quiltingcandy

It would be nice if all kids had your parents or mine. I would agree they do spend too much time testing the kids. They want to base the teachers' salaries to the test scores - but how do you do that when there is no base line? And not all the kids are on equal ground? My daughter teaches 4th grade this year and 2 of her students speak little to no English and one doesn't even read at first grade level, one girl only speaks baby talk and is in speech therapy (that comes out of her class time). Fortunately there are only 22 kids in the class, there are 15 boys and 7 girls 12 are ESL students and 5 have diagnosed learning disorders. You cannot always blame teachers when the parents don't do anything to help. One little boy has trouble writing, his parents believe he doesn't need to write because he will be using a computer soon.

My sisters and parents taught me the alphabet, how to read, and how to add, subtract, multiple and divide before I was in the first grade. But that was before the afternoon TV was even on, my sisters taught me as they did their homework with me and my dad was an engineer at Boeing and he loved to play math games, then my mom put up with me following her around reading out loud to her while I was learning to read.

Okay - I am stepping off the soap box, I could go on for hours and no one needs that.

There are a lot of kids that have nothing!!! It is really hard to image it if you had parents that always made sure you had what you needed, but some of these kids don't eat unless they are at school and there is no money for school supplies. So the schools are just trying to even the playing field and give every child a chance. My daughter buys the basics for all of her students - pencils, pens, crayons, markers, colored pencils, spiral note books, lined paper and the composition books. They are not allowed this year to ask for donations but she lets the parents know if these "disappear" she does not replace them, it will be up to the student to replace. She also provides glue (white Elmer's school glue and the stick glue), scissors, white boards and rulers.

If you look closely at the list they are asking for donations of these items, so there is some idea of what they need. They are not asking for every student to bring 15 rolls of paper towels, or every student to bring 5 boxes of tissue. One student brought in 8 boxes of tissue and another brought a box of 30 glue sticks. My daughter felt like Christmas. And the tissue had extra "Box Tops" so double yippee.