Hi all:
Before I launch into my saga just want to give you a bit of background on our district. It was out of TAG compliance for 15 years. Most teachers (& certainly the administration) don't "believe" in TAG and only somewhat comply under threat of a state audit.
Now on to our story:)
Despite a grade skip, ds12 is only working at his level in one class this year - Algebra 1, where he's getting an A. Another class - science - provides him with new information and he enjoys it, even though it's not at his pace.
Since he'll be going to the high school next year for math, we plan on approaching the school about other subject acceleration for next year. Our concern is that we aren't getting a full and truthful academic picture from two of his teachers.
The problem is two fold: How to get an accurate picture of where he is in terms of benchmarks ( this is how the district measures their "sucsess")
How to get the powers that be to understand that learning new information isn't acceleration?
The 7th grade social studies teacher not only is a denier but a hater. Since history is a special interest of our son, he has learned nothing and spent the 1st quarter in the library researching and writing a paper that never was returned. 2nd quarter he chose not to test out of the unit because he liked the teaching assistant. He spent class time talking Civ games with the t.a. and chatting to a friend.
Ds has a much better S.S. teacher this quarter. He will find something for ds to do - but he will be back to the denier/hater the final quarter of the year.
His advanced language arts teacher told me at the beginning of the year that his placement showed he was right with the other kids. I seriously doubted her - based on ds' academic testing and the teacher has a history of fabrication. According to ds only about 4 of the 30 kids in this "advanced" class are gifted.
When pressed for more details about her syllabus, teacher says that her class will provide new information for ds, and will fill in some grammatical holes that no one in the lower grades seem to be teaching. This sounded reasonable. Since September he has learned 1 new concept and he's written 2 papers. No grammar has been taught.
We prefer he take freshman english and history next year. How do we make this happen?
Thanks!
