OK, so if you know me in person, you know my older kid (age 10) struggles in school with math and spelling (but she kicked ass in her clarinet solo, dammit!)
Now, my kids attend a Catholic school, and it's challenging, and if they graduate with good grades they get a decent scholarship to some of the private high schools around here. When I say "challenging" I mean if you don't get a 75 on a test, you fail. My 4th grader is doing "elapsed time" problems I can't do in my head, and I was a math major. She's got somewhere in the vicinity of a 79 average in math, which just misses a C . (A is 94 and up! Hurts me.)
Her little sidekick got pulled from our school and plunked into a public school. She sucked at math when I helped them with homework. Now she's getting A's and her mother made a point to me that she's doing "SO much better now in this school" and I should move my kids to public school too. Because, you know, if I don't, I'm a bad mother and all.
Methinks I'd rather have my kid struggle for a hard C then get an A handed to her.
2 comments:
Your kid has smart parents, so she'll be fine. That other kid is going to miss wearing the uniform. I know I would have.
As someone who went to public school for 7 years, catholic school for 2 years and private school for high school, i can tell you that the harder the classes and the more meager the easy grades, the better for the student. The worst for me was middle school (catholic), believe it or not, 50% of the class got A's or better, contrast that with my HS, where 4 out of 62 seniors had a 90 average or above. Kids with grades in the 80s went to Ivy League schools. I took a physics class where I had a 43 numerical average, but with the curve, it was a solid C.
Send them to better schools, don't worry so much about the grades. I know plenty of A students from public HS's and they ended up in temp jobs just like the C students, so it's no guarantee of success...
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