Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Meeting with principal/update: first day not great

It is so nice to hear stories like this. It will be a great day when each child can receive the support they need to keep learning, and it is all taken in stride and treated like no big deal!

So if they got a blind kid it would be OK to tell them to "go back to blind school"? The problem is something the teacher needs to deal with though confidence to say I belong here would help.

My email to the new teacher got a very good response. She will assign him a very nice child as a buddy and rearrange seating so he is at a table of very kind and gentle children. She also wanted me to tell him in no uncertain terms to tell her if he heard more remarks like that. He was worried about "tattling" and thus said nothing--probably socially savvy, but later it ate at him. She said he did beautifully with the work.

Yes, definitely keep on top of the language the other children use. My first skip was done 6 weeks into the school year and I received similarly threatening comments. I internalized the stress instead of sharing it with my parents, feeling that I'd done something wrong to be targeted. That was porbably my first brush with imposter syndrome, and it was painful.

If I can offer one piece of advice, it's to guarantee your son that he'll be supported if he comes to you with tons of affirming language and clear messaging that he is where he belongs. Definitely praise the information sharing. It sounds like the grade 1 teacher didn't fully think out his immersion strategy.

Thanks for this--it is so obvious to me that he can make it in 1st that I had forgotten to emphasize it with DS, but he did need it to be emphasized, as it turns out.

Update: Going much better socially--DS reports that his buddy is nice and no one has said anything else unkind. BUT. OMG. Yesterday he brought home a TWELVE-PAGE packet of homework. Due Friday.

Seriously???

We did four pages yesterday, and he was actively complaining. The work is easy for him in terms of reading and understanding, but there's a lot of handwriting practice ("Write these words five times"), which he is still relatively slow at.

If it's going to be like this all the time (maybe this is an assessment packet? please??), we may have to reconsider. Is this at all typical for first grade?? 4 pages of reading/writing homework a night? DD's first grade was nothing like this, but she was at an odd charter school.

Definitely out of the norm here. You might ask other parents what their experiences are.

We are also seeing that with teachers under more and more pressure from testing mandates, workload is increasing in lower grades these days.

DeeDee

We had the packet thing...home on Monday back on Friday in first grade...not 12 pages long.

You might ask the teacher, seeing as he is not used to that workload, if he could try getting packet on Friday instead to give you a few additional days to spread it out. You could agree for him to just get a head start on the tasks like writing the words and hold off on tasks until the week that he hasn't been introduced to (maybe a math concept.)

I know that kids with accommodations or kids in the beginnings of RTI stages were sometimes given extra days on the packets.

As he gets more comfortable with the work load you could try moving it back to Monday like the other kids. Consider asking for 3 or 4 weeks to transition and then see if he can manage the Monday.

I personally liked the packet system because some days he had plenty of time to work and other days he did nothing and whenever he was bored I always said pull out your packet. If he had to ride along to some activity for big brother? Bring your packet! (I kept a pencil box in the car with scissors, colored pencils, pencils, glue, and anything else he needed in the car).

It also taught him how to skip around, plan, manage his time, and we actually got him using a calendar. And sometimes he even had to wake up a bit early on a Friday morning to finish up and he HATES that with a passion so it only happened once or twice.

Unfortunately, that actually sounds light for some teachers/schools/districts. In preparing to advocate, here are some thoughts and possible talking points regarding content, and scheduling.

Content
Part of creating a society which accepts one-size-fits-all standardization is to overwhelm with more quantity and less quality. Some have noticed more food providing less nutrition, more news with less information, more schooling with fewer new challenging concepts. Libraries may tout more offerings but the collection may be entirely digital becoming much easier to censor and to track reading times for each reader. Transparency may shrink at various levels of government while personal privacy is sacrificed to data collection. Content is being removed in many aspects of our lives, substituted with fluff, filler, repetition, and tracking. The effect is disempowering people.

There are counter movements focused on content over quantity in many areas, including nutritionally (pockets of emphasis on home gardening, organic foods, farmer markets, whole foods, gluten-free cookbooks), news (getting news from Non-USA media sources), healthcare (alternative/natural/herbal), and education (charter schools, homeschooling, alternative schools, and advocacy).

Some possible talking points regarding advocacy based on content may include: how the assignment supports the student learning objectives, the level of repetition needed if the student has mastered the particular objective, and the grading of the assignment.

Scheduling
Regarding the 12-page packet, has the teacher/school shared an estimate of how many minutes of homework are deemed appropriate per day? Have they shared an estimate of how many minutes the 12-page packet may take to complete, on average? NEA offers a Research Spotlight on Homework, which suggests an average of 10-20 minutes per grade level. Some teachers/schools have re-interpreted that as 10-20 minutes per grade level in each subject.

Doing the math... a 12-page packet, if distributed on Monday and due on Friday... allows 4 evenings for completion on the student's own schedule. Completed at a rate of 3 pages per night, spending about 4 to seven minutes on each page would be within the 10-20 minute guideline. At 4 pages per night, this would be about 2-1/2 to 5 minutes per page.

Some have found that distributing a homework packet with several days for completion is best practices (as compared with assigning homework due the next day) because it offers the relative advantages of allowing flexibility, encouraging time management, increasing a sense of personal ownership and accomplishment for one's own education, raising the likelihood that a parent may see/review the homework, and does not penalize students who have an activity on a particular evening which may make a due-next-day homework assignment overly burdensome.

Some possible talking points regarding advocacy based on scheduling may include: how many average minutes of homework per night the teacher/school deems appropriate, the average amount of time it takes a student to complete the packet.

Good luck with this!

I don't mind the packet system in and of itself--as has been pointed out, it has some advantages. The length seems excessive. It includes a free writing assignment ("Write about these people and what they do"), a free drawing assignment (he took quite a while on this), a lot of handwriting practice, reading comp questions, capitalization work, a crossword, work on recognizing the parts of a book...I could go on. The 4 pages he did yesterday took him at least half an hour because he is trying to improve his handwriting, at my behest. (It's one thing he does need to work on.) I don't know if I should just let the handwriting go so he can work faster. It's not terrible by any means. Probably on the slightly low side of average for a first grade boy.


I am going to see if this continues to be the norm and then I may ask for that. I worry that asking for accommodations may be seen as "He can't handle first grade."

As for math, this isn't even the math. He gets separate, challenging math HW (from an enrichment book) from his K teacher. I like the math HW and feel he needs it, since he is not getting much math worth his while in class--but it will add to the workload.