The career placement test was probably taken as a curiosity and for fun upon completion of the PARCC testing.
It looks like 9 out of 10 kids may go
architecture. :-O
There is a middle school tale going about that one boy in mischievous middle school fashion answered all of the questions by checking 'b' for his answers. Then he wrote on the test that he wanted to "be the owner of a nail salon." This has not been verified.
Whey I went to a university survey program, one of my fellow students was there because he took a career placement test. He graduated as a 4.0 student scholarship student.
Padem, you should write a little prose vignette about the worst teacher that you had in school. I'm sure it would be amusing.
Local teachers are so glad that my 3 sons have left their school systems as they did not enjoy their meetings with dear ole dad.
Given that our school systems have so many optional classroom "agendas" that are intended with special educational needs, their intent upon maxing out all options for more revenue does not follow the proper needs of the students. Not all candidates for special needs attendance meet the lack of skills these classrooms were intended.
Bottom line, the schools were filling seats that would bring in more revenue to the school system with students that were over qualified for remedial studies and letting their educational needs fall thru the cracks. This accounts to nearly 30% of all students.
The final chapter of my meetings with teachers came when a counselor had decided that my son was to attend these special classes where each student had their own cubical so they could concentrate on subjects several years behind their present grade level.
His scores were average and until that day there was never a note from the school indicating his lack of skills.
Here we sat with counselor in charge, surrounded by my son's 8 teachers from varied classes and me in the hotseat. I patiently listened for an hour or so about how his concentration was not centered on the teacher's subject of the day, his restless movement in his chair and that he did not fall in with the usual activities of the rest of the class.
They would not discuss the fact that his grades were decent and that he would answer with the correct questions in class and at home and in his homework.
While I sat there, I noticed all the same behavior from the group of peers that had come to enforce the decisions of this counselor as they were describing what my son was expressing. Restlessness, squirming in their seats, gazing around the room, leg pumping, fiddling with their fingers and many vivid facial expressions as the topic changed from one subject teacher to another.
When finally ask if I was in agreement, I had very little to say. My response was that everything that had been described to me about my son was equally present in the actions of each and everyone of the teachers sitting there and except for the one sided convictions of the counselor, all of us needed to be placed in the same environment during school hours for re-education purposes because they had lost their way in their attempt to be educators and had started their own selection committee to decide who can become what they want to be and who can not have that choice.
Everyone immediately got up and existed the room and the counselor told me that I needed to leave the school grounds.
I was never invited to meet with another teacher or counselor and when they removed my child from regular classes, I transferred him to another school system and joined a coalition of thousands around the state and wrote the State Board of Education of our concerns.
I double "Hey Teacher Leave them kids alone" policy.
Paden & skool
> Paden, you should write a little prose vignette about the worst teacher that you had in school. I'm sure it would be amusing.
Man, institutional education and my young self are two things about which I probably could NEVER write anything amusing. Don't misunderstand me, I had fun during my school boy days. None of it was actually during school.
I was a targeted and wanted man as a student. If something happened on the other side of the school, I was the first one they rounded up for questioning. I was predisposed to guilt. I will admit I was so convinced that I would probably get blamed for it anyway that I actual started acting out. Kind of like life imitating art..
I was sitting in the balcony of the auditorium during what we use to call "an assembly". A kid named Jeff Milliron was sitting four seats away from me and we were all on the first row in the balcony, right above the "drop-off".
Jeff had nabbed somebody's lunch-box from their home room and pocketed a little plastic covered bowl with maybe vegetable soup in it. As the assembly came to order, Jeff feigned a very audible "throw-up" noise and leaned over the railing, acting like he was vomiting. He slipped the lid off the soup and let it splatter it the aisle below.
Of course it was hilarious. The old WWI vet janitors brought out their best red and green sawdust and tidied things up. Meanwhile I was picked up for questioning just because of my proximity to the act. I wouldn't rat on Jeff so I spent 3 days out of school for something I had nothing to do with. The hierarchy's logic was seriously flawed and I never missed a chance to explain to them just how stoopit they were going about educating us.
On a serious note - this actually happened in my third grade art class: The teacher handed out mimeograph sheets of a blue-line picture of a pilgrim and a turkey. Our task was to color the picture with crayons. Each table had a coffee can of various color and sizes of crayons. I could not find the browns and reds and blacks that one would probably expect to see on a pilgrim picture, so I improvised and attempted my version of what had been considered Picasso's blue-period.
The teacher felt that my blue pilgrim was a distinct passive-aggressive indication that I needed the principal to explain to me how serious a transgression I had committed and then swat me with a stick of wood. So much for expressive art class...I never could figure that one out.
Later, as a teenager, we were given aptitude tests at high school. I was a classic under-achiever but I always enjoyed exams. I scored so high my counselor and the rest of the staff was convinced I had "cheated" somehow. I was required to take the exam again, by myself, in a room with the counselor watching. I was never told how the two tests compared to each other and nothing more was ever said. I would have been happy with a simple apology.
There are a lot of things in my life I have worked though and forgiven others and myself. But I still cannot understand how public education is allowed to continue with the dismal results and apparent damage it inflicts on our young. It sacrifices the very curiosity and ambition in a young mind that should actually be nurtured.
A good example would be to give a cheap spring-loaded ball point pen to a four year old. After scribbling a bit, the child is bored. Given enough time the pen will eventually be disassembled and a young mind will be learning how thing work with wonderment and accomplishment.
Give that same pen to a fourth-grader. After four short years of "education" he's pretty sure that he will be disciplined for disassembling the pen. His only hope is to scrawl "eat me" on his test paper in a futile attempt to express the frustration involved.
Nope, school wasn't for Paden. :bored:
good on you, Mr. Harris..
..good on you.
I endured several "meetings" similar to what you've described. It was touch-and-go for my boys in their school years.
Both my sons are grown men now, ages 39 and 41. Both had the "Cash" gene that had genetically caused myself and my forefathers to loath school. If asked what I think my greatest lifetime achievement was, I would have to say working with my children and helping them understand their own ability to learn and understanding the damage a public education can inflict.
The youngest has an MBA and writes technical software manuals.
The oldest makes a truckload of money annually managing a QA-QC non-destructive testing department for a space exploration firm.
I can lay down when it's time knowing I made a difference. B-)
We pulled our kids (twin boys) out of public school after the fourth or fifth grade due to exactly the kind of crap you're describing, and home schooled them the rest of the way. They're now 24, US Army veterans, both are in school, and one is married and parlayed the skills he learned in the Army into an IT job with a Fortune 500 company. Pulling them out of public school was the best thing we ever did for them.
Oh and the unmarried one is a Geomatics major... not sure if THAT was the best thing I ever did for him...;-)
Fathers Know Best
I salute you for standing behind your kids and choosing the best path for them. You are to be commended. That is what fathers do.
That being said, our son 'shadowed' at a local prep school recently. We were approached by members of the school's administration and others to apply. He has been accepted.
His present public school education has failed for him. There is an uncompromising attitude and institutional approach that does not educate the student.
He has had some exceptional teachers and administrators through his 7 years of public school. But it takes only a few bad teachers and administrators to cause problems.
My eldest is mildly epileptic. She's almost 12, and has been on (for about 4 years) and off (for the last few years) medication to control regular but infrequent seizures. With or without meds she has vague, almost impossible to qualify cognitive issues- but nothing terribly severe. Something you might qualify with a colloquialism like "she's a little slow on the uptake."
Through second grade a pattern emerged: she was woefully behind on assessment indicators measured at the beginning of the school year. But, by and low, she's on par by about Christmas- not class valedictorian or anything, but holding her own just fine. The teachers would express their concern each year, but I (with a bit of resistance from my ex-wife) would insist that she be treated like any other kid. That, for all intents and purposes she is 98% of the time, and that as her parents we are the main facilitators of her learning. That if special accommodations needed to be in place they were to take the form of extra effort on our part to make sure she could hang.
This was all copacetic- their school is two blocks from our house. For several years the highlight of each day for me was waking them to school- rain or shine- and dropping them off to their classrooms.
Then, at the end of her second grade year, the principal was replaced. Seems a large block of new parents (residents of a large redevelopment nearby- one that I happened to be project manager on for about 7 years) were not satisfied with the test scores of our neighborhood elementary. So they raised a sufficient stink and got us a new principal. One with a reputation for turning around underperforming schools. And make no mistake- there was nothing underperforming about this school. It is a school that draws from perhaps the most ethnically, culturally, and economically diverse student pools in town. But it wasn't at the top of the matrix, and that apparently wasn't good enough for our new neighbors.
Two weeks after my daughter started third grade, we were called in for our usual start of the year meeting, this time with the new principal. We were told our child (who she couldn't even name, nor would have recognized in a lineup of one) was special needs and needed to be separated from the regular students. Seems she scored a 7 or an 8 on their scale in various subjects. Hmmm, I asked, "what does that scale look like?" She showed it to me- it started at 5 and went to 20. And I thought, "Lils started kindergarten when she was 5. She just turned 9. When she graduates she'll be nearly 19. Weird how that corresponds so closely to the scale." So I our new prinicpal if she'd spoken to her previous teachers, since this was apparently such a problem. "No. That's irrelevant here." The next words out of her mouth (and I'm not kidding): "we tend to see kids who are at this point at the start of third grade struggle later with getting into college or having the options that kids scoring higher have." That was game over for me. "She's staying in regular classes with her friends and I suppose you can fail her if you find that her grades merit it by the end of the year." Of course, they didn't.
But I didn't want to leave the school. It's home- our neighbors and friends and their kids (some of whom are now in college) and later us- we are that school, and I was gonna be damned if we gave in to a push from new parents and a principal ratched. So we stuck it out. But the vibe at the school slowly changed. Tardy slips and reprimands and no-noise policies in the lunch room became Dickensian in nature. The revocation of their meager, shrinking recess time was a constant threat. I volunteered to coordinate parents' supervision of a 20-minute all-school recess before the bell each day in the stead of the daily school-wide assembly that served more as a brow beating than anything else. I was met with a look as if I'd suggested a nudity policy.
We rode out that last year, growing increasingly frustrated and sad at what was transpiring. They were trumpeting increased test scores, all I saw was kids (my own and others I passed in the hallway every morning) who appeared and acted increasingly miserable with what they were being subjected to.
It wasn't an easy call, still. I felt like we were abandoning the community. I even got a decent amount of flack from some friends who felt the same. But, for me- my kids aren't future consumers, or unwittingly in some competition with Chinese (or whoever) kids their age. Life is tough enough, and they're not kids for long enough. We put them in hippie school. It's actually a public charter school, and I don't know how they get away with it, but it's considered public (and it is, for all intents and purposes, free). The morning walk has been replaced by the morning drive, but it's still my favorite time of day. They don't get grades, but the teachers meet with or call us every few weeks and we talk about where things are. They're outside almost two hours every single day- they hike, they have a garden to tend to, chickens to feed, etc). Theyre thriving academically. And, most importantly, they're HAPPY again. Every morning and every afternoon. Ok, not every, but most. Homework isn't torture, waking up and getting going is as much a breeze as you could expect from this age.
I was a trophy kid in public school- I aced everything they threw at me and begged for more. And I get that the system has to normalize for a massive number of students. My kids, I guess, just don't work in whatever the current normal is. I suspect many others don't either. I'm not an educator, so I'm not gonna pretend like I know better. And i can't save every kid who is miserable in that system. But I'm doing what I can for mine.
:good:
