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Originally Posted by 4EverLearning
I've never been to Gambier, but I am familiar with Mount Vernon. I know someone who teaches at Mount Vernon Nazarene College, and I used to visit him there. You and Jane have been on a lot of campus visits at this point. Do you think she is afraid to commit to a decision? How is she doing emotionally these days?
We've probably visited upwards of two dozen campuses! No, it's not so much that she's afraid to commit -- it's that a lot of schools take it as a sign of high interest if you've visited, so it's almost part of the application process. And because of various timing issues, some of the schools she thought she'd be most interested in are ones that she couldn't visit until late in the process, like Davidson. We would have liked to combine the visits to Emory and Davidson, but Davidson's admissions office wasn't during Jane's winter break, and we couldn't do both of them during a normal weekend without her missing school, and she's missed so much school this year already, so we ended up visiting Davidson after she'd already finished her applications. And in a few cases, she ended up having to make a second visit, like to Kenyon to complete the interview. Now she's waiting to hear which schools she gets accepted at, and I think she's trying to not think too hard about which is her top choice at this point until she knows what her choices are.
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I used to get a lot of spontaneous, unexplained muscle pulls, too, along with all sorts of assorted aches and pains I couldn't account for. Isn't it amazing how core strength has so many unanticipated benefits? Is your back feeling better now?
I can still feel the pull a little, but it's just a twinge. I'm up and dressed for my class this morning.
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What thoughts run through your mind when you see that your weight is so close to your hard stop? What exactly is it that freaks you out so much? What are you telling yourself would happen if you do happen to exceed that hard stop (which is pretty inevitable at some point)?
Actually the thing I really would hate is having to set my sig file back to zero! LOL!
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I would guess that your son is unusual in being able to make that transition so successfully. One of the criticisms about tracking, of course, is that it consigns certain students to a lower level of achievement and precludes certain opportunities later on, simply because the student wasn't at the appropriate level of readiness at the time that the tracks were initially assigned.
Yes, he was unusual. His teachers used to comment on his work ethic pretty much consistently. One of his teachers told me she'd once caught him in his academic study hall -- a supported study hall -- looking at some other kids who were goofing off and clearly thinking "What do these fools think this is?" I don't know how easy it is for kids to move out of the standards track. I doubt it's any coincidence that Michael was one of the ones who did and he happens to be from an intact, high-expectations family with significant resources of pretty much every kind. Other than developmentally disabled students, most of the kids in standards classes at Sycamore are from low socioeconomic backgrounds.
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Tracking is definitely beneficial for the high-aptitude kids, except for the few cases in which someone gets put in the "fast track" but is unprepared for it and falls behind. In theory (if not always in practice), tracking is also good for the lowest-aptitude students, because they get put in smaller classes, with more personal attention, with a curriculum that challenges them without overwhelming them, and they are not constantly being compared against higher-achieving students with whom they can not realistically compete. It's the group in the middle, statistically the largest group, whose needs are least likely to be met by tracking, largely because they lose the benefit of having the example of the higher-achieving students to aspire to.
Probably the most common complaint I hear from other parents in our school district is that Sycamore serves the gifted and the kids on IEPs superbly but not enough attention is paid to the issues of the kids in the middle. I can't speak to it from personal experience, but from the outside looking in it seems like crap.

We have like a 98% graduation rate and something like 95% go on to some sort of post-hs education. Sycamore prepares students so well that it's very common for kids to report their freshman year of college feels like "13th grade." Michael graduated with a 2.8 at Sycamore -- his grades have gone up more than half a point in college, and I've heard more similar stories than the opposite. What more can you really expect from a school than that? A special parent group for the parents of kids in the middle? Trips to Europe that are only for kids who don't take AP European History or five years of Spanish? But again, I didn't really have a kid in the middle.
Gotta go to class -- want to submit this so I don't lose it, but I'll be back later! (later) Okay, back. Man, class kicked my butt this morning. 30/30 circuits where we were supposed to push as hard as we could during the work period, then rest. 30 seconds sounded like a long time to rest, but I was literally out of breath the entire time.
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And, in their case, many of them COULD realistically benefit from being compared to those who outperform them. But ALL of the benefits of tracking are, of course, predicated on the assumption that aptitude can be accurately measured and therefore tracks can be appropriately assigned, which is often not the case. IQ tests and academic achievement tests of all kinds are far from perfectly reliable and make bad predictions about future achievement in around 40% of cases, on average.
Yeah, they start identifying "gifted" kids in 4th grade and pull them out to the "resource room" for a class or two a day. I dislike the name. It just screams the idea that these kids are getting access to resources the rest of the student population doesn't. Jane was one of the kids being pulled out, and the classroom wasn't any different from any other classroom. The class were just moving faster in writing and math.
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There will be both false positives (kids whose test scores suggest they can do work that they actually will not be able to do, resulting in being placed in a track that is too demanding for them) and false negatives (kids whose test scores underestimate their abilities, placing them in tracks that will prevent them from achieving up to their full potential). And IQ scores can vary substantially over time, which is obviously a problem, considering that tracking is based on a "snapshot" taken at one point in time, and once kids get assigned to a lower track, they get further and further behind, making it less and less likely that they will ever be able to move out of that track.
Yeah, the system's a little screwy. In 4th grade, for the resource room, you have to have the test scores. By 7th grade, you can opt in -- kids who are performing can move into accelerated classes with a teacher recommendation at the Jr Hi, and any student can opt into any class in high school. But the problem is that if you don't get onto the accelerated math track in 4th grade when they've got the transition worked out, getting onto it later requires you to actually SKIP a year of math or wait to get on that track until High School, when you can take Geometry over the summer and then transition without skipping a year of math.
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(The valedictorian of my college class was 12 years old. I always wondered what her social life was like!)
Good god. I wonder where she is now? Have you ever googled her?
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And repeated failure isn't much better when it means that students will be grouped with others who are substantially younger and smaller.
That actually still happens with developmentally disabled students, sometimes with very unhappy results. With an IEP that supports it, parents can pretty much keep their kids at a school for EVER, which in one case meant a 15-yo boy with autism and Down Syndrome was riding the bus with kids as young as 5 and attending class with 10 year olds. They finally had to take him off the bus, as he was touching girls, but his parents believed it was helpful to him to be attending the same school he'd always attended so he stayed in the fourth grade the entire time my kids were at the elementary school.
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It doesn't surprise me at all that the pressure would come from the parents of the students who would have the most to lose if that second track was eliminated. But I think four tracks is pretty unusual. Three is most typical.
Yeah, four seems like a lot. But my kids have used all four levels, so for us at least, it worked out. Because Sycamore serves both ends of the spectrum so well, it draws both groups into the district. We did a TON of research (surprise!) when we were moving out of the city before Michael started school, and we think it's the best system in town for both kids. We literally never had to fight the district once to get Michael's needs met, and the system served Jane about as perfectly as a large district could. There were other districts that would have served Jane as well -- some possibly better, because they're MUCH smaller and she would have likely been a standout -- but none that would have been as good for both. Those smaller districts tend to send their special needs kids to the larger districts nearby, who can afford to serve them more easily because they can take advantage of economies of scale. We didn't want that for Michael.
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Eliminating the tracking, and thereby homogenizing the curriculum while simultaneously diversifying the make-up of the class, has the effect of producing regression to the mean. That is, the performance of the lowest performing students will move UP toward the mean, while the performance of the top-performing students will move DOWN toward the mean. This is obviously not in the best interests of the more capable students, but there is clearly a political undertone here.
Exactly -- and I do see the major benefit to keeping those top-performers in the mainstream.
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Yep, even then, my approach motivation outweighed my avoidance motivation. However, that has now changed.
Right at the moment, I think I am at the true ambivalence point. I am frozen, stuck, confused, and stressed by the feeling of absolute indecision.
What decision do you feel you need to make? Answer in email if you want.
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Had a bad eating day today, eating 7-8 NS desserts tonight as I struggled with my absolute ambivalence about the dating issue. I also have to make another big decision. I got asked today to take over a class at another campus, for a colleague who has a medical emergency. I think it would be for the rest of the semester. This would involve a lot of time and travel and stress, and I have to decide by tomorrow. If I need to get ready to take over someone else's course by next week, I may need to spend the weekend doing that instead of spending it with my eharmony match. Had a personal training session today (but I'm sure it was not nearly enough to burn up the extra calories I ate today). Blech.
Good grief -- do you really have time to take another class on? Aren't you still taking on the classes of your colleague who's on sabbatical? Which campus would you have to be traveling to? Is there a benefit to you to taking this on? Is it three days a week you'd have to do this?
So, what were you thinking when you ate those desserts? Is there anywhere you can store your extra desserts -- maybe in your office at school? -- and just bring home enough to have just a couple days' worth on hand? I'm wondering if the desserts weren't as readily available in large amounts, you might find it helpful?