But it’s not a good financial option for my family right now, and even if it were, I still care about all the other kids, whose parents perhaps don’t have the time or ability to teach their children, and whose parents can’t afford a private school.  I think every child deserves a quality education.

I wish I could help.  I’d like to create a real neighborhood school.  I could teach my kids, and those from a few more families.  And maybe the other parents could help, either by teaching or in some other way.

We could all just pitch in as a community.

Is that something that’s even possible?  I know homeschooling is possible, but there are laws about creating actual schools.

I do think it’s time to create something new.  Clearly the current system isn’t working, especially financially.

I’ve been thinking and wondering about kids in general lately, too.  I work in an elementary school, as the computer lab specialist, so I see a lot of different kids each day, including kids with special needs and kids with behavior problems.

I spent more than two years working in a self-contained special ed class, so I know there are kids who need special accomodations in order to function at school.  At our school, some are in regular classes and some (with moderate to severe disabilities) are in self-contained classrooms.

Kids with more obvious disabilities or needs are, in some ways, easier to deal with.  You know they will behave differently.  You know that you may have to respond differently. Our expectations tend to be lower (and now I’m wondering whether that’s OK).

With other kids, especially those with severe behavior problems, it’s harder to know how to respond.  Is this kid throwing a fit because his brain is wired differently, or because his parents let him do whatever he wants to do at home?  Or is it a combination of the two?  Should I hold firm to my behavioral expectations, or change my approach?

Luckily for me, most of the time it’s the classroom teacher that decides how these things will be handled.  I don’t have to make the decision.  But I still wonder.

Photo by Pink Sherbet Photography

As an educator, one that I’m interested in is Measure 58, which “prohibits teaching public school students in language other than English for more than two years.”  I actually became aware of this measure in July, and wrote about it here.

I’m thinking about it today because of a student who was just in my classroom.  She’s a second grader, and I happen to know that this is her third year here, so she’s already been immersed in the English-speaking environment of school for two years.  At our school, the kids get 30-45 minutes of specific ESL instruction daily.  The rest of the time, they’re in their regular classes.  And even in the ESL classroom, they’re most likely to be speaking English, because students from all different language backgrounds are instructed in groups together, and ESL staff don’t necessarily speak all of the different languages.

This girl, however, is still barely speaking English.  She managed to string 3 words together for me:  “I go here?”.  The rest of the time she was silent.  She also had a great deal of trouble double-clicking a mouse, although that’s not necessarily related.  She did manage to navigate the educational website the class was exploring today.  She’s definitely not English-proficient after two years of school, though.

That’s just anecdotal, of course, but it does demonstrate that different students have different needs.  Some students learn English quickly, and others do not.  Schools and teachers should be able to decide on an individual basis what a student needs, rather than being told by state law.

55, 23, 78, 44, 55, 99, 32

Explain why an elementary school student needs to know the mode of anything:

Given that testing is difficult for older elementary students (and even older students), Mother Jones is asking why in the world the Bush administration has been giving tests to four and five-year old students in Head Start programs?

Okay, I understand you want to measure the success of the program (or use the results to try to get rid of it), but this is not the way to do it. In fact, according to the article, the test has been found flawed and unreliable by the Government Accountability Office.

Mercifully, Congress stepped in this past fall and voted to discontinue the testing program for Head Start students. You can play in peace, kids.