Posted on 05/30/2014 9:47:04 PM PDT by MacMattico
I've brought up education issues before. I've tried to help other people's children with school difficulties and dealing with school administration. I have an Education background. My first child is a HS student and even with all of the public school problems we encounter, she enjoys her school (for the most part) and it is a small enough place where everybody pretty much knows everyone else. My daughter has nearly a 4.0 average. I went to the same school and was happy and grade obsessed. I never could understand how people thought HS was "hard". I must have been obnoxious. Going into the Education field (not any longer there) I got an attitude adjustment and realized different people have different strengths and weaknesses, and grades aren't everything.
But you know how when it comes to your own family things can seem so hard and different? My youngest daughter is in 6th grade. She is adopted, and I don't mean to imply anything by that except that we have no record of her life before age 1 and don't know anything about who her biological parents were or prenatal care.
She has really struggled with school this year. Common core hit really hard. She will pass, but with very low grades in the grade level curriculum, and I think some of these grades have been inflated because she is such a nice, outgoing kid, the most helpful,and that she tries so hard, and her teachers just love her. But we wanted a true reflection of her abilities so we took her for some outside testing.
Her IQ came back at 81. I'll be honest and tell you this broke my heart. She is also so trusting it seems no matter how much we try to teach her right and wrong that she has no impulse control and is going to get herself into some real trouble later in life. I hate to say it but the kind of kid that you could give the whole "don't take candy from strangers" talk to and five minutes later she'd be doing just that. It takes hours to get her through homework and it's like she never was at school that day sometimes-- no retention whatsoever. We study for a history test and even though it takes forever, she'll seem to understand the material and then fail the test miserably. I can't say "you didn't study" when I studied hours with her!
So a few weeks ago I stopped studying with her and only helped with homework when specifically asked a question because I didn't want her going in with perfect homework I had basically done. I wanted them to see her real work. Needless to say, she's not doing well. We got her a tutor once a week. When going through things one on one with someone outside the family, homework is done but info not retained.
The school has said because she is passing, she will not qualify to take special Ed classes but need to pass a foreign language(starting next year) and all of the usual high school courses including trigonometry and lab sciences. I know in my heart she can't do it. I'm not sure what to do. Even homeschooling I don't think I could teach her these things, and she loves school-- sports, friends and clubs especially. Testing by the school and by the private educational psychologist we brought her to both say she is "a few points above" being given Special Education services in NY. They did give her an IEP, though, which allows her to take a test in a quiet area and she can have a little extra time, but that's not helping the situation. She did come home crying after a state test because they had her take it in the regular classroom and she needs to whisper hard words and talk out math problems if she even has a chance to get them right. Other kids were telling her to shut up, and complaining she was bothering them. Which, really, she was but she needed to do that. She cried that she had told the sub she usually takes tests away from the group but was told no.
I'm very scared, as her mom, about her future. We're not sure what to do. Some days we think she'll never be able to live on her own. And it's not her fault but taking every evening doing homework and giving her all my attention and ignoring family time has caused us all great stress. She and I get so stressed it becomes a shouting match. Which I know is so wrong. And we're not even in jr high until next year... The good thing is, they believe their to be no mental health issues.
Find a metronome app or a real metronome and teach her to use it.
Oh and there are special ways to count time by breaking each beat down. There’s no shame at all in counting each measure out this way to be sure each note is on the proper beat, practicing it slowly then getting up to the proper tempo.
I did the band thing for 6 years and was by no means talented, but I got by pretty well using this...made up for being massively uncoordinated.
There’s info on Ali’s IQ testing on the internet that seems valid. It surprised me also.
I don’t get that from the clip. He seems to be saying that it will help kids learn to read and that everyone should have that opportunity, not just white kids. But that is quite different from saying Common Core was created to dumb the white kids down. It was garbled, so I’m not sure I caught everything.
Indeed. Stylistically there’s nothing at all wrong with that when it’s a choice. It adds flavor and interest to the music!
At the same time, for a struggling beginner it helps to learn the rules starting off, as well as the little tricks to help you get there. School bands sadly aren’t big on improv.
I found counting off each note to understand where it fits into the beat to be one of the most useful learning tools, hence I’m cheerful to pass it along to someone else who’s struggling a bit in the hopes it helps them as well.
‘Her IQ came back at 81’
I just looked it up and that is just a hair below average and 68% of the test takers are average, where average starts at 85.
http://teaches12345.hubpages.com/hub/How-Important-Is-My-Childs-IQ-Test-Score
Her problems with taking tests in general could account for it.
Thanks everyone! It may be an up hill battle at times but you’ve all helped me to look at things more positively. Thank you for all the great advice!
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