Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments Typical M.S. in-class content and homework?

I've been talking with my 2 older kids and my wife about some aspects of their current school, and some of it concerns me. I wanted to check signals/compare with others...

The school

Suburban public middle school (grades 6-8), with approximately 1000-1100 kids, within very large district. Not a magnet school or specialized gifted school. My kids (6th and 7th grade) take challenge classes for core subjects plus one gifted generalist class. 6th grader is significantly math accelerated (Geometry).

The things that concern me:
1) The kids say that a large % of the in-class time in at least some classes (one claims about 3/4, IIRC, but I take that with a grain of salt) is spent reading the textbook, taking notes on it, and/or doing simple worksheets. i.e. In history class, the teacher says, "read pages xxx-yyy and take notes on it" and gives them, say, 30 minutes to do that.

IMO, textbook reading should primarily be done at home, and classroom time should be primarily the teacher at the front of the room. But it's been so long since I was that age that I don't remember if the practice as they describe it matched my own experiences or not.

2) There is very little homework, other than math.

3) The science content seems skimpy. DS12 is taking Life Science - basically Biology. There have been no dissections. The school apparently doesn't have microscopes. Even the standard "slice an onion and look at it under a microscope" doesn't happen in this class.

My DD13 is taking Earth Science, and says a lot of it is watching videos (admittedly at least some of that is stuff about the solar system which doesn't lend itself well to in-class experimentation/demonstration). Apparently the only hands-on stuff she's done this year was about 2 weeks of playing with minerals (testing hardness and the like).

This rubs me wrong in part because, when our DS12 took a test to see if he knew the Earth Science material already and could skip ahead, he failed miserably on a physical experiment assigned with the test that it seems is not something he would be doing much, if any of if he DOES take Earth Science next year...

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I guess in general, I'm concerned that too little in-class time seems spent with the teacher actually teaching at the front of the class, and that the one subject where moving beyond a book and into hands-on content seems MOST important (science) seems to, in fact, have little hands-on content.

But then, maybe I'm remembering more of what I did in H.S. and college and assigning that memory to my earlier years when perhaps my own experiences were similar. Feh, it sucks being so old as to not remember that stuff clearly...

1. Well, okay-- our experiences/recollections are about a time when educational philosophy was substantially different here. Two observations about that.

a) recall that the 'teacher/lecturer' model out-and-out FAILED about as many kids as it suited-- makes sense when you consider that the only kids who are really suited to that model are the auditory/visual learners among them, and

b) kids DO NOT all 'just absorb' how to do things like read for content (not pleasure) and take notes. Yes, this is a primary study skill. It is now being taught overtly prior to high school... and yes, it is slow, and yes, it is something that many kids struggle to learn and apply. Even gifted kids, who may actually not see much point in this activity at this level (where they can "remember" everything WITHOUT doing anything in particular).

The simple worksheets, ugh. Yes it is typical, but NO it is not "good practice" in any way, shape, or form. Yuck. On the subject of why classrooms look less like we recall them, though, there is a concept in education that is called "flipping" the classroom. That is, it reserves class time for THINKING/discussion/problem-solving/applications, not "learning the nuts and bolts" which can theoretically be done ahead of class time. Most college classes have always relied upon some form of flipped classroom, though college STUDENTS have often resisted and not noticed what we were trying to do there. {sigh}


2. Little homework could mean a lot of things. Are your kids doing it IN class? Possible, if they are operating at a level beyond their classmates. Not a good sign otherwise, though-- particularly in math.

3. Science instruction has gotten skimpy. It's now a mile wide and an inch deep, all the way from K through 12. I say that as a scientist and science educator. It's PAINFUL. I truly wish that rather than doing all of this "watching" of flashy multimedia stuff, they'd do some SIMPLE directed experimental design and actually, you know... USE the scientific method to explore something. I've seen this about half a dozen times in my DD's grades 3-12 experiences, by the way, so I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. AP Physics has been as good as it's gotten, and she's done her own experimental design there about 3 times this year.

To clarify, there IS math homework, but very little in the other subjects.

According to my wife, there has been a strong move away from homework. The parents push back. The kids are doing athletics of various sorts and don't have time. Next year, supposedly, homework won't count at all for grades (i.e. few if any consequences for kids who don't do it).

As a result, non-math teachers can't expect kids to do much, if any work outside of class, and so classroom time is spent on what seems to me to be stuff that could be done as homework.

That said, I'm sympathetic to some of the arguments against homework at this age, and to the idea of teaching study habits within class.

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No microscopes in a Life Science class just boggles my brain though. I think they learned the parts of a cell this year, but to do that and not LOOK at a few different cells in a microscope - feh...

I am not going to go into too much detail about the schools where I live, except to say that I haven't known any children in any of our middle schools (neighborhood schools, public alternative or private) who spend that much reading in class or doing worksheets - reading is reserved for homework for the most part, and worksheets are not in vogue here. Class time is reserved for a combination of teacher lecture, group project work, and class discussion. The quality of any one class is usually highly correlated to the enthusiasm of the teacher, and is also influenced by having disruptive students in the class when that happens. Our public middle schools "track" all students into groups based on achievement (not ability), and the level of what is taught is determined by the tracking.

My kids are in a private school that is designed to be academically challenging and fwiw they have a small amount of reading time built into their day at school (quiet time after lunch), and they choose what they read during that time - it can be something that's required for school or something they are interested in. As mentioned above, they don't spend much time, if any, reading during their classes, and there is very little "lecturing" by the teacher - class time is a combination of class discussions, group projects etc. The science lab has microscopes as well as a wonderful teacher and the students have done quite a few dissections - I am not sure that the science classes in our neighborhood public schools offer the same level of learning or labs. Graphing calculators are incorporated into the math curriculum starting with Pre-Algebra, but they aren't replacing learning any concepts, they are an additional tool to use.

And way back when I was in middle school (I can still remember some of it lol!) - we had mostly lecturing from the teacher during class. There weren't any worksheets because I was in MS during the age when reproducing things like that cost $ and teachers didn't make copies of anything except for tests (my mom happened to be a MS teacher at that time to, fwiw, and she also only made copies of tests!). Our homework for things like Social Studies etc was to answer the questions in the back of each section/chapter etc in our textbook. In LA we had to learn how to diagram sentences. In science, we had labs every week, but microscopes and dissectiions didn't happen until high school biology class. In spite of that, I remember enjoying some of my classes immensely, and finding others so boring that all I did was daydream. Our school district didn't have a gifted program then, but they tracked students in MS the same way the district does where I live now, and I was in the highest level track. Then, as now, the difference was the teacher. It didn't really matter to me if I was in a class that was academically and intellectually challenging to me IF I had a teacher who had enthusiasm and could make me think. So that's what I remember about MS (not listing all the social/emotional stuff... or the incident that occurred when the school chose to close down the cookie line in the lunchroom!).

Just curious - are there any other school options where you live? Our public school district offers quite a few alternative programs and charter schools, and that's where you often find programs that get away from the types of challenges you're finding with your MS.

Best wishes,

polarbear

Not saying this is a good thing, but fwiw - I noted above there were no microscopes in my MS (back in the caveman days)... and fwiw, I'm a scientist. I loved science then and I love it now. I am ok! Not having access to a microscope in MS didn't harm me in any way or hold me back one bit. I wouldn't get *too* hung up on the lab equipment (or lack thereof) in MS. A student microscope costs about the same thing as I'm guessing many parents here spend on the typical birthday gift for their child... so if you can afford it, you can always get a microscope for exploration at home.

polarbear

polarbear - Yes, our family does in fact have a microscope (which unfortunately has been gathering dust of late).

I realize that stuff like this is cheap and can be done at home if not at school. But the fact that microscopes are so cheap is part of the reason I'm so irritated that the school doesn't have them (I have heard that the reason that scientific equipment is sparse and experiments/demos rare is a financial one. But to me, if you can't afford a set of microscopes for a few middle school science labs, given that they can be had cheaply and used for years, and that our district is not impoverished, then resources are being poorly allocated somehow...)

Re: other schooling options - that's a longer deeper topic hinted at a bit in some of the other flurried posts I've made in the last 36 hours (I like this board!) There are alternatives, but not easy ones, IMO...