Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Vent..Reading....

As easy as it is turn this into some kind of political statement (the skools is LIBRULSZ!!), the reality is that just about anything related to social studies it taught badly in schools, with little in the way of conflicting information that can lead children to exploration and developing critical thinking skills. Social issues are presented as facts to be memorized, regurgitated, and forgotten. The narrative of steady progress from grunting ape-like societies to modern man cannot become clouded by confusion, else the real purpose of education (to turn out compliant cogs in the industrial machine) be undermined.

When a district curriculum supervisor informed me that "the primary purpose of an education is social integration," my jaw hit the floor. I mean, she could have said "indoctrination" or "mind control" instead of "social integration," without changing her meaning at all.

/rant

Yeah, that. My mom has been complaining about this idea ever since I can remember. Sit still, do your worksheet, and be a good little girl or boy. No questioning allowed.

When I was in fifth grade, our teachers got a bright idea about giving everyone a color-badge based on behavior and what you could call social integration. You had to wear the badge all day. Kids with green badges got special privileges and were called to line up and go to recess first. Then orange, then red. The red kids lost privileges and were called out for their bad citizenship (or whatever the term was).

My parents were livid at the thought of a school labeling children and creating classes of students in this way.

Guess what, Val...the color coding is alive and well and being used in my DD's classroom. Yes it makes me livid.

In fact, she was probably "yellow" today because I neglected to sign her spelling test. I remembered it this morning after she went to school, and I feel horrible. It was my fault, she showed it to me and asked me to sign it but we didn't go inside for quite awhile after school yesterday and I stuck it away. Time change, nice weather, everything going on in the classroom/homework all different leading up to the almighty state assessments. She hasn't brought home a spelling test to sign in about six weeks so I sort of fell out of the habit.

I'll hear about it in about 1.5 hrs when I go pick her up.

Punishing the child for something the parent didn't do is unacceptable.

They do this same thing at my kids' school. The report card is sent home in a manilla envelope every 6 weeks. The parents are to sign it and send it back the next day. In K, the kids get 2 tickets to the treasure box if they bring it back the next day, they get 1 ticket if it's brought back a day late, and no tickets after that. Nothing like making a 5/6 year old sit and watch other children get toys for something they had basically no control over!

LOL.

And why do textbooks need to be rewritten every year?

Did someone discover a new way of doing math or chemistry?

I can tell now my post about kids killing kids was off topic. My bad.

I have noticed that it's sometimes hard to tell from the initial post and the subject of the post what the topic of the thread is.

I wouldn't worry about it too much.

With practice, you will probably get better at posting things that are on topic.

Happens all the freakin' time. (And a big chunk of it is that the teacher sees it as "parent would have done X if kid had reminded them, so I'm letting the kid experience the consequence of reminding / not reminding." Except that I often search my kid's stuff without being reminded, and often forget to do stuff I've been reminded about, so even for good kids with good parents, it doesn't work like that.)

The kids with bad parents get the consequences of that every single day. They don't need the teacher piling more consequences on top.

The kid getting the consequence thing is presented as helping to build up the parent/child communication. And we do fine, but it causes alot of stress because sometimes you just drop the ball. And if you try to communicate that to the teacher, you get the lecture about the child needing to learn responsibility, and it probably comes off to them like "the dog ate my homework".

Anyway DD got invited to a friend's house, the weather is fantastic and she seems to have forgotten about the yellow, replaced by nice things after escaping from the school walls for another day.