To our intense dismay — because we are both strong proponents of the public school system — for the past few years we’ve found ourselves deeply dissatisfied with our local public school. Which, according to all publicly available data, is supposed to be a good school. It’s a school at 108% (or something similar) capacity, though, and there are nearly a thousand kids there from JK-8 so it’s a school that focuses very much on shallow compliance and smooth operation. It doesn’t really have time to give a fig about any particular individual student and it makes no attempt to do so. M was bored and unchallenged there, a problem which nobody attempted to rectify in any useful way, and we put up with many ridiculous and unhelpful processes. Her teacher last year in particular was absurd in her marking (examples below) and really went out of her way to set kids up to fail.
Leaving the absurd marking aside, one example. At a parent-teacher interview I caught sight of the sheet on the wall on which the teacher recorded whether or not the seven- and eight-year-old kids had, without any prompting from her (“OK kids, get your reading logs out of your backpacks NOW and put them RIGHT HERE” would be age-appropriate), turned in their reading logs on the assigned date and at the assigned time, and found a row of six or seven negative Xs beside M’s name. Why on earth, I asked the teacher, did you let this happen for more than two weeks without writing something in the @^$##@ planner that goes back and forth every day and which is supposed to convey such information? She sidestepped the question.
M’s reading log — and she was not the only one; this was the case for about a third of the class — had in fact been sent back to school on time each week in her backpack, so somehow not only was the teacher somehow failing to get the kids to turn them in, but she also wasn’t communicating anything to us that could’ve helped solve the problem. She was more interested in playing Gotcha! than in helping the kids learn. Of course, this is only one example, but if I listed all the ones I know of nobody would be able to read to the end in one sitting.
Then we looked at some of M’s work and discovered that the exact same bit of work hadn’t been done in the exact same place on each week’s spelling worksheet for fourteen weeks in a row, again with nothing mentioned in the supposedly critical planner.
At that point I admit I wrote off the teacher utterly and attempted to suppress some very stabby thoughts indeed.
By about February we were wondering whether we shouldn’t pull M out after March Break and homeschool until the end of the year. At that time I had a layoff notice for the end of March and while I may well suck as a teacher, I could not possibly suck as badly as the teacher she had. Had I been laid off this probably would’ve happened, but the layoff notice was rescinded so we focused our efforts in getting through the school year and preparing for the next.
We recognized that grade 3/4 — where you begin to read to learn instead of learning to read — is a perilous time for bright kids and that if you let them turn off, tune out and coast at this point, it’s very hard to get them back into active learning. In Toronto gifted programs used to start in grade 3 for this reason. Now they start in grade 5 or 6 — much too late. We figured we’d better do something pretty quickly because taking a flyer on M’s ending up with a teacher within her public school good enough to counter the damage her grade 3 teacher did was kind of a long shot. I hadn’t heard any particular schoolyard gossip extolling the virtues of the grade 4 teachers. The only other public option was sending her to grade-4 entry French Immersion, and the research on French Immersion didn’t lead us to conclude it was a good idea (sadly. French Immersion kids tend, in the general case, to emerge with bad English and then proceed to lose their French).
For April, May and June M went to 2 hours a week of tutoring at Oxford Learning. They were expensive and M didn’t have any particular academic issues aside from being bored, but we wanted her to remember that learning and challenging yourself could be both fun and worthwhile. Oxford did that job very well. I recommend them.
In January I sat down one night and looked up all the alternative schools within a 45-minute transit ride from our house. We ended up applying to one, but they used a lottery admission system and M’s number didn’t come up. There was no point trying other public schools in our neighbourhood. They’re all massively oversubscribed and none are taking out-of-area kids.
In early March I sat down again and went through all 174 (at the time) private elementary schools listed on the TDSB website. I eliminated schools that were unreachably distant and schools that were religious (madrassas, Christian, Jewish). I reviewed the websites of the remaining schools and among five or six possibilities ended up with a clear front-runner in the tiny Howlett Academy on Madison, next door to the Tibetan Buddhists and across from the eponymous pub.
We toured the school and OMG, it was like night and day. The kids there were engaged, the teachers customize the curriculum for every single child so they are all appropriately challenged (this is only possible with a tiny school), and oh, their processes were so, so sensible. They do everything humanly possible to set the kids up to succeed and to teach them HOW to learn as well as expecting them to then put it into action and do the learning. They have high expectations and they set kids up to meet them. The head of the school, a teacher herself, set it up to counter the flaws she perceived her own boys experienced in the public system — the exact flaws we too were perceiving.
M started there this week and yes, night and day. She loves her teacher and agrees she’s not bored and has learned stuff. Yay.
As parents we love that the school sent home a mere two forms at the beginning of the year. These forms took me 8.5 minutes to fill out, vs. the hour I spent last year, and since they were brief and efficient they didn’t leave me in a foul temper. They accomplished in about four paragraphs what took the old school twelve pages and eight separate forms.
Also, there has been nary a whiff of Comic Sans. That alone is worth I don’t know how many thousand dollars of tuition.