Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums High School One step forward, one step back

After a disastrous first semester, DS's counselor moved him to another English Honors class. DS16 really, really likes the teacher, picked out a book for free read based on Teacher's rec and they had some conversations about it. All is good, right? A good teacher can make all the difference.

Unless...

A student teacher takes over about 5 weeks in. And is very much like the first semester teacher. Aargh. So, do I ream out the counselor for setting this up?

Did the counsellor know? Sometimes I think it doesn't occur to anyone that a teacher change is something that people should know.

I'm not sure if the counselor knew, but wouldn't he have had to check with the teacher before moving him into the class? And wouldn't the teacher say "sure, it's fine, just be aware that I have a student teacher".

DS has started working with his "team" at school. I'm going to ask them about it today after I calm down and collect my thoughts.

How much is the student teacher doing? Usually they don't do full-out teaching for a while. Is the current teacher correcting whatever bad habits/things the student teacher is doing, and what are they doing? Generally, I thought that the purpose of student teaching is to have practice teaching but with the actual teacher watching and stepping in as needed.
I hope this all works about; I know this year's just been disastrous for your son with this counselor! ((hugs))
And in all seriousness, can you get another counselor?!

The student teacher observed and got her feet wet the first few weeks, but now is teaching the current book and the teacher is not in the classroom. The social worker didn't know about the student teacher, but she asked why I thought this might affect my son. Well, the book will be done in a few weeks and DS will have a few weeks to get used to the classroom teacher...again...just in time for the final.

The counselor is retiring at the end of the year, which saves me the very, very difficult process of requesting a new counselor.

Just saw this thread. I think I was out of town. Yes, definatly talk with the counselor about this and tell her how displeased you are with the situation.

Exactly this type of things has been happening this year for my DS. Counselor promised she picked out a good English teacher for DS for this year. I wasn't impressed by her but it didn't matter she went on maternity leave after two months, she still isn't back. We are on our second 'long term' sub. First long term sub was better than the teacher, second long term sub isn't so good.

The counselor has washed his hands of my son since January (he is retiring this spring). The social worker didn't know about the student teacher, and the English teacher didn't mention it to the counselor when the switch was made. (Our school seems to have a serious communication problem.)

In the end it didn't go tooooo badly. He didn't care for her much, but DS is certainly more engaged in the class (the teacher tells me this is a terrific class, bright eyes and lots of ideas). He turns in work, picks good books. He didn't do so well on the paper that was due for the student teacher--we will talk about it AFTER the AP test next week--but he wrote it in good spirits and turned it in, which is huge. I'm still very disappointed in the counselor, though, and in the teacher, too, for not mentioning it. But I don't know how the counselor approached it with the teacher, so maybe he didn't think it worth mentioning?

The student teacher is gone now. The time-gobbling spring activity is nearly over, the AP is next week (what do they do for the rest of the semester in chem?) 30 more grey hairs. Whew. Last night he pondered with me the Seven deadly sins as portrayed by the characters in a play. Getting back to normal.

For some reason with 7 weeks to go DS still had a 'long term sub' with no date for the teacher to return. IDK and I'm not worrying about it at this time.

The AP classes here end up doing 'projects' and labs the last 5 weeks. And the juniors get to take the new state testing. (And our whole schedule is going to be strange for 2 1/2 weeks because of it.) It's one of the reasons our district is changing the whole school schedule into August for the first time this year. (Because of calendar reasons we moved up a week this past year.) The elementary teachers aren't happy about it but because of the rigid schedule of when AP test are, they H.S. kids really need to start school earlier.