Our school system offers online schooling and we had to put our daughter in it at least temporarily, because she was the most bullied kid in her school and it got to the point one day that she broke down and cried and said she couldn’t go to that school one more day. So I’m glad that option is there, but I have big issues with it, especially with English, because the education company they contracted with only uses public domain texts and your average seventh grader whose experience with English has been books like Hatchet and The Giver, can’t parse at all. Plus, it’s stuff like H. H. Munro, who wrote stories about Edwardian English aristocrats, so she can’t understand the texts both because of the language and the fact that she has no frame of reference. The English teacher I’m emailing about it doesn’t seem to care, but I’m basically having to walk her through the lesson each time and go through the text slowly, reading it to her so she doesn’t mess up all the hard words, and stopping every few sentences to explain to her what’s going on. We’ve only been at it a week, and it’s such a needless slog. She has no trouble at all with the parts of the English lessons that don’t involve those texts. She understands all the concepts being taught. But 19th century literature is not appropriate for an average 7th grade reader.
Eventually, we want to get her into another middle school, but she needs a mental break from being around other kids to heal. This is ridiculous though, and I have no idea how other kids in this program get through it, because we were told everyone from kids with psychological issues to kids who were expelled are in the online school and I doubt those expelled kids are able to follow an O. Henry story about a safecracker full of slang with an ironic twist ending.
Theoretically, in Indiana, we could just pull her out of the school system entirely and find some other homeschool curriculum for her to follow. It’s totally unregulated here. But then we wouldn’t have anyone to turn to if we needed help. At least in this case, there’s a teacher I can eventually browbeat into doing a tutoring session.
We’re just lucky I’m on FMLA right now, otherwise she would just fail out of this entirely.
Sorry, not all that related to what is going on. I just needed to vent. I feel so trapped with my daughter.
I’d say school failings in dealing with bulling and with any student with a special need (even ADHD) is a big part of what’s going on. It’s not just the parents not trusting the education content - it’s often more about the environment at the school preventing education at all, for various reasons. And I don’t understand it - we had bulling when I was in school in the 90s, heck I was a “victim”, but the school kept it clampt down, and I pretty much got over the minor stuff that still happened. There’s plenty of stories about alternative systems like these home school pods and such also not having the same bullying problems either. So what is the issue with public schools? I tend to blame it on the system being rigid, mixed with not enough resources even though we spend so much on the schools.
Our school system offers online schooling and we had to put our daughter in it at least temporarily, because she was the most bullied kid in her school and it got to the point one day that she broke down and cried and said she couldn’t go to that school one more day. So I’m glad that option is there, but I have big issues with it, especially with English, because the education company they contracted with only uses public domain texts and your average seventh grader whose experience with English has been books like Hatchet and The Giver, can’t parse at all. Plus, it’s stuff like H. H. Munro, who wrote stories about Edwardian English aristocrats, so she can’t understand the texts both because of the language and the fact that she has no frame of reference. The English teacher I’m emailing about it doesn’t seem to care, but I’m basically having to walk her through the lesson each time and go through the text slowly, reading it to her so she doesn’t mess up all the hard words, and stopping every few sentences to explain to her what’s going on. We’ve only been at it a week, and it’s such a needless slog. She has no trouble at all with the parts of the English lessons that don’t involve those texts. She understands all the concepts being taught. But 19th century literature is not appropriate for an average 7th grade reader.
Eventually, we want to get her into another middle school, but she needs a mental break from being around other kids to heal. This is ridiculous though, and I have no idea how other kids in this program get through it, because we were told everyone from kids with psychological issues to kids who were expelled are in the online school and I doubt those expelled kids are able to follow an O. Henry story about a safecracker full of slang with an ironic twist ending.
Theoretically, in Indiana, we could just pull her out of the school system entirely and find some other homeschool curriculum for her to follow. It’s totally unregulated here. But then we wouldn’t have anyone to turn to if we needed help. At least in this case, there’s a teacher I can eventually browbeat into doing a tutoring session.
We’re just lucky I’m on FMLA right now, otherwise she would just fail out of this entirely.
Sorry, not all that related to what is going on. I just needed to vent. I feel so trapped with my daughter.
I’d say school failings in dealing with bulling and with any student with a special need (even ADHD) is a big part of what’s going on. It’s not just the parents not trusting the education content - it’s often more about the environment at the school preventing education at all, for various reasons. And I don’t understand it - we had bulling when I was in school in the 90s, heck I was a “victim”, but the school kept it clampt down, and I pretty much got over the minor stuff that still happened. There’s plenty of stories about alternative systems like these home school pods and such also not having the same bullying problems either. So what is the issue with public schools? I tend to blame it on the system being rigid, mixed with not enough resources even though we spend so much on the schools.