Yay! The kids are back in school, woo-hoo!!

[Avatar]

Good for you Malik. Get them started young.

(Purely as a point of interest, our school year here runs from January to December, with short(ish) holidays breaking terms up.)

--A

[Lord Mhoram]

I start tomorrow. I probably shouldn't be here from Monday-Friday, and if I am it just means I'm not doing my homework.

[Waddley]

My sister starts kindergarten today.... that makes me feel old It feels like next time I visit her she'll be in high school. She needs to just stop growing up. Right now. She's perfect like she is.

BUT she's in the advanced class cause she's awesomly super smart!! I'd take credit, because I buy her so many books, but I only see her a few times a month, so that wouldn't be right.

[A Gunslinger]

my twins just started 6th grade today! Yuk.

[duchess of malfi]

That's a tough age to be in school! Every adult I know says that either sixth or seventh grade was one of the worst years of their lives.

[Holsety]

4. Our younger son is very bright, and he was getting very frustrated in school, as the pace was much too slow for him, so he was zoning out a lot and not paying attention, and missing assignments because he would be wool gathering rather than listening to the teacher. He is a Calvin, with his pet cat Bud being Hobbs.
6. Until he can control the wool gathering a bit better, we did not feel he was completely ready for high school yet, especially since he would be involved in two sports, at least one (if not both) on a varsity level. Sports suck up an immense amount of time.

Just to say something...#4 is definitely representative of problems with schooling I've seen right now. I live in a pretty good town educationwise, with a high school that's competitive with the private school...but it still doesn't do that well pulling kids in. My high school has great upper level classes with engaging teachers - I swear my AP bio and english teachers could teach college - and their classes have an irregularly high number of 5s on the AP test etc (so they stand up to the standardized measurements of education as well). However, my experiences in 9th grade, when there weren't many high level classes I could take, I had a very boring year outside of English (good teacher). I'm personally a very motivated person - I forced myself to work because I knew, even then, that to do less in High school might limit my options in choosing colleges, and college being all that I hear I'd like to have as much of a choice as I can manage. But, a number of my friends fell drastically behind due to boredom and are now in the lowest level classes, although I feel they've got the mental capacity to be in the highest.

And as for #6 I had a lucky break - my sport of choice is swimming. The varsity team excercises at 5:00 AM, and since I'm never up that early anyway the practices don't affect me much. The meets have only once in 3 years made it difficult for me to do homework, and I had to struggle to write the essay on the bus despite all the shaking and such going on.

On homeschooling: good for you, Duchess. I don't homeschool myself, but I sure spend plenty of time teaching my kids. My 5-yr-old just started kindergarden, and his teacher was shocked that he already knows how to read.

Same experience here. However, my teacher probably would've been even more worried if she knew I had beaten Super Mario Bros. 3 a year before learning to read

7th grade was the worst for me, more because of the lack of good teachers - a good science teacher and the rest were terrible. 8th grade, I had a teacher who taught on a higher level of thinking than I've had in AP history courses.

EDIT-I'm not actually back in school right now, 2 more days. Thankfully I'm done with all my summer stuff.

[A Gunslinger]

My kids are definitely bright, engaging and equal to the task of mitigating the 6th and 7th grades. Hopefully, without much pain.

[Holsety]

My kids are definitely bright, engaging and equal to the task of mitigating the 6th and 7th grades. Hopefully, without much pain.

The question as I see it, to which homeschooling/private school is sometimes the best solution, is whether they and other schoolkids will have teachers who are intelligent and/or engaging (depending on the teacher, subject, and students, things can work out with only one of the two). My impression from what I know of the US education system is that there are two reasons which outdo the others in terms of hurting a child's education - life outside of school, which seems to vary greatly depending on what district and location you're talking about, and the quality of teachers and staff within the school, which can also vary by district but isn't dictated by it.

[duchess of malfi]

Both of his sports (soccer and wrestling) expect year round work outs. My pet peeves are workouts on major holidays.

Now my older son has never had any focusing problems. So in the fall he would work out or play soccer 5-6 days a week and do the wrestling workouts at least 2 times a week. And still do great in his classwork.

In the winter, wrestling 6 days a week, sometimes 7 (the coach allows is generous in letting the Sunday practice be optional ). He always blew off the soccer workouts in the winter, as those were mostly conditioning and weight training anyway, and he was already doing those for wrestling.

My younger son is going to have trouble with workouts lasting 2-3 hours a night, and having tournaments all day long on Saturdays. We all know this. He takes a lot longer with his homework, and the sports are going to kill him.

Did you know that the damned sports are getting to be so ridiculously demanding that the state just passed something that says that no public high school can have mandatory practices for any sport during the week of the Fourth of July??? I wish they would also pass the same thing for all major holidays and Sundays as well!!!!!

[sgt.null]

our DIL is "home schooling" her two kids (the third is only 3) and her brother. of course she hasn't got the books yet, and she had trouble enough scraping through high school. I do not understand why a teacher needs a degree to teach, but she does not.

[A Gunslinger]

I am leery of homeschooling in that I beleive kids need social interaction and exposure to outside influences. Home schooling is way to controlled and protected an environment, IMO.

[duchess of malfi]

In our case, our son is seeing his friends regularly in his travel soccer and his wrestling club, as well as having sleep overs at their houses and having them come over to ours. The social thing was one of our bigger concerns.

Our high school principle told us we were the first couple with college degrees who has ever pulled their kid out for home schooling.

[CovenantJr]

My 5-yr-old just started kindergarden, and his teacher was shocked that he already knows how to read.

The mind boggles that teachers are shocked by this. Having not raised a child yet I don't really know what I'm talking about, but I always had a vague notion that starting school before being able to read was a bit bizarre. Then again, my mum prides herself on making sure she educated my brother and I to the best of her abilities before we started school.

There's no way a child of mine will still be illiterate by five years of age!