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Hello,
I have been silent for quite a long time - I am terribly overwhelmed. I used to teach in public middle school in Brooklyn. Now, because my license for NJ is still not ready (oh, DOE!), I had to get a job in private catholic high school for girls where nobody cares if you are licenced.
Here, I thought, my life is going to be heaven (the heck with the miserable pay!)- my students and parents will care and work hard with me, and instead of disciplining students I will teach them... and I can use direct instruction methods without closing my door!
Well... The life often brings you surprises - the one for me: my son will not attend a private religious or non-religious school.
So here are my commentaries to share:
a) classes are smaller so the kids should be able to receive more personal attention. Hmm, yes, the classes are small (in NY my classes were 30-34, here - 22 maximum). However, when I teach 6 classes a day (4 different subjects) I am overburdened with amount of preparation and less effective as a teacher. Grading of the works still amounts for 120 students...
b)parents pay tuition so they are investing in their daughters' education and would be interested to learn about the progress. Hmm, during parent-teacher night I saw 8 parents. None of the 20 parents I have sent personal invitation to call me, e-mail me, or see me regarding their daughters who do nothing in my class responded in any way... When I call homes that the child does not do any HW, comes for help sessions or misbehaves, the response is either "ugh-ha" or "can't be".
c)Students slack homeworks, do not come to tutoring, and generally do not care in the same ways they do in public schools.
d)A lot of teachers teach by assigning reading from textbook in class and then going over the questions at the end of the chapter without getting up from the chair.
e)Teachers in my school were not observed by a supervisor for at least 3 years. The new principal decided to start observations this year and caused quite a havoc. Teachers from 3 other schools that belong to our archdiocese (we met at convent) said they were not observed for even longer time.
d)Teachers do not cooperate, teaching is not aligned, and many "cultural" and "fun" events still take away from learning time
e)I have no intentions to continue teaching in this school...
My additional frustration comes from working with freshman group this year. They have NO math skills. Linear equations? Forget it... Positive -negative numbers? What is it? Order of operations is not clear either. How am I supposed to teach them Physical Science that includes basic chemistry and physics without touching math? (when I spoke to the math teachers of these kids, their answer was "oh, it's a very low level group. We can't teach them anything either.")
I know why curriculum continues to get dumbed down and it's impossible to find a decent physical science textbook with problems involving math published after 1970... Because of frustration! I can't teach them science because the math is not there... Grrr....
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34 comments:
There are Catholic schools and Catholic schools. I bet Catholic boys' high schools are a completely different deal. There must be more than a few girls who are at that school just because the parents were at their wits end and wanted to keep them away from boys...
Catherine, is C's school just for boys, or is it co-ed? How do your experiences so far match Exo's?
My daughter is a first grader at a Protestant school. They started Spanish last year and they started having tests this year. So far, she has learned colors, parts of the body, animals, and is starting to learn Spanish questions. She informed me yesterday that a lot of people don't know it, but many place names in the US mean something in Spanish, and Boca Raton means rat's mouth!!! They do Singapore math, Spalding for spelling, music, music history, art, art history, and in fourth grade, they're going to switch over to Latin. They do nature fieldtrips every few months, and C now knows far more about the local trees than I do (I'm not from here). In 7th or 8th grade, they'll do Aristotelian logic.
Sorry to hear that. While I've only had personal experience in one K-8 parochial school, our experience has been quite different. And the (Boys) High School where my 8 year old went to sports camp this summer seemed aligned with my impressions.
But it shows schools still have to be administered well, and have an idea of how to teach. And that it comes from the top of the administration down.
BTW, here in California all the parochial schools require the same credentials as the public schools. It's not a legal requirement, but the Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum told me they try to keep their program of instruction in sync with the California standards so students can easily transfer from one to the other.
Amy, you are right of course. There are schools and there are schools.
May be that's just my luck...
Ben, my school is also reporting that the "teachers are seeking certifications or are certified" which is not true. Most of the teachers (at least those who stay longer that 3 years) graduated from catholic schools, and started teaching in catholic school right after college, and didn't see anything else...
I'm two weeks behind reading posts but when I saw this one -- oh, boy.
Had to read.
(I have TIME TOMORROW!!)
This is horrifying.
Absolutely horrifying.
As for what I think about this....sheesh.
I've heard universally (lots of comments on this blog, actually) that Catholic schools have gone downhill. This is a universal perception.
Partly that has to do with the fact that there are very few nuns these days; partly it has to do with the fact that the dominant culture affects Catholic schools, too. The little K-8 Catholic school here in town, where I considered transferring C when I realized what a disaster the middle school was, used Lucy Calkins for writing and had the kids producing PowerPoints as their "research paper" in 8th grade social studies. This was on the web site.
Now the school is closed & they have a sign up out front saying, "Visit our 21st century pre-school." (I've been planning to take a picture of it & post.)
When we had parent-teacher conference day at Hogwarts last week the ELA teacher complained about the "research" paper her elementary school daughter had just been assigned, which was going to require mass Googling and parent reteaching. Her daughter attends a Catholic school.
The assignment she described was EXACTLY the kind of thing we are constantly complaining about around here.
Basically, I'm not hearing particularly good things about "Catholic schools in general."
The other issue is: Hogwarts is a Jesuit school. That is HUGE. The Jesuits have a 400 year tradition of excellence in the liberal arts; that is their tradition and their identity. A lot of path dependency there.
Another thing: C's school is, in some ways, sui generis.
I hadn't gotten around to posting this yet, but this school has a constellation of factors that make it utterly unique:
* it has an association with a good university (this is typical with Jesuit high schools which all started as feeder schools to colleges, I think -- must check that -- point is: Jesuit high schools in this country were, I believe, from the beginning, college preparatory school)
* faculty members can send their kids to the associated college free of tuition, which means Hogwarts has married-with-children parents who stay in the job because their sons can have free education from 9th grade through college graduation (and perhaps beyond - I think the principal may have told me they get a break on law school tuition?); their daughters get free tuition in college
* because of this, faculty members are all middle-aged and see themselves as parents. That's the way they talk to parents: they talk to parents parent-to-parent.
* the school has a 150 year history - it is a beloved institution; huge numbers of the kids have dads, uncles, and even grandfathers who went there; the same is true of the faculty. The principal's father went there (did he say his grandfather went there??)
* the school was nearly closed down in the 60s or 70s, at the time that Brooklyn Prep was in fact closed down. The current principal led the charge to save it ---- he is the leader of the school, the soldier, the fighter, the protector -- these people have a mission. Period. They love this school, and they know how close it came to dying.
* competition: there are 3 fantastically good Jesuit high schools in the NYC area, and they're rivals. There are also a bunch of Diocesan Catholic High Schools plus some Christian Brothers high schools (I don't know if they're considered Diocesan) -- so there's a whole bunch of OK to good to very good to fantastic to one-of-the-best-schools-in-the-country Catholic high schools & that keeps them all on their toes. (It's very funny, because 6 months ago: what did I know about Catholic high schools? Nothing. Now I know which teams are good & what hostile nicknames they all have for each others' schools & which team wiped everyone else out on "New York Challenge" [what is NY Challenge? I don't know! I just know our team won]. C. has been transported body and soul into a parallel universe of Catholic Young Men Going Out To Compete Against Each Other On The Playing Fields Of NY Each And Every Weekend.)
I think that about covers it so far.
As I say: sui generis.
Of course, my other thought is: hand the whole public school system over to the Jesuits.
God's soldiers.
A couple years back, I was doing the DC parent thing, which means desperate school and neighborhood research. The Archdiocese of Arlington in Northern Virginia is supposed to be a sort of conservative Catholic mecca, so I did a lot of research on it. The religious education looked more than fine, but the math curriculum for the diocese was the hellish spiral that I had learned about from the old KTM: new topic, new topic, new topic, new topic, new topic, new topic, new topic, etc. Repeat with literally dozens of topics every year until the end of 7th grade, then juuuuuuuuuuump across the progressive abyss into rigorous, very systematic traditional 8th grade algebra. I can only imagine how many kids didn't make it across. It was a really disappointing discovery for me, especially since every school (public and private) in the metropolitan DC area that I looked at was doing progressive math. My husband ultimately got a job offer in Texas, locals recommended a classical school (run by faculty wives), and the rest is history.
oh - I do have one comment more.
We've gone to all the parent events. There've been quite a few.
At each and every one we are warned, repeatedly, that our kids are going to be getting their first bad grades ever.
They'll say things to us like, "Your sons have never had a C!"
or: "Your sons have never had a B!"
Midway through the quarter the kids are given "Deficiencies" in subjects where they're not doing well. Ed and I still don't know exactly what a Deficiency is, or why a kid gets one apart from: his work in that subject is Deficient.
The quarter is now over, and, yes, quite a few of the kids got Deficiencies.
C. got no Deficiencies, and easily earned all As and B+s & made "Highest Honors." (He's in all Honors courses, too, which he wouldn't have been here.)
When we went to teachers' conferences, teachers would say things like, "Oh, you're C's mom. That's easy."
The math teacher - C. is in "Algebra 2 Advanced Honors" - said, "He keeps up terrifically well. (That was one of his B+ grades.)
When I told her we'd had a lot of trouble in the middle school here, and asked her to be on the lookout for gaps in his knowledge, she just looked at me blankly. She didn't have a clue what I was talking about; she obviously perceives him as pretty much breezing through the course. (Well, maybe not breezing - he got a B+, not an A ----- but she saw him, and said she saw him, as a very strong math student.)
Finally I told her, "Look, I taught him most of the math he knows," she said, "You did a very good job."
(parallel universe)
My point is, though, that all of this has made me wonder what's going on in Catholic schools K-8. Hogwarts is very Catholic; 85% of the student body is Catholic. It's not like schools in the Midwest & CA, where Protestants have flooded in and make up 40% of the student population.
A huge number of these kids have attended Catholic schools from the get-go & C., who had such a struggle in the handful of accelerated middle school courses here, finds Honors level work quite a bit easier than those kids seem to do.
I don't know exactly what to make of this....I do wonder whether the silver lining of having a far-too-accelerated math course here, plus no spelling curriculum, etc. -- whether all the intensive afterschooling I've done bumped C. a lot further ahead than I realized.
We were constantly trying to keep his head above water; we were dealing with grades like "D" and the occasional "F" in accelerated math & Regents Earth Science.
So we were working our tushies off....and still seeing him as "struggling."
At the same time, I wonder how much the Catholic schools are teaching?
By the way, when I say we were "warned," it's completely different from all the warnings people get in public schools.
The principals tell hilarious stories about their own kids getting deficiencies, and they have a standing gag about how we parents are to MARK THE DAY OF THE DEFICIENCIES ON OUR CALENDARS because the deficiencies are not mailed home but are given to the boys in person, and IF YOUR SON TELLS YOU THE DEFICIENCIES ARE BEING MAILED HOME THAT IS NOT THE CASE, but of course NONE OF YOUR SONS WILL EVER DO SUCH A THING.
It's a whole stand-up routine on the subject of the 14-year old Hogwarts student who is NOT YOUR SON but who can be counted on to lie through his fricking teeth about Deficiencies, Report Cards, and everything else under the sun.
That school is one of the funnest places on Earth.
Math is a mess everywhere.
Sidwell Friends uses TERC (I'm pretty sure - Barry looked it up).
When we looked up the faculties at every private school within 30 miles, we found, again and again, that the only faculty members with ed school degrees were the math teachers.
For English, history, & foreign languages you get people with MAs and Ph.Ds in a discipline.
For math you get people with MAs in "math education."
(Can't remember what I found for science...)
It is a nightmare. The entire country is fuzzy, including Catholic & private schools.
ooooooooohhhhh
Sidwell has math nights for parents!
MATH CLASS FOR PARENTS CONTINUES Please join us for our upcoming second math class for parents! We have looked at addition and nw we will be moving on to subtraction, Friday December 5th at 7:45 a.m. Since so many parents are curious about how their children are learning math and want to understand the approaches we are taking in teaching the operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) at Lower School, the Math Coordinator and Math Resource Teacher will be offering a series of early morning math classes for parents of students in all grades. These classes will be held once a month on Friday mornings from 7:45 to 8:30. (By special arrangement, the Library will open 15 minutes earlier on these days for the children of the participating parents). · The second class on SUBTRACTION will be held on December 5th. · The third class on MULTIPLICATION will be held on January 9th. · The fourth class on DIVISION will be held on February 6th. We plan to hold class in the Math Lab, upstairs in the Manor House. We would appreciate gaining some sense of the number of parents who would like to participate. If you are interested and think you will be attending, please let us know via e-mail .Thanks. Merry Adelfio (Math Coordinator) adelfiom@sidwell.edu and Raina Fishbane (Math Resource Teacher) fishbaner@sidwell.edu
Isn't that special!
So now I'm experiencing moral hazard.
I have to hope the Obamas hate their math program.
You MUST check out the problems parents are going to study Friday mornings.
I'm pretty sure W. Stephen Wilson pulled his kid out of a Friends school because of TERC.
wow - his son's new school has a disciplinary focus.
Friends School uses the TERC Investigations math program in K-5. It is viewed by many as about the worst of the worst, and today that is a highly competitive field. Here are some reviews of the program:
Bill Quirk's review.
Stanley Ocken's review.
Mathematically Correct's review (second grade). To save you time, their Overall Program Evaluation (for the second grade) is: "There is nothing to recommend about this program. The use of this program in our public schools is a strong argument for vouchers."
Mathematically Correct's review (fifth grade). To save you time, their Overall Program Evaluation: "This program received the lowest overall rating of the [10] fifth-grade programs in this review. This program cannot be recommended for use in fifth-grade classrooms."
Our students (85% of them) come from Catholic middle schools. All of them sign up the obligation to enter college. 1/3 of the students attend summer school for math before entering 9th grade. SAT scores are low. Math is simply not there.
Curriculum for science did not exist in my school - I ended up writing it using a curriculum from Ridgewood, NJ high school as a sample. However, I can't teach science because students get lost in simple equations - and since for me it's so simple and I do it mentally, and I was not trained to explain math, I had a hard time realize why they couldn't do it... Now I spend my lessons explaining steps in adding and substracting positive and negative numbers. Just gives me a headache.
Speaking of teachers' attrition. The pay in Catholic schools is really miserable. I wouldn't take the job if NJ would accept my NY license. So it may explain why the science teacher before me just sat on his chair for 5 years and didn't do a single experient (he used PowerPOint from the publisher, as well as tests from the textbook). As a result, senior students who take Anatomy elective class (with intentions on pre-med major) DO NOT KNOW any Biology.
Catherine- Right there with you on the hope that the Obama's hate their math program but if they liked Everyday Mathematics at the U of C Lab School, I don't see much hope of that...
http://www.ucls.uchicago.edu/academics/curriculum/math.shtml
So, they're going to Sidwell Friends, that uses TERC and has "Math Classes for Parents!" in the morning. I hope they go. Unfortunately, with enough support at home, schools can get away with a lot of silliness. At the private schools I looked at around our area, all of them used Everyday Math. When questioned, they all said that they supplemented with drill. Right. Why not just use a better curriculum?
At Sidwell Friends, they have sessions that show parents how they teach their kids to "think". Right.
Finally I told her, "Look, I taught him most of the math he knows," she said, "You did a very good job."
(parallel universe)
Well that, my friend, is worth the price of admission. Have I told you lately how much I LOVE these stories?
The Obama girls did go to the Lab school, like anon said, so they've had EM from the beginning. If they haven't spotted a red flag by now, they might not at all. Although, I do wonder if they'll be blaming the kids or the parents later for any failings they might have. That would be a pretty interesting parent-teacher conference.
Catholic schools do really range in quality. It's hard to figure out the good ones from the bad ones, but one way is to look at their mission statement. Although, even that can be misleading.
Obviously, checking on the math curriculum tells a lot.
My question is--are their other kinds of schools besides the Jesuits? I've heard Franciscan, but not being Catholic I have no idea what this might mean.
SusanS
Jesuits are the most "intellectual" of all the orders. Seeking knowledge is their tradition, making them uniquely equipped as educators. Jesuits are who they are because they're on a quest for knowledge. It really sets the tone for their schools.
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As for the math thing, I was saddened to find that many Catholic schools are adopting local standards of education. That is, too many of them are taking the state guidelines and trying to replicate much of what is happening in public schools. You really have to do your homework when it comes to any private school, parochial or secular. You might be surprised at what you find. I know I was.
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I've been pondering the Obama choice of schools focusing solely on the issue of math. I'm wondering if the fact that the school uses Investigations (TERC) could be a good/bad thing. Investigations is reputed to be worse than Everyday Math (if that's even possible) and at the very minimum it's a change from one curriculum to another with a difference in some of the methods. That might be enough for the Obamas to at least take notice. Of course, Sidwell Friends is big on flexible grouping which should certainly mitigate the damage. I'm sure they also have some kind of additional program to supplement Investigations and plug any holes, and we cannot forget that Sidwell has parents who are ready to jump in with homework or tutoring whenever necessary. You cannot compare it to a public school that implements Investigations. Well you could, but it wouldn't be a fair comparison.
There's a new blog "New Jersey Coalition For World Class Math Standards" at
http://njworldclassmath.webs.com/
that you might want to check out. It seems that Missouri and New Jersey have alot in common when it comes to mediocre math standards.
Better state standards are needed to keep inadequate programs out of the schools.
I wonder if some disambiguation is needed, relative to Catholic schools. My impression is that the K-8 schools are (mostly) under the control of the individual dioceses, and the educational quality and rigor might vary by the interest of the diocesan staff.
The 9-12 schools tend to be under the care of a particular order (Sacred Heart, Sisters of Mercy, Benedictines, Jesuits, etc.).
The Catholic 9-12 schools also vary in quality. My impression is, at least in this part of California, not so much by order but by the tradition and history of the school.
Exo, I am sorry that you are having such an unhappy experience. It sounds like the culture of your school isn't particularly invested in rigor or academic achievement.
"Jesuits are the most "intellectual" of all the orders."
The Jesuits have the strongest teaching tradition of all Catholic religious orders. Gilbert Highet, in his classic "The Art of Teaching" devotes an entire chapter to Jesuit pedagogy, which was very rational and humane from the get-go. There was also a lot of emphasis on memorization (of verse), competition, and debates. There's this thing called the Ratio Studiorum which I haven't read myself, but which is basically the Jesuit constitution for education. Jesuit schools were suppposed to be free (hee! hee!).
As to which is the most intellectual order, I think a lot of people would say that the Dominicans (the Order of Preachers) are up there, too. My husband (a bit of an Aquinas scholar) is a big fan of the Dominicans.
Amy- absolutely.
Overgeneralizing the Jesuits, too. Really, not all Jesuit schools are tip top anymore. Many are far from it.
re: Catholic grammar schools vs Catholic high schools: very few Catholic high schools are taught by an order any more. Most Catholic grammar schools are not controlled at the curricular or teacher level by the diocese, either, but by the parish, which is in various states of decline (though often the diocese refuses to pull the trigger and close failing schools, so the process of the decline continues to infect the rest....) In both cases, in most dioceses, a school is allowed to claim it is "catholic" with MINOR MINOR restrictions--like the bishop is on the board, and maybe two board members are Catholic.
Exo, I think your problem is you're comparing apples to oranges in the first place. you went from a middle school with a different base population in Brooklyn to a all girls' school in NJ--and you don't say where in NJ. First, girls' schools have never been strong in math. Ever. This "students slack and dont' care...THE WAY THEY DO in PUBLIC SCHOOLS" is malarkey. In MOST high schools, kids don't care. Sometimes, their parents do, but it depends. Your prior school experience may have been special because of the age range, the parents' SES, etc. But I doubt very much that if you taught in PS39487 in new york you'd see well prepared math kids of any stripe, either.
Allison,
you may be right. I may be comparing apples to oranges. I taught in MS 88 in Brooklyn on the border between very wealthy Pakr Slope and poor Sunset PArk(the school was considered Title X, with very low SES); I taught honors and "close to honors" Regents Biology and General Science.
Here, in South Orange, NJ (well the neigborhood is not very high SES either, but again - on the border. I teach Honors and Regular classes (9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade). The school is college preparatory academy for girls, so academics is valued per se. However, I taught material of Physical Science to 7th and 8th graders in NY when doing physics "russian style" without getting that "look" from students as soon as we start solving problems.
Problem is, I don't know what to do. Stop this topic? Move on without mastery? Sit on it until we are blue? I spoke to math teachers - they said they will offer tutoring to kids..
I can't find any test scores for Sidwell. Are private schools not required to report those?
It probably depends on the state. In my state, private schools aren't required to administered the state tests (although some do), and don't seem to be required to report to the public any scores from any tests they do administer. Sometimes you can find high school scores, like ACT/SAT, on their websites. Not always.
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