My wife left me a message today after receiving my daughter’s IOWA test results in the mail. A few years ago we had a major battle with a principal of a certain school regarding my daughter’s placement. She has a late December birthday, and the school insisted she should be in the lower grade, i.e. she will be turning 9 this December, so they would have placed her in 3rd grade. Fortunately she is in 4th grade in her current school, where she scored in the 97th percentile on her IOWA, meaning she is in the top 3% of 4th graders in NYS. I can vouch for the fact that she cares nothing about school performance, in part (I think) because she is not being challenged. I don’t write this to brag (OK, maybe just a little bragging : ), but to reflect on the misguided advice of her former school which is symptomatic of what schools do. I can’t recall who made this point – I think Herbert Kohl, but I may be wrong – but it is simple and obvious. If someone came to your workplace and decided to do a corporate re-org and assign job function and responsibility by people’s age, that would be construed as unfair, discriminatory, and downright stupid. But when a school takes children and assigns them to classes based purely on birthday cutoff without any discrimination as to ability, that is viewed as a sensible rule to be enforced as a yehareig v’al ya’avor. Let me just head the pedants off at the pass – true, developmental stages roughly correspond to chronological age, but the key word is roughly. Chazal say 40 se’ah are a kosher mikvah, but 40 se’ah chaseir kurtav is pasul, but children’s developmental stages are not mikvaos! Not that her current school is perfect – one teacher suggested her poor penmanship is a sign of a potential learning disability which could interfere with her school performance and therefore we should ask the district for testing. Glad we turned that advice down as well. I guarantee that if you walk into a doctor’s office and subject yourself to endless tests, something wrong will turn up somewhere. Yet, your doctor would be guilty of malpractice if a single test or cutoff was used to determine your prognosis without taking a holistic view of your medical history and overall health. Too bad schools don’t take the same approach, and too bad they can’t be held accountable for the educational malpractice that occurs all too often.
One other point while I am ranting on the sad state of education. My older daughter last week needed some help with her math homework, which involved factoring. While helping her I asked her why she needed to know how to factor. Answer: because the teacher gave us this work. And why did the teacher do that? Answer: because it is in the math book. Ah Ha! That explains it – there is a conspiracy of math book publishers to crowd kids’ minds with useless information! How can anyone feel motivated to learn anything if it is presented as useless trivia which does not enhance one’s comprehension of the world or provide a practical benefit? (I am too afraid to ask her teacher if she can answer my question as to why kids need to learn factoring, but if I’ve made you curious, take a look here for starters).
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What kind of idiot teacher suggested poor penmanship was a sign of a learning disability? You should have reminded him/her that Doctors are known to have the worst handwriting. I had a nutjob teacher in preschool who used to send bad boy notes home to my parents because i didnt color in the lines - ironically i grew to become a talented creative artist.
ReplyDeleteMy girls' school really has this thing about handwriting. My son can write sloppy without being analyzed for it. But I truly believe there is a gender bias in this. Girls are expected to be neat, and so messy handwriting is regarded as a major failing on their part. I know that my own bad handwriting (and I have a PhD BTW) has often been pointed to as proof of my not caring about what I was writing or its intended audience.
ReplyDeleteRe: the first school's desire to place your daughter in a lower grade: there is a valid reason for their attitude, to which academic acheivement is not really relevant. I was born in March, and should have started first grade a year later than I actually did. My mother had me tested, and based on the test results I was labeled gifted and worthy of being started in first grade a year early; so I was always in classes with children who were a year older than me. Over time, I tended to gravitate socially to kids who were my age but a year behind me in terms of academic grade levels. This became really obvious in college, when every single one of my friends was in the year behind me.
ReplyDeleteHow things would have differed if I was kept to the grade level of my chronological peers, it is of course impossible to say. But that they would have differed, I am certain.
And I've survived bad handwriting for four decades now. The two things I always came close to flunking were penmanship and phys. ed. So I wouldn't be too worried about your daughter's penmanship. Just teach her how to type in the near future.
Some thoughts: I don't know if you can generalize from your situation to all others, e.g. my wife finished college at 19 and has always been one of the youngest in her peer group. I wonder if there are research studies on this (any ed psychologists out there?) Also, while you realize now that skipping ahead may have not been socially the best solution, it did allow you to move ahead academically - there was a tradeoff between alleviating the potential boredom of school work below your level with a not-great social mix. Once you acknowlegde that there is a tradeoff and no one best answer, shouldn't the issue be left for parents to decide rather than have one option or the other forced on them by school administrators?
ReplyDeleteI'd like to pint out that I have an April birthday but was not the youngest in my class. There were other Aprils, a May, and even a June (that would be 6 months past the cut off by today's standards) The girl with the June birthday was one of the brightest in the class.
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