure out of everything she has “taught” this year, including even Charles Dickens who I love. I think I wrote about her taking “The Christmas Carol” and droning on and on about it for a full three months and generating more paperwork than Enron shredded!

I had the same experience with my ADD daughter’s sixth grade teacher. My daughter went into her class wanting to be a Marine Biologist (who knows if she had the grades of the where-with-all but don’t burst her bubbles!) and now she absolutely hates science. We just pulled her out to home school her because we refused to carry her through the ridiculous projects anymore. The teacher assigned them ‘college type’ science news articles and the kids had to find their ideas themselves on the internet. She just assigned them a huge Solar System project, and the teacher gave my daughter and several other kids detention for forgetting to bring the instructions home. I screamed bloody murder to her guidance counselor for giving detention to a child whose middle name is ‘forget’ but they backed the teacher so I said , bye, bye. We both work (opposite hours) but feel completely relieved that our life won’t revolve around homework anymore. She had 5 pages of ‘college type’ instructions for that project, and I asked my daughter if they had done anything toward working on it in class, and she said, “no mother, it’s HOME work.” I am a television producer, and the first thing I am going to expose is Everyday Math and New New Math…and then I am taking on too much homework! If parents don’t band together, this won’t stop and learning disabled children will be completely left behind.

Good for you!! Let us know when to watch!!!

I have a sixth grade daughter who is not LD who is handling it OK. The work is similar to what you describe but she is beginning to be able to handle it by herself. It is still a lot of work and I think back to sixth grade when I was in school and it was a world of difference. I shake in my boots when I think about my LD 3rd grade son.

Beth

Beth, I wish you and your son luck- hopefully, he will handle 7th better than my son is! A LITTLE bit of the problem is that my son should really be in 6th— he is 12 1/2. You’re right, it’s nothing like when we were in school.

Audrey, I’m glad I am not the only one outraged about this situation. And as for Algegra— that is a story in itself! Someone in our school district had a brilliant plan to incorporate a new math program, “Mathland” when my son was in 3rd grade. This program involved so much time, work, and money that the teachers were all disgusted. And, the worst— at the end of the school year, everyone was drowning in instructional materials, and none of the kids could add, subtract, multiply, or divide. We spent the whole summer with good, old-fashioned flash cards (at the teacher’s suggestion) to get our son back on track.

As if the situation is not bad enough, we have just found out that, because of a huge deficit in our school system, the middle school classroom size is expected to increase to 36 + students in a class. My son is floundering as it is. We may as well forget it with that many kids. I am considering homeschooling also. I am wondering if there is any way a child can be partially homeschooled…

I am sorry to tell you AC, but in the research I have done on “new,new Math”, Mathland is the very worst. It’s not completely the fault of the school districts.

Some years back, the Department of Education trotted out about 10 ‘revolutionary’ math programs , and the math experts across the country hit the ceiling. Please don’t hang me on the completely accurate facts (those of you that know more than me)…but 250 mathmeticians, computer people, and the brightest minds in the math world wrote a letter to the Dof Ed. saying ” what in the h*** were you thinking? ” They posted the letter in a full page ad in the Wall street Journal addressed to the DofEd. and all signed it. Last spring there were congressional hearings on the mess, and as all you California folks know, it’s been called “Math Wars” for the last 10 years. So, AC, don’t feel like you were alone in your frustration.

I think you would find homeschooling feels like ‘partial’ school…but…I am certainly too knew to this to tell you whether you should homeschool. But I can tell you that everything you ever needed or wanted to know, down to what cirriculum to get, is all on the world wide web. It’s astonishing how much the internet has helped homeschooling…because of those blessed brave souls who pulled their kids out first and then shared their information. I found two very good cirriculum sheets (what scared me most) which I combined into what I actually wanted my daughter to learn. The affidavit for the school was even there. All we had to do was fill it out and notarize it.
And homeschooling doesn’t seem to be just like the rigors of school, meaning we have to go 180 days or 900 hours, however we choose (our state’s law). My daughter and I studied our new Social Studies textbook tonite for an hour(purchased from the University of Missouri distance program), and the learning was extremely enjoyable for both of us (what did she say? learning was fun?). We do know that in 8th grade we have to take a difficult state assessment test, just like all the other kids, so we will keep her program in line with that, but at our pace….at *her* pace…finally!!!

Audrey, I believe Mathland was the worst! I did some volunteer work in my son’s classroom at the time, and I couldn’t believe the time involved in just getting all the materials in order just so the poor teacher could even attempt to teach. It was a nightmare at a cost or around $7,0000, if I remember correctly.

So, how much time a day do you think you spend with your daughter? I have a home business and am concerned that I might not have enough time. But, with our school district in the shape it is in financially and the thought of 36- 40 kids per classroom, I think we have no choice…

No wonder our district is 8 million in the red!

Don’t worry, I understood!
Here’s how it breaks down and how we are going to do it:
Approx. 900 hours of homeschooling in 41 weeks (sept - June)
3 1/2 hours a day/ 5 days a week
4 hours extra cirricular activity/weekends

But here is the fastest way to homeschool =
900 hours of homeschooling:
5 hours a day/ 7 days a week for 180 days or 6 months
However, our child would be in regular school if she could learn like that, so we are taking the advice of a wonderful Cyber School administrator. One subject at a time (with the exception of alittle math all the time), things she likes, unschool the bad memories, and create a new love of learning.
I roughly figured out that if we went the traditional 300 days that kids are lashed to school, we would need to homeschool about 3 hours a day/ 7 days a week. Remember, your 900 hours (or whatever your state requires) includes going to the Y, attending Art classes, drum lessons, me teaching her piano, teaching her how to bake bread, etc.
I hope to move alittle faster than that and keep her on a fairly routine schedule: teaching her core subjects 2 and a half hours in the morning and then my ex husband will give her math & computer when he gets home at night… for about an hour.
So….if we teach her 3 1/2 hours a day (what we used to do on homework), 5 days a week, and she has 4 hours of extra cirricular activities each weekend (drum, piano, Bball at the Y and Art Class) we will finish our 180 days the same time the school does- about 41 weeks. But I am sure we will exceed the 900 hours, because we will be learning things she likes, taking field trips, etc. Philadelphia has several remarkable workshops catering to homeschoolers. Our Franklin Institute has a Science Workshop for Homeschoolers, and I am sure I just scratched the surface.
Also, we aren’t going to completely stop in the summer. The Cyber School woman told me to do some math everyday, since we are struggling with that so much. So this ultimately isn’t about putting in our hours, it’s about making sure she is back on track.
I love geography and history. As I teach her Social Studies I can’t tell you the amount of holes in her knowledge of American rivers, mountains ranges, maps etc. Because we pulled her out in the middle of the year, we only got the second semester of Social Studies from our online course but we got the whole textbook which covers the year. The book is so beautiful we want to do the whole year just so we can read it! That’s real learning.
By the way in case I didn’t say this before, somewhere in my WWW travels I read that Saxon Math is good for ADD kids and homeschoolers. I read another good review of it this morning and love that it places her where she needs to be (it has an online placement test) so we are going with that to undo our Everyday Math tragedy!

I have a friend who homeschools, she lived in Philadelphia for a few years and had great success, really loved the extras that are there. Good luck!

Audrey, thanks so much for all the wonderful information. It just might work for us… We also have a math tragedy. My son has some sort of gift with math that even his tutor doesn’t understand. He can figure out the answers to complicated Algebra problems in his mind, but he flunks every test. He does alright in the rest of his classes, but has absolutely no joy in learning which he used to have all through elementary school.

Anyway, thanks again for all the info. You certainly have done your legwork. I have just begun to seriously consider homeschooling and have a ways to go. But, if my son’s class sizes actually do go up to 36 plus kids, I just don’t think we have any choice…

Adrienne

My 7th grader got a project like this. The idea is to bring many subjects into the project to show that math is part of history, etc.. They ended up giving an assignment that required historical statistics that were not available. They did not bother to research it for themselves, prior to assigning. Then they needed to graph using the excel program that they did not teach first. Those that hand graphed got a full grade lower. The english and science portions were more reasonable. We spent hours helping our child look for statistics that were unavailable. 2 days before the due date they woke up and changed the research end so that the kids could get numbers, but still did not teach the computer skills needed during class. I hated this project, objected to it during a coffee clutch with the principal. It did no good. He also had ridiculus papers to write this year, that were never any good, even when we helped him out (we both have post graduate degrees). Lastly, he is given books to read, that he reads for homework, they are never assigned comprehension questions, nor is there class discussion. There are due dates and then there are tests. Let me tell you, the books are tough, this is literature, and some is old english. Again, where is the teaching and help at school?