If you have spent any time with me this summer, you have probably already heard this rant in person. I apologize in advance, but I have to vent again or I might explode.
Maria is going into the 6th grade - the first grade of middle school. For a couple of years the middle school has had all incoming students complete a summer reading project. And I heard a lot of complaints about the size of this project, both form co-workers and parents of really good students. I don't think most parents have a problem with their kids being asked to read over the summer, maybe write a reflection or two. But when the assignment becomes so big that it is taking up hours and hours of a student's summer, and they are still only in middle school, there is a problem. Apparently some parents complained excessively, and went to the school board to try to get summer reading abolished. But given how the parents went about this, and the fact that it got very ugly, the school decided to fight back. This summer they gave each kid summer reading and summer math. Now you might think that the addition of summer math was only in the best interest of our children's education. But Ben heard it straight from the boss's mouth - "Wait till those parents see that we added summer math too!"
Maria's summer reading project consisted of her reading one assigned book and then making a scrapbook page about a dog she either has had or would like to have. She is a little disappointed since she doesn't like dogs, but the assignment is very reasonable for a 6th grader's summer. The summer math, however, is ridiculous.
Maria is part of the first 6th grade class to have the summer math packet. There was an informational meeting about these packets in the spring, but we were given less than a week's notice about this meeting and had a dance dress rehearsal, so we had to miss the meeting. Not a big deal, as the actual math packet wasn't even ready to hand out to parents. I don't think a professional should invite all of his parents to an evening informational meeting and then not have the actual information to hand out, but that's me. Maria was given the packet on one of the last days of school, and we left for vacation two days later, so I didn't worry about it until we got back from our vacation.
My first hint that this might be a problem was when I overheard another mother talking at Sam's baseball game about how much work this math was, and how long it was taking her 6th grade daughter to even complete one problem. In the back of my head, I was thinking "How bad could it be - it's summer!" But I asked Maria to dig out the assignment and show it to me that night.
And boy was I wrong. Ten weeks worth of stuff (our vacation this year was only a little over ten weeks long). Each week was a page in length, broken up into six boxes, and each box had three multi-part problems. One box was to be done a day - for six days, each week all summer. And each box took at least a half hour to do - and that's if Maria knew how to do the problem. All in all, it was several hundred problems. To make up for being gone on vacation, or camp, or that fun summer stuff that is what kids are supposed to do in the summer, each child had to do hours of extra work.
On top of the length of the assignment, many parts were extremely difficult. It was supposed to be based only on the 5th grade standards that the students had already been taught. But my daughter is at the top of her class. If she didn't have any idea how to do some of it, I feel very badly for many of the other students. I spent hours helping her, looking up answers and methods on the online textbook, and even resorted to e-mailing the teacher our question (which he encouraged in his directions). He never even e-mailed back. If I worked during the summer, it would have been very difficult to have spent that much time helping her. Moreover, the posted online answers that we were encouraged to check came from another school district's site in another state - who most likely has different math standards. Being an educator, I would never steal a huge assignment like this, without doing the problems myself and then making my own answer sheet. At times the posted answers were even wrong and made no sense. I taught Chemistry several years ago, and spent many evenings working out problems so that I would be prepared to teach it the next day. That this teacher gave the kids hundreds of problems that he stole from somewhere else and never even worked out on his own in inexcusable.
But I have to hold my tongue. I work in the same school district. And the person that I would need to complain to would take my complaints and talk around them forever and then convince herself the school has done nothing wrong. Or worse, if I e-mailed her the complaints, I would receive a reply with lots of capital lettered words, underlining, and colored phrases for emphasis. And the tone would be extremely condescending. Trust me, Ben has worked for this person for many years. And in the end, nothing would change. But I have heard that many people in the community are also upset, so I have a feeling I won't need to add in my opinion.
Maria and I finished the packet tonight. We've spent 6 or 7 hours just the last two days to finally get it all done. And now I am worried that if everyone had trouble, the teacher won't count it as a grade. And that will make me furious, since Maria spent so long and worked so hard to do a quality job on every problem. So Ben and I decided we won't officially complain about the assignment, but if an acceptable amount of credit is not given for the assignment, then will need to say something. And the sad thing is, this is not a good way Maria to start off in the middle school - hating it because she had to work on math all summer. She's a kid, and summer should be about fun and lazy days, not integers and percents and story problems.
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