Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Just - arrrrgh, re differentiation

Vent:

DS7 is in second grade in a public school that has worked hard with us over the past couple years to get to know him and find ways to help him succeed. His first grade teacher helped him a ton - mostly with managing his emotions and learning to function in a crowd. She also was along for the ride when he learned taught himself to read and had the virtue of not getting in his way

By all accounts we have the pick of the litter for second grade teachers, and he seems positive about her. Some of the projects he has told me about sound actually interesting! And in fact for him to be telling me anything about class at all is a novelty. I have a sense things could be going much worse.

BUT - arrrgh. The "work" that came home in his folder from last week. The largest piece of "work" was multiple pages covered with rows and rows of boxes into which the kids were supposed to write numbers, counting as high as they could. Apparently some of the more ... compliant ... kids filled in numbers up to 400 and more. DS did 2 pages - up to about 150, then clearly declared all stop as the next page has a big X in each box!

Good lord - they've been doing this "counting" and writing numbers since K. Even back then he declared it a stupid waste of time. He did get a green star and "good job" for the numbers he wrote. And I suppose we could look at this as writing practice which he definitely could use. But sheesh!

Vent over ... and thanks for listening!

Sue

You have my sympathies that is even worse than the 'plus one' facts.

In second grade? Sympathy given. Since it's the beginning of the year maybe is an informal assessment? On handwriting as well as numbers?

Ooooo.

That would NOT have been a good way to adequately assess anything but DD's oppositional streak, I fear.

Thanks all for making me smile.

For now, I'm giving them benefit of the doubt that this is assessment, including writing, as you suggest BlueMagic. And happy for them to see what a struggle writing is for DS! But if they "assess" like this repeatedly, they are indeed going to get a heavy dose of hard-headedness a la HK's DD.

On the other hand - I'm happy to get it on the table that DS is not motivated by typical strategies. Hope Teacher can/will learn to give him a good reason WHY. It's the simplest path to getting his buy-in.

And really it's easier than getting in a battle with him (like K teacher did), which only leads to rapidly escalating no-winner hostilities. First grade teacher will probably be an ally here....

Ah school!

Oh, man, my daughter was always woefully behind on her "number scrolls" too. When she sees work that's pointless (rote, tons and f copying type stuff that she already gets, etc) she just becomes a good union slowdown worker. Fingers crossed the new teacher gets your kid, and soon!

Ds6 had to count in tens as high as he could. He figured 200 was high enough to prove he could do it. Ds8 declined to write a letter explaining why he shouldn't have to do homework the next week (the winner got a week off homework) on the grounds that it would take him longer to write the letter than tfort to do the homework and at best he had a one in thirty chance of winning. Why do the teachers think the kids will go for such stuff. This week one of ds6's homework tasks is to build a fort in his room and attach a photo to his homework sheet. What? Not unless he chooses to he wont as i am not insisting on it.

From a slightly different temperament: #1 stopped recording books in the class reading competition, because winning isn't as important as reading (after all, the point of the competition is to encourage children to read, and one is already reading all the time), and there was another child for whom winning mattered.

Went through this again in a later grade, with regard to recording times in the required reading log. Of course, this counted into one's grade.

This is true in my family, too. One child is a competitive, driven, teacher-pleaser and the other is exact opposite. Even though their IQ profiles (GAI, anyhow, don't know DD's processing speed but suspect it's much higher than DS') are very similar in terms of VCI v. PRI. I would expect them to be more "alike" but they are as different as day and night. DD would fill out those assignments because she cares about how she is perceived, even though she might (privately) complain.

We always did the reading log, it but made it up. Sometimes you read an hour one night but play with Legos the next...that translated to 1/2 hour for two nights. (We never lied about the books read...more like the time and day portions). My kids read plenty over the half hour a night I was NOT going to let a silly reading log run our life schedule if we were skipping a night.

I explained to the boys the idea of average reading time over a whole week and that we weren't lying as much as coping within the confines of the institutional regulations while still meeting the goals of getting kids to read. And the boys always tested years and years above grade level so I felt like they were lucky we were filling it out at all. So far faked reading logs have not led to a life of crime.