Back to school night

[kerry]

My daughter has entered Middle School (6th grade) and it was 'Back to School Night' for parents tonight. We went to the school and followed her schedule, going to each of her classes for 10 minutes and meeting the teachers. The school she is going to is the best in the DPS system (I think) and ranks amongst the highest in the state. My daughter had briefly commented in the last 2 weeks that she hasn't liked Social Studies or Science.
When we went into the Social Studies classroom, there were no posters of countries, or historical events, but lists of rules, written by the kids, about how to work in groups. The teacher told us her main goal was to get students to work in groups. She said she used to teach Western Civ in 6th and Eastern Civ in 7th grade but she's realized that 'Connections' are more important. So now the's focusing on the connections between the 2 continents! She even mentioned to us that her 7th grade students were complaining that they had to do the whole 'group thing' all over again another year but this was ok because they needed to spend two years learning how to work in groups.
In science class, the teacher explained to us how she was grading the kids. They had two grades so far. One for copying down the rules correctly and another for taking a piece of paper home for parents to sign. She said, the couldn't really tell us about the curriculum because she had gotten new texts and would be reading the book with the kids and didn't yet know what it was about. She then explained an exercise she had them do in which they had to balance as many nails as possible on the head of a single nail. The point of this was to show that in an ecological system things have to stay in balance and since the new book was about 'Water' this was an important lesson to learn.

It was pretty clear that neither teacher was a scientist or social scientist and had no clue as to how to communicate a field of study to children because they knew nothing about their field. I was appalled. Her other teachers were very good, but the thought of having teachers this bad at one of the best schools in the state makes me cringe.

I think the only solution is to abolish education degrees and make teachers actually learn a discipline.

I'm sure lots of you have gone thru this same thing with your kids, but it brought back terrible memories for me of sitting thru endless wasted hours in high school classes taught by brain dead teachers.