Chapters One

and Eight

chapter one:

King School, although fictitious, is very similar to a number of schools in Kentucky that sprang up as a result of the Reform Act. One of the schools used for this design was the Chance School, which my son attended until Grade 3. The cost was over $6,000 a year, catering to a highly educated, upper middle class to upper class population. The practices were virtually identical to this article. Unfortunately, in my son's class of 32, 12 students, including my son, were given labels of LD, which is statistically impossible. No phonics, rote, memorization skills, word building skills or simple math facts were taught.

As a result, I have little interest in the Utopia presented in this model. How many children have word attack skills? How many children can add, subtract, and understand the concept of numbers? The suffering that resulted from this model continued, throughout high school. As a result of the lost window of opportunity for teaching these vital skills, all twelve students had to compensate through tutoring, Sylvan classes, staying after school in order to grasp the very basics lost in the first essential three years of school. Oddly, my son's 'learning disability" was CURED through direct methods. He is, as are his other friends from Chance, very bright.

The elitist model posed disregarding direct teaching does not take into consideration that in every class, at least one-third of the students have to learn DIFFERENTLY, meaning: phonics, rote, memorization, short answer tests…. The middle third of the class works very hard, sometimes grasping important basics, and sometimes not. The top third, are children who would learn to read in a cave. The assumption that direct teaching methods are BAD is incredibly frustrating to parents whose children do not learn to read or do math through OSMOSIS. Following specific philosophies to the exclusion of other successful models is, in my opinion, short-sighted and exclusionary to the detriment of our students.

A never ending journey

Excuse me, when does Maria encounter a real class in a real school? How did John Dewey handle a group of students who daily entered the classroom high on glue , overturning desks, and refusing to listen to any instruction? This is the REAL learning experience (at least in my regular ed. language arts class at Westport Middle School) and classroom management is the REAL issue.

chapter eight:

The little school…:

Again, could we have an example of a REAL school? Nice ideas, but I would prefer hearing about them ten to fifteen years down the line after all of the theories and philosophies have been honed and polished.

Governence:

Jayne John has an interesting system in place, which could become a model for other schools. Her school, however, appears to be a privilaged segment of society. In my last placement, parents could not be found, were in jail, were too drugged to even call their children, therefore, donating time was simply not feasible. I would enjoy reading about ghetto/lower income or transcient populations that have made strong positive changes in their community schools, and somehow, were able to involve these errant parents.