Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Learning Environments A Dear Teacher... thread

Dear Highly Ranked High School,

Well, it sure has been a bang-up year in the math department. We started with an arrest of a teacher because he was a sexual predator. Everyone rallied around him because he was "so popular" among the students. Yes, hmm. Sexual predators do have a way of ingratiating themselves with their prey.

Moving right along, we have the teacher who videotapes lectures in the morning so that the afternoon class can benefit from his wisdom without his actual presence. Great!

Then a math teacher suffered a nasty repetitive strain injury and was out for six weeks, starting in early January. During this time, the subs focused on such tasks as their smartphones and their knitting, but no one actually, you know, taught anything. The knitting sub told the kids that "honors students can teach themselves." There was not a single official communication from the school about any of this, and emails were ignored.

Finally, in early March, the kids were handed an online system. They were expected to complete the whole course in the last three months of school, including the stuff they'd covered before Christmas. Never mind that they spent six weeks watching a sub knit, either. You have three months. Do it all. Go.

In April, it became clear that the real teacher wouldn't be back in even a semi-meaningful way, given that even minor use of a computer causes severe pain.

And, naturally, this person will be teaching computer science next year. She announced this fact herself on one of her rare days in class.

Well, there you are.

Signed,

Someone who wonders, if this is a highly ranked high school, what do the bad ones look like?

(If anyone can top bottom this one, I'll cry with you.)

Yep, his friend is still in that class with that teacher and doesn't have a disability like DS (DS has developmental coordination disorder), but the same thing happened. Very neat handwriting the first couple weeks of school, then it went downhill from there. DS still has to put more effort into writing than other kids, but can do well when he slows down and thinks about what he's doing.

Val, as you know, I could write something incredibly similar re: math this year. DD's triumph over a 200-level college math course owes nothing-- no, really, NOTHING-- to the course or the instruction offered.

The teacher has not had class all year-- not for AP statistics, not for Calculus, not for Trig. The course materials and textbooks are average to barely mediocre in terms of instructional value, so it's not like class wouldn't be a good idea... and I mean this LITERALLY. Not ONE INSTANT of instruction. Not one. Oh, he has "office hours." Half an hour, once a week.

The teacher's most common advice for students who ask questions? Look it up on Google.

Or some variant thereof.

Today the kids had to take a test. They had to log on to the system to take it. DS said that no one could log on for the first half of the class because their (absent) teacher had put seat restrictions on them, and you had to be sitting at "your" computer in order to log in. Problem: they've NEVER had assigned computers.

The sub had no idea what to do. Someone from somewhere figured it out after a half hour, and now they have to finish at home.

Nothing I could say would be worse than that. What a nightmare

This article below reminded me of your post. The lawsuit suggests the problem is limited to low-performing schools, which is not the case.

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/05/29/us/29reuters-usa-education-california.html
California Students Sue State Seeking More Learning Time
By REUTERS
MAY 29, 2014, 4:00 P.M. E.D.T.

I often say same the same sentiment. If my school is consider highly ranked, I'm scared to see what a lower ranks school looks like.

I can't top the post about the math teacher. But I do have a similar although less appalling thing happen in 7th grade. One day the fall of my 7th grade year my math teacher walked into school with an orange juice container filled with vodka, completely drunk. He was so drunk the 8th graders noticed and called down to the office. (And we ended up with an extra week of drug/alcohol awareness.) At least he wasn't a loved teacher, most parents were complaining about him. It was the last time we ever saw that teacher. What my mom said is that she was supposed to meet with him to talk about how he unchallenged in math I was that week, and I know there were several other parents who were putting pressure on him to challenge us more. (I don't remember the details... just the most memorable like all the gossip about the 8th graders finding him drunk.)

After that we had a few weeks of short term subs and then a long term sub who I hated just as bad. She was simply teaching right out of the book, one assignment ahead of the class. I got reprimanded for cheating at one point because I had the not so clever idea to share the boring long division homework in study hall. This teacher though it was because I didn't know long division. Luckly, my mother came to bat for me again. At least I didn't have to put up with her the next year as I was taking Algebra, but I did have study hall with her once a week. I was even more disillusioned with her when I tried asking her for help on my homework and she was clueless. Turns out she had only an elementary teaching credential.

To add to Bostonian's link above:

The ruling wherein Portland Public ...al hours guaranteed them under state law

The saddest part? This wasn't even caused by the "emergency" slashing of school days of two to four years ago. This one was part of a "strategic plan" that went through regular channels for approval. The school-day-slashing thing was declared a state of emergency. Now, that meant that OR students were getting fewer hours of instruction than... well, than basically any students in the first world, from what I can gather... but there wasn't anything that parents could do about that one. State of emergency and all.

This was different. Ohhhh, but the stories that I could tell. My daughter, for second year German, has had just 45 hours of POSSIBLE contact time with a teacher-- including office hours and regular instructional time. If we leave out office hours, she's had 16 hours of instruction THIS YEAR.

State says that one credit requires a minimum of 130 hours.

As for the 990 hours that high schoolers are entitled to under state law... my DD has had approximately....

SIXTY-FIVE hours of "instructional" time with teachers. The rest has been canned lesson slides, etc.-- basically independent study.

When we bought our house, our real estate dude gave us excellent advice about the local schools. He had grown up around here in one of the super-high-performing districts, and lived in another one with his wife and daughter at the time.

He told us not to buy a house because of its location in a supposedly great school district, saying, "it's the parents and not the schools that are creating those high test scores."

Yup-- we had a similarly forthcoming realtor. Very glad of that, actually.

Dear (no-doubt now retired) Kindergarten Teacher,

Thank you SO very much for being honest with me about the damage that a kindergarten placement would have caused my precocious and sweet five year old daughter. I realize that what you told me was not at all politically correct, and that district administration would be horrified and angered to know that you'd said it to me, but you did right by my daughter, and I'll never forget it.

You recognized, with your decades of teaching experience, what TRULY "very gifted" looks like in a pleasant and introverted five year old-- and were able to peg my daughter as such without even speaking to her-- just by observing her behavior (and how very different it was from agemates). You knew that in spite of the district patting itself on the back for having such bright students, kids like mine are still very very rare-- so rare that most classroom teachers can't possibly manage to do much for them. You also knew that in a paradoxical way, "bright" students actually make that situation even worse, because even offering students like her something more suitable implies to other parents that their own little snowflakes might not be THE smartest cookies in the free world. Instead, "rigorous" means a firm ceiling on instructional offerings in the district, and no services at all until 3rd grade, and even then, precious little for the top 1-3% of students, who teachers in the district are strictly instructed to treat NO DIFFERENTLY than the top 15%-- in fact, there is a tacit agreement that everyone act as though there IS no difference between them. "Readers" entering kindergarten are mostly children who have memorized a few sight words, and the occasional child who can blend CVC words. They are NOT kids who spend hours on sustained silent reading many grade levels ahead of their ages. But all of those children are "grouped" together-- at the ceiling.

Thank you for pointing out that it would be particularly cruel to subject our daughter to the chaos and danger of kindergarten placement when there would be no academic benefit to her whatsoever.

So I thank you for being forthcoming, and warning me that kindergarten would mean that my daughter would be expected, as a "top reading" student, to restrict her selections to Henry and Mudge, and a Lexile range; to "learning" about the math operations of addition and subtraction... and expected to sit quietly for over 450 hours of classroom time in which she learned nothing at all.

I appreciate it more than I can ever say. Teachers like you are a credit to the profession. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

~Mom to the little Harry Potter fan at Kindergarten Orientation night, 2004.