My DGD use to get teased by the boys in like 3rd grade because she was smart and got good grades in most everything. One told her that boys didn't like girls who were smart just pretty. ACK!! I just told her to tell him that one day She would be signing His paycheck.
She is now at GA state with a full scholarship. Him hanging out no job.
I made sure she could spell and knew what words meant. With real dictionaries.

I can't wait to tell my MIL, a retired school teacher. She gets so livid about things that aren't taught in school now that were when she taught. She has been retired for 20 years now.

It is very frustrating, but it isn't the teachers making the decisions. It is the administrators trying to make their "scores" look better. I don't want to get on my soap box, but so many of them want to keep costs down and make scores go up. In our local schools, you can't hold a student back unless the parents agree. So you child can't read, but you can keep advancing him anyway. That makes no sense at all.

Our retirement savings are going quickly to educate our grandchildren. We've co-signed for the whole 4 years of one daughters university cost (she worked, had every financing help she could find, we did the rest)
another 9 year old is in accelerated classes which are a joke and we are paying $45 per hour for additional tutoring to teach her better study habits and hoping to find a way to make her an interested not bored student. I wish the schools could work for these kids. They worked for my generation and for my kids and two of my GD have their master degrees with honors - but the lower in the grades you go the worse the instruction is. It is costing us big bucks to try to give these grandchildren a future.

THIS IS INSANE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Years ago, when I was a beginning teacher, I was assigned to teach English grammar in middle school. The principal came by and found me teaching diagramming-I got called out for it. She said that "research" has proven it's a waste of time-that a "whole language" approach was much better and that the students lost their "creativity" when forced to learn "unnecessary" grammar rules. Well-I also taught German as a foreign language, and the kids had absolutely no comprehension, since they didn't .know a subject from a verb from a direct object. . .The idea is that if they speak the language, they can write it. My grandfather grew up speaking German as a child, but couldn't read or write it. Whenever he got a card or letter from a relative in Germany, I got a call to come over and read it to him. I didn't have to translate-just read. Now-if you also take out the spelling component, how will any one even be able to read it??? I know that as a teacher, I used to feel stressed when the students "creatively" spelled whatever they needed to write, especially when a word was spelled correctly in the typed question they were answering.

How in the world is our country going to keep going when our kids come out of school not being able to do the basics. Judge Judy said it well the other day while trying to read a message on a phone. She said our kids are loosing the ability to speak the English language. I totally agree.

My son and I were discussing just this week that his daughter's 4th grade teacher had told him "not to be concerned unless her grades fell into the 70's. At that point the teacher would assign some homework but no homework is needed until then. He is going to ask the teacher what is her goal for his daughter. Where does the teacher expect to see his daughter accomplishing education-wise? He expects her to be able to enter any university she applies for and to have at a minimum her master's at age 25. I doubt if her teacher has even thought about it. Probably just to be able to go to the next grade, and just going to the next grade year after year will not have you qualified for a top notch university.

There are schools that have been doing this for years.

I was too. I can't imagine not being able to write in cursive.