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...
