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Ed went to the board meeting last night and came home, for the first time in years, feeling encouraged.
The tone of the meetings is vastly improved; apparently the new board president conveys an attitude of respect and interest in what parents have to say. This really hasn't been the case for as long as I can remember, and I'm not the only person who feels this way. One parent told me, "Why go to these meetings and get condescended to?"
At one point, Ed asked a question she didn't want to address just then, and she said so in a friendly and courteous fashion, explaining that they would be getting to it soon.
Then, when they did get to it, she came back to Ed to answer the question of her own accord.
That is an enormous change, and so welcome.
more good news
And here is something wonderful.
For years the board has refused to allow board meetings to be televised. Years and years.
That will now change.
Even better, part of the reason it is changing is that the IEF -- the Irvington Education Foundation -- made a grant of $15,000 to purchase the necessary equipment.
God bless their hearts.
Last year I was sooooo fed up. I'd always contributed to the IEF; I'd always gone to their galas.
But last year I just couldn't. I couldn't raise money for a school that was failing to teach my child math (or spelling or handwriting or Spanish or writing), and treating so many parents as shabbily as it has done (and continues to do often enough -- more on that anon).
I was wrong.
I'll be at the gala this year; that's for sure.
board meeting
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You know, we should trade backscratches sometime.
Maybe you could ship a memo upstate toward Cooperstown that reminds school boards that it's possible to treat community members with respect and dignity.
In return, I could've hopped on down to Irvington and explained very clearly to the board that the public can record a school board meeting and televise/distribute it without the approval of the board. They don't have the right to make the decision - it's already been made and I'm sorry that they told your district otherwise. Unless, of course, the taping/recording process is so obnoxious as to create a legitimate distraction.
If any questions come up about the 'open government' aspect of school boards in New York, feel free to call or e-mail me - I can likely help.
Heh, I can already tell the accent of the town you live in. :D
Your area seems to practice nasal elision before the dental (basically, like dropping something like n when it's before d or t), especially when there's another nasal in front of it.
Hence, "minton" in an unstressed position is identical "mitten", this is related to how "winter" sounds like "winner" with nasal elision before a dental, etc. and the merger of "udder" and "utter". Personally I say both "fow-uhn" and "badmih-en" (alongside bad-mint-en) at times too. New England accent from childhood (but it's rhotic!)
Anyway, English spelling is not phonemic. I for one support a spelling revision.
But of course, this is unlikely in the near future.
The trick is learning to analyse spelling the same way babies analyse speech. To me, I've always rather disliked phonics exercises.
To me, to write something takes more effort than simply pointing one's hand to the right (it's more straining on the hand), so the "wr" is associated with exertion.
Meanwhile, the "gh" in "right" has a sort of upwards assertiveness to it (like claiming a right, or to be in the right) that "write" doesn't have.
I think skilled readers learn to read a word without actually looking at all the letters of a word. They don't use rules like "a is normally short by itself but long before 'e'" or the ubiquitous "i before e except after c", not even subconsciously or automatically.
Rather, each word contains motifs (linked to emotions and symbolic thoughts) that we recognise. So when we want to write a word, we think of the motifs associated with it, and then recall the letters easily. You can almost "feel" the spelling of the word.
A lot of strategies advocate "inferring from the context", but I think it highly depends on how exactly you make the inference.
Also, I find that independent dedicated reading (rather than forced reading) stimulates spelling ability more. At a young age, I remember how I got into books of ever thicker and thicker length. I remember in elementary school, someone referred to a large tome of Lord of the Rings (much bigger than any Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys book!) on my teacher's bookshelf and the remark was something along the lines of, "I bet you can't read that."
My response was, "oh yeah? I bet I can." And I took up the book mainly to fulfill the challenge. The reading was more labourious than any cheesy "young adult" fiction story. Of course I can't remember the labour of reading now (I am trying to remember how it was like) -- only what my attitude was -- that's how I remember it was labourious in the first place. But then it started to more than proving my friend wrong.
After a while, I found my appreciation impossible to keep alone, so I challenged my friend, "I'll bet five bucks you can't read that." My friend was hesitant so I increased it to 10. (My thoughts were, "Oh dear, what I have gotten myself into now!" 10 dollars is a hefty amount for an elementary school kid.) But in the end he loved it so much that he forgot all about the bet ... or so I thought, until he reminded me (jokingly) the next year that, "you were supposed to pay me 10 dollars!" but he let me off because he now knew what my intention had been. By then he had already pushed his friends to do it, who in turn pushed their friends, and so on.
It became sort of like an infectious disease.
So that's how I got both myself and friends into heavy reading -- and I think spelling ability is tied to this. The idea is confidence. Let kids see they have a viable chance of mastery -- they will independently go to lengths to support it.
Apologies, but I'm a little lost.
hey----you're in NY??
How did I miss that?
Yes, definitely.
backscratches for sure
it's possible to treat community members with respect and dignity
We have had an imperial board, that's for sure.
Also an imperial superintendent.
I don't know if you were around when I've mentioned the school board attorney who's been advising me informally. (She's not in this state.)
She said that school boards never have training in public relations, and that this is a big part of the problem.
One of the sources of difficulty, she said -- and this I believe -- is that there really are a LOT of parents in any school district who are basically nuts.
I questioned her pretty closely on this subject, because I do want to know whether I'm in that category.
Her answer was quite interesting.
She said that, typically, a school administration (administration, I believe, not the board) would see Ed and me in 3 ways:
* SPED parents; know their rights; give them what they want
* reasonable parents where their typical child is concerned; "not going to demand the school un-discipline their typical child"
* "bee in their bonnet" about academics, probably something to it, annoying
I think she's probably right about this, based in the "vibe" I get from the district now that it's clear I'm not going away.
I had a revealing conversation with another parent who told me a horrible story about .... hmmmm....
I'm not sure I can disguise this well enough to post.
In a general sense, my point is that the superintendent and the board in some cases get daily emails from parents complaining about other parents' children, among other things.
This is something I wouldn't dream of doing. (Never say never; I guess if I felt that another child was an active & ongoing danger to my own kid I could be emailing every day....but even then, I don't think I'd be sending C. to school if I thought there was a present physical danger from another student).
We have never, ever, complained about another student, and I don't think we ever would.
AND....(this is getting too long, sorry)....we've had I think 4 situations in which it would be normal to complain:
* once when C. was being bullied (2nd grade) - we resolved it on our own (would have contacted the school for help if our own efforts had failed, of course)
* once when a student at the 4-5 school told C. he was retarded like his brother (something like that) -- we didn't even care about that, frankly -- we just told C. to deal with it
* 6th grade when C. spent the ENTIRE school year being told, at lunch, that he was moved out of his ELA teacher's class because he was "stupid" and he deserved the two Ds she gave him --- an entire year of this, and we didn't grouse (I think I mentioned it to his guidance counselor once; that was it)
* 6th grade when C. was supposed to have an afterschool fight with a boy who said he had a knife -- we didn't contact the school over this! (Again, if we'd thought the other boy really did have a knife, we would have contacted the school. It was obvious the other boy was scared, and that saying he had a knife was the only way to get out of the fight.)
My point: we SERIOUSLY don't complain about other people's children. Period.
After talking to the mom I mentioned, I suddenly realized the district has worse problems than Ed and me.
Anyway, my point is that school boards get CONSTANT complaints from parents. Our own board receives, I think, 100 emails from parents a week, none of them happy.
They don't have training in public relations; no matter how good they are at their "day jobs," they don't have experience or expertise in being school board members.
I've started to try to "discount" the portion of the parent-school board conflict that comes from these two facts.
Don't know how to do it, of course.
I could've hopped on down to Irvington and explained very clearly to the board that the public can record a school board meeting and televise/distribute it without the approval of the board. They don't have the right to make the decision - it's already been made and I'm sorry that they told your district otherwise.
wow!
I sure wish I'd talked to you earlier.
One parent told us he was about 1 step away from doing a guerilla action. He was going to record the meeting on his cel phone.
You wouldn't believe the rules and regulations that have been laid down on parents.
My favorite was: no unauthorized hand-outs.
That was aimed at me, because I brought hand-outs publicizing the Irvington Parents Forum to a big board meeting.
If any questions come up about the 'open government' aspect of school boards in New York, feel free to call or e-mail me - I can likely help.
Will do.
We're working on the committee issue now.
Two other parents have done the heavy lifting; we're playing catch-up.
The most intense parent - amazing guy - has been turned away from committee meetings.
The superintendent finally went to their attorney to ask about committee meetings.
He said committee meetings, by law, have to be open.
The former board president said, "No, no, that's not right. Ask this other attorney."
The superintendent said, "I did. He said the committee meetings have to be open."
Someone on the board had mentioned, at a previous meeting, that they couldn't let just any parent serve on committees, because then the teachers would be "afraid to speak."
(This was reported to me; I didn't hear it myself.)
That won't work.
Again, I suspect I'm the target of this statement; I would presumably cause math teachers to fear speaking up for lousy constructivist textbooks.
That's how I construe the comment. I could be wrong.
But the very idea that teachers have to be protected from parents by THE SCHOOL BOARD is just beyond the pale.
Teachers have a union to threaten parents.
They don't need the board acting as their union, too.
We should talk.
Anyway, it has now been established that committee meetings are open.
I can go to meetings and scare everyone to death any time I like.
(I will never get over some of this stuff)
Sweet Mother of all that is Holy... We absolutely nede to talk - I can direct you to a resource that will clear all of this up, as well as most future issues, in about three seconds.
For some reason, school boards often fail to realize that a) they aren't the only school board in the county, state or country; b) someone has thought about these issues before; c) their ignorance of a), b) and all legal rulings/precedent is not proper justification for whatever answer their generally-unfamiliar-with-public-policy minds squirt out after the ideas bounce around.
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