Muticaction Table /Cursive Writing / Letter Writing

[Wayne Goodwin]

Do Teacher's still teach "Cursive Writing" in classrooms , What about "Multiplication Tables" in class rooms ?

I heard the other day , Guess it was our state of NC was going to require all schools to teach Cursive writing and Multiplication Tables in school . I didn't know it stopped ?

Do you still write "Letter's" ?

That is an art that should be kept in our society .

[Dell]

Wow, sounds like you were teaching in Louisiana! I am glad it is not that way everywhere.

[Dell]

For crestowaves.....

[crestofwaves]

NJ is supposed to be number one in the nation for education.  I wonder how valid those stats are?  I wonder what other districts are doing?  I work in an extremely affluent community.  So many of the kids get into amazing schools because  they get "excellent" grades in high school and their parents can easily afford them, and most of the kids are hard workers and many many take AP courses--all kids are encouraged to take them.  These kids will succeed in life.  The kids in Camden and Newark, not so much.

However, the teacher I am subbing for and her co-teacher were told from above that they had to stay after school as long as it took to help a student who could not do an essay because he WILL not write ( autism) until he came up with something.  In other words, he VIL not fail!

[P.A.]

It was things like these that drove me to retire from teaching in 2007. I did teach some classes at a local university for a few years after that. It was kind of scary because 90% of them actually wanted to learn and were alway prepared. Of course they were graduate students and there for older and much more mature.

[blithe spirit]

I have only been teaching for 13 years so I wasn't around when the tracking was done away with and the kids with special needs for the most part were included in the same classrooms as all the other kids. There were a number of lawsuits over the years that ended up requiring school systems to change the way they teach and what they do with these kinds of kids. Many of them need one on one teaching which is quite expensive. We have gotten really good at diagnosing a variety of learning disabilities but not so good at providing the learning they always need. Of the 97 students I teach, 23 of them have special needs of some sort..and only some of the kids get extra help with language arts and math...they are all in my science classes. 

We know a lot about how to teach kids.... but at what cost...parents want the best education their tax dollars will buy and rightly so...but these educational mandates have costs and the legislatures don't have the will to step up and say so.

In my opinion, educations isn't as valued as it was when we were growing up...our parents saw it as a way for us to do better and have more opportunities in life. Often, parents consider teachers glorified babysitters and govt officials think we are union thugs trying to rip everybody off. It's a dilemma for sure. Schools have been put on the back burner for many years with everybody pointing fingers.