Posts by Deborah
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My ASD cousin did very well at Wellington East Girls, Gio.
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So you think literacy depends on a series of tests after someone gets to school rather than what happens before they get to school?
Of course not. But there has been a clear failure with respect to my daughter's literacy, and I'm very, very tired of the school side-stepping any responsibility for it, because we did, and do, all the right things, including modifying what we're doing to fit the particular child's needs. But I need the school to come to the party too, and it's part of their job. I'm pretty pleased with what they're doing this year, but it's taken an on-going effort from me to get them to even acknowledge that there might be a problem.
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Miss Eight the Elder does fine with maths, 'though she doesn't seem to have the intuitive grasp of how numbers fit together that Miss Eight the Younger has. So there could be something going on to do with the maths / reading split discussed in those studies.
I've just been talking to my mum about Miss Eight the Younger. Mum taught in, and then ran, a Montessori pre-school for about quarter of a century, with real success in literacy. The school has just opened a new library for the children and parents, and it has been named after her. She always chose to start a child reading with phonics (pure Montessori), but she came across a fair few who were better off using whole language techniques (not Montessori at all, but clearly what that particular child needed). So she's very, very experienced in assessing what is going on with children's reading. She's fascinated, and worried, by what Miss Eight the Younger is doing. She can't do phonics, and she isn't managing whole language reading. She's making odd mistakes i.e. not the standard mistakes that a child who has difficulty reading will make. Most kids who struggle with reading struggle in standard ways, but Miss Eight the Younger has quirky difficulties. I think this is why the school has been so slow to recognise that she has reading difficulties.
Miss Eight the Younger is also the family practical joker, and actor, and performer. She's got an excellent sense of comic timing, and a real sense of word play. We've been working very hard on recognising and celebrating all her excellences, especially language-related ones, because like Isabel's lad, she is starting to lose confidence.
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I've just been at the school, asking her teacher the totally open question, "John, what's happening with [Miss Eight's] reading next?"
The answer was a good one. The school has a new deputy principal, who is responsible for Science, and for Evaluation, meaning making sure that each student is being evaluated, and her or his progress and learning needs assessed, and acted on. This is a new thing for the school - it has a new principal (appointed last year, 'though she was previously DP), and hence a new DP. Our new principal is very keen on monitoring each individual child, and making sure that each child is getting what they need. So... Miss Eight is due to spend 40 minutes or so with the new DP tomorrow, working on evaluating her reading, and the school will work out what to do from there.
So yes, if I'm not happy with what the school is doing, the next stop will be an educational psychologist, to get some outside input on what she needs.
The curious thing is that Miss Eight is a twin, and an identical one at that. Her twin sister, Miss Eight the Elder, with the same genetics, and the same environment, after a slow start with reading, is now up and flying. That's what I want to achieve for Miss Eight the Younger.
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I've just realised that I misrepresented my elder daughter's achievement in English. In year 6 (Standard 4 in the old money), she was achieving the average standard for pupils in year 10 (Form 4). And still that wasn't "excellent".
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We do want the best results for the children we teach and our expectations are always high.
sometimes teachers feel the greater burden of blame is placed on them when in fact they are doing there best.
Really? All of the teaching profession are like that?
The trouble is, I have come across too many poor teachers who seemingly cannot be changed. A few years back, a friend of mine who was a deputy principal at a Wellington primary talked about one teacher in her school. This teacher was sufficiently bad that parents would move their children out of school in order to avoid her. All the school could do was place very strong teachers in the years either side of her, and ensure that children who were in her class one year were with one of these very strong teachers the following year.
Then there were the teachers who ignored my concerns about my daughter's reading, telling me that she was achieving what was needed for a child of her age. That would be the bare minimum. And apparently that was enough, despite this child coming from a home that is an incredibly rich reading environment. You would think that would indicate there might be a problem that the school needed to address, but no. Apparently achieving the minimum is just fine, even when all the other indicators suggest that she should be able to read with comparative ease.
At the other end, there are the teachers who have refused to acknowledge the excellence of my elder daughter's work in English. This is a child who in what I would have called Standard 4, and we now call year 6 in NZ, is working at the level required for average achievement in 3rd form (year 9), and came out in the 95th percentile on the UNSW tests. NB: it was her choice to sit them, not mine: the note came home from school and I asked her if she wanted to have a go.
My niece has just started primary school (in NZ). Because she has come out of a Montessori preschool, and because she has a mind that works that way, she is a competent phonetics reader. But her new entrants teacher has told her, and her parents, that she mustn't sound out words, because it's the wrong way to read, and she must do whole language reading.
Anecdata, I know. But that's a large part of the problem for many parents. We can get information about how our child is doing compared to what they should be doing for their age, but it's bloody difficult to get information about whether our children are reaching their potential. I'm not interested in whether my children are achieving what is required for children of their age, but I'm very, very interested in whether the school is helping them to achieve all they possibly can.
Of course I have run across excellent teachers too. I was especially impressed by teachers my daughters had at Karori Normal, from the new entrants teacher with experience dripping out of her fingernails, to the teacher who gave my elder daughter extension work and encouraged her to research anything she was interested in, to the assistant principal who piled in the extra resources to help my younger daughters with their reading. Alas, despite all my social resources (y'know, highly educated, articulate), I have been unable to get them the same sort of help ever since we left there.
It's also worth remembering that schools are sites for reproducing conformity. Be an introvert who loathes group work, a child who asks quirky questions, a child who is doing work she "shouldn't be doing yet", a kid who really doesn't give a damn about sport, and there are problems.
Many teachers, and probably most, are undoubtedly doing their best. Some are not, and the people who suffer as a result of that are the children whose education is compromised.
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No replies so far to my belief that our literacy rate does not depend on tests AFTER you get to school, but what happens BEFORE kids get to school - so we are defining the wrong problem, and therefore the wrong solution.
I call bullshit on that. One of my daughters is struggling to learn to read. We're highly educated, both to doctoral level (and mine in humanities at that), we both read constantly, I read to each of our daughters the day they were born, and most days since, I have done all the reading work with my girls, we are regulars at the local library, and still my daughter is struggling (aged 8). She is a quirky learner and a quirky thinker, but one with excellent reasoning skills. I've tried to get schools to give her extra help, I've tried to explain that she is a non-standard thinker, and the answer I've got back? "Well, she's achieving within the range we expect for x year olds." She's not a phonetics reader, not a whole language reader... she does something else entirely, and the schools can't cope. They couldn't cope in NZ, and they can't cope in Australia.
I've done some horrendous jumping up and down at my girls' school this year, and I'm planning to accost her teacher tomorrow morning, to find out exactly what's happening this year.
As for what I'm doing myself? At present I'm reading Famous Five books with her. It's all about on-going practice. She reads a page (with a fair amount of help), I read a page. She enjoys the story, because really, she's over the kind of stories you get in basic readers, and she gets the critical on-going practice in reading.
Also, at just 8, she's able to discuss the gender roles in them, and pick out the classism.
The school system does just fine, and can do just fine, for standard kids, even standard bright kids. I've got two of them, and they're both doing well. But it can't cope with unusual children, at all.
(Edited to fix html)
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A sampling of both songs.
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I had a wretched experience with some fresh kina a few years back. I think it was the second helping that did it. I didn't even want the second helping; I was just trying to be a polite guest, and show my appreciation for the effort they had gone to. Fevers, chills, crawling on the floor to the bathroom - it was no fun. I lost about a kilo overnight.
I will never eat fresh (as in raw) kina again.
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I'm just finding it hard to get over that Christchurch businessman being reported as saying that:
it was tongue and cheek
[link] (about half way down the page)