being smart pays off
What a week its been. I finished building out the first rack today. It turned out not to be nearly as bad as I was anticipating. I still need to move systems into it next week, but that part shouldn't take more than an hour or so. Today, I was pleasantly surprised when I got my annual performance review. It was nothing short of amazing. All of my accomplishments were highlighted, and there were really no notable issues. I received the highest possible rating ("Exceptional"). Its funny what a difference a year makes. A year ago, I felt stifled, bored, unchallenged, and most of all, unappreciated. Now I feel like a valued contributer to a growing team. And the best reward was a 10% raise.
All of this lead me to reflect on an ongoing dilemma that we've had with David's new school and how his Kindergarten class is being run. The issue here is that the curriculum is incredibly diluted & simplistic to the extent that at this point, its nothing but review material for David. David has known the alphabet, the sounds of the letters, and simple math for close to a year now. Now this wouldn't be that big of a deal, if they were quickly ramping up to challenging, new material. However, his teacher reviewed the curriculum plan with us, and they're not going to even attempt to teach reading until winter, and the most difficult math that they'll be covering is single digit addition & subtraction. So for the time being, all they're really doing is reviewing letters, colors & shapes, repeatedly. Initially, I was holding out hope that they would eventually make an effort to attempt to tailor the curriculum to what each child was capable of doing, or at least breaking them into groups rather than one size fits all. However, its clear that will never happen this school year (and its unclear whether that will happen in 1st grade either). We actually made an appointment and spoke with David's teacher this past Monday, in effort to impress upon her that we don't want David to think of Kindergarten (and school) as someplace to go to play all the time. While she insisted that he will be challenged eventually, she claimed that when she tried to have him read, he was unable to do so. Now, we never claimed that he knew how to read, however at the same time, Denise has been spending an hour every day for the past couple weeks working with David on sight words as well as basic phonics, and ramping him up on arithmetic. So her claim that he couldn't read at all was frustrating, as she had him attempt one sentence, and when he failed, she just decided that he couldn't read any words. We asked her for her list of important sight words, and she basically blew us off. We largely suspect that she doesn't want to be challenged by parents who would effectively do her job for her, but also because she doesn't want to be told how to do her job. Throughout this fiasco, Denise has been very seriously considering pulling David out of the school altogether, and home schooling him for the remainder of this year. Two days ago she went in to speak with the principal, initially with the intent of inquiring what requirements existed for parents who were homeschooling. However, the conversation went significantly better than planned, and she never raised the topic. Instead the principal claimed that several other parents had spoken with her already with similar concerns about the lacking difficulty of the curriculum, and she planned to speak with all the Kindergarten teachers about the matter. Today, we received a call back from the teacher, and things took a turn for the worse. She had spoken with all the teachers, and ended up bringing up David specifically. His teacher again claimed that he wasn't ready to learn how to read, and that we were exaggerating his abilities. Again Denise noted that just because he can't read whatever random sentence she threw out him doesn't mean that he can't read, and yet again requested her list of important sight words (and got blown off again). She also claimed that David did know all his numbers, based on the fact that he wasn't writing them in the way that she demanded. Basically, if he writes the number 4 one way, and she insists that they write it differently, even if both are valid outside of the classroom, then he doesn't know how to write the number 4. I understand that there needs to be consistency, but insisting that someone doesn't know numbers because they're not writing it how you demand is shortsighted and foolish. So the bigger issue is that all they care about is brainwashing based writing, memorization of sight words in bulk, from a secret, protected list, and actually learning how to sound out & comprehend unfamiliar words, and being capable of doing basic math is unimportant. I'm all for learning a basic group of sight words to get a foundation from which to build, but if the sum total reading educational experience is going to be memorizing 100 words with no ability to actually learn new words independently, that is utterly unacceptable. I'd never claim to have stellar hand writing (and I could easily go on a separate rant about how handwriting skills are being largely irrelevant & useless in this age), but if a child is writing legibly, and sizing the numbers & letters appropriately, I'd like to think that there are higher priorities than forcing them to relearn everything from scratch. Focusing on uniformity & brainwashing does no one any favors, although it likely makes a teacher's job alot easier. What all of this comes down to is the value of teaching children to think critically, to challenge them so that they are pushing their current boundaries, and to ensure that those who are capable of more are not being stifled. That's how you create smart children who grow up to be intelligent adults.