A Brooklyn elementary school teacher writes:
My school applauded itself last week when we got back the ela and math scores. I even felt somewhat proud of one of my 5th grade SETSS kids who has an extreme math disability. For the first time in her school testing career, she received a Level 2 on the math test. Maybe all of her (and my) hard work paid off. Hours of practicing counting by 2's and 5's. Great Leaps for math facts, manipulative's for number work, mnemonics to remember when to regroup and how to round numbers to the nearest 10's and 100's, etc.etc.
So I asked her to do some review work and gave her a few subtraction problems. Guess what. She forgot when to regroup.Then she did some number rounding. She could do it after I reminded her how.
I still am proud of my student because she tried very hard and has learned a lot this year. She knows the importance of doing what you believe is right and not falling prey to peer pressure when it will have a negative outcome. She is beginning to think about what it means to "grow-up" from a little girl to a 'teenager". Her taste in reading has widened and she enjoys spending time with books more then ever before.
But she still can't subtract with regrouping even if she got a Level 2.
The City Wide Test were so easy. At this point most children should have good grades because of how easy the teast was. = In summary we got inflated grades that do not correspond to the real knowledge of the children.
ReplyDeleteThat is exactly what has happened. And as a result, there is very little summer school going on which saves the city lots of $$$. Anyway, the only purpose of summer school was to train the kids to pass the much easier end of summer tests. Imagine if the DOE had planned some exciting, meaningful summer school opportunities for our kids since they don't need the summer test prep.
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