I miss my homeschool calendar! Public school rant

[Night Elf]

I have tremendous respect for teachers. They deserve and **need** every in-service day/hour they get.

 

I was an education major and one thing I noticed was that teachers rarely got down time. When i worked full time in an office, I could sit at my desk and do things without being interrupted. I could eat my lunch in peace. At the schools I went to, teachers were with those kids all day. They sat at the lunch tables with their class. They accompanied them outside for recess. The only time they had alone was during specials and it was so short because there was never more than one special per day. PE was twice a week, art was one day, music was one day, and foreign language was the fifth day. All of the teachers I knew worked at home preparing for class each day. They said it was just part of teaching and I would have to do it too if I wanted my school day to go smoothly. Everything was planned out because they couldn't let the kids have time to get wild as it took time to get them refocused on school work.

[Julie Smith]

My (teacher) husband hates all these weird days too. Rally schedules, staff development, collaboration time, etc., all eat into teaching time and provide very little benefit that he can see.

 

He had a staff development day--no students--on Monday which was a new low in his 18 year career. His district paid (and probably quite well) for a "consultant" to come in and have the teachers do things like walk in concentric circles while telling each other, "You are awesome!" and "I want to learn more about you!" The weirdest part was the 45 minutes (no exaggeration) they played a game where you made a sound, the person to your left made a different sound, and the person across from you made a third sound. Then the person on their left started it all over. I think the sounds were something like "Wooooooo!" "Zap!" "Kooooow!" They did it over and over and over until they got the pattern of words and order of people right.

 

I don't know whether we should be laughing or crying, but crying feels more appropriate.

 

I was a college professor. We never did anything that strange. But I found some of the various special activities to help/improve our teaching were equally useless.

 

What was funny is afterwards about half the people would seriously talk about how useful the speaker/activity/event was.

[Tap]

How are Private Schools and Public Schools in "the same school district?" You mean they are in the same general area? But not the same school district, yes?

 

I get how the conflicting calendars of Public Schools and Private Schools can cause inconvenience to parents who have children in both.

 

Bill

 

With regard to the OP having kids in private and public. The schools are not in the same district. By saying they are in the same district, you suggest they are under the same regulatory authority. Where I live a private is not subject to following the district where it is geographically located. It's a private school. So it sets its own schedule.

 

.......QUOTE]

 

I live in an area with 5 school districts. Each of the districts have different calendars. For instance, some districts take the last week of March for spring break, others take the first week of April. Teacher inservice days are not the same, and school holidays like conferences are not necessarily at the same time of the year. Private schools do have their own schedules and every one we have been involved with has had a calendar that is different than the school district boundaries that it resides. They do however, typically have the same major days off. They take spring break at the same time as the district they reside in, etc.

 

If my kids were in different school districts there would have been even more variations in their schedules. Two major ones would be: one district doing late starts every other week, conflicting with my dd5s weekly alternating early out days, and spring breaks at different times.