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WOW Montana! That psych is worth his/her weight in gold!!! Do you mind saying whether you had IQ test alone or was it also achievement testing? I've heard that schools are more open to achievement testing than IQ but i've not been successful in finding someone to give the WJIII.

Grades 4 and 5 do a lot of the same practical work at DS8's school (another reason why I don't see letting him move to grade 5 as a big deal).

They follow the California state curriculum. I though it was okay after a quick glance at the books last year, and oh, how wrong I was. The copyright date on the books is 2000, which means they were probably written in 1998/1999 and are therefore ten years old. Some of the information is very out of date.

I found a glaring date-independent error in the book and on an exam. I tried to point it out to the teacher because it had confused DS8. She replied "this is what the book says." End of conversation. I was a little surprised at that.

This got me thinking that every public school kid in the state reads these books. I wonder how many teachers are providing incorrect/outdated information to their students? It's no wonder we have so many people who are scientifically illiterate if the illiteracy is fostered in elementary school!

Well, I guess the honeymoon's over at the new school. It's better in some ways, but not at all what we'd hoped. Oh well.

Val

Great news, Montana! I'm so happy that you all have finally gotten some help from your school.

Sorry things are not quite so rosy for you, Val. That "this is what the book says" just makes me cringe!

I taught in a university department that had lots of interdisciplinary offerings, so we had students with many different majors in some of our classes. Over the years, several colleagues and I noticed, to our collective dismay, that the largest single source of attitudes like "but the book says..." or "just tell me what I need to know for the test, I'm not interested in anything else" came from the education students. (There were lots of good ed. students, too, of course, and of course this was only one school in one province at one particular point in time, but still...) The phenomenon was marked enough that we really did wonder what kinds of things were going to be going on in classrooms around the province as the years went by. My personal favourite horror story was the young woman who proudly told me that she had managed her programme over the five years of her degree such that she was going to be able to graduate without ever having written a research paper! She is now teaching middle-school English. Sigh.

Hey, pauli, glad you liked the martians! We thought that book was really fun!

I was very surprised by her answer. At first, she really seemed to understand my son, but I've been wondering lately.

I found out today that when they said they'd move DS6 up to 2nd grade spelling and reading, they meant "enrichment" rather than a formal move. I don't know what this means yet. The teacher told me she thinks it's important that he do the 1st grade spelling and that "it gets harder after the first few lessons."

?? They've been in school for four months!? When will they finish the first few lessons?

Apart from two "special words" tests (numbers; which, when, etc), he never gets more than one wrong on his pre-tests. So I'm not sure why he needs to continue to write down a bunch of words he never needed to learn how to spell to begin with.

Val

What a great news Montana! I am glad the school got it and finally did something about it! You must all feel so much better now.

Hi, Dazed&Confuzed...it was IQ and achievement (and she's doing social things as well, classroom observation, maturity, etc). WISC and WIAT. She presented results from both, so I don't know which if either mattered more to the school. There was another deeply satisfying moment, when the principal did this "well, the WIAT reading tests aren't relevant to schools because the selections are so short they don't co-relate (how IS that spelled?) with skills used in school" thing, and the psych. said, basically, "yes, I agree, and that's why I administered THIS and got this range of results" and slapped down another piece of paper, which utterly silenced the school protest. Ohhh, did we enjoy that! I still, when it comes to mind, really savor the moment. Probably makes me a bad person, but oh, I really enjoyed that. (I think the latter test is the Woodcock-Johnson, but I'm really tired and might be wrong).

So yes. Worth her weight in gold! She kept assuring us she knew how to deal schools and for us just to keep quiet until the results were in, which drove me INSANE waiting and waiting while things got worse and worse. But I have to admit, her having all those things at our meeting circumvented a lot of upsetting lines of argument from the school. And probably was tactically good, b/c now there's less on the record commentary from the school for them to back away from, which I imagine helps them save face and be interested in helping.

Wow, Montana, I'm DOK over your psych. Wish I could find one that good.

I was worried for you on the waiting, so I'm very glad you ignored me and it all worked out!

Sometimes it's very, very good to be wrong!

Ah yes, that was definitely worth the wait!