Monday, October 16, 2006

More Advice for Teachers

mellowman, one of my commenter’s made a great suggestion/remark.

He said he liked class websites that allow parents and students to see and/or download homework assignments.

This is one of those great ideas that would require an extraordinary amount of discipline from the teacher. Updating a website can be a time consuming practice, but the benefits would be immense.

Perhaps teachers should create a blog for each class. With today’s web based tools, it would only take a few minutes to create a blogger post and upload it to a website. They could do a short post outlining the homework assignments and any class notes. If they had electronic copies of any worksheets it should be relatively simple to upload it as well.

Parental Struggles Update

Just clarification of my earlier post Parental Struggles. The school imposed punishment is for one day of in-school suspension.

The idea to attend school with my niece is our punishment in addition to the school punishment. I can think of nothing more embarressing than having your uncle sit in all your 10th grade classes with you and hang out with you at school. I expect I will get some funny stares and a few smart ass comments, but we can not accept behavior like this. Besides, I will get to see the quality of teaching that goes on at our local High School, and I might even learn something.

Need Advice/Help!

Teachers, experts, parents... we need some advice/help.

One of our 3rd graders is behind in her reading comprehension skills. She is already getting after school tutoring that utilyzes computer based instruction, but we would like to know what else we can do to help at home. One idea that we had was to have her read out loud to us for her daily 15 minutes of reading and her reading worksheets, but we are unsure if this is the most effective method. Truthfully, we have limited time to spend hours of one on one instruction (6 kids, including an infant) and we can not afford private tutoring. We are looking for things that we can do to help her get more out of her current assignments and extra things we could do that take up no more than 20 to 30 minutes.

Parental Struggles

Niece busted for smoking at school. One day in-school suspension. In addition, I am going to take a day off work and sit in every class with her one day next week. Nothing worse than having a parent attend school with you. We also e-mailed every teacher of hers and let them know to report any misbehaviour, missed assignments, or unusual behavior.

I am disappointed.