Elementary
Posted by: Jessica Rappaport, September 16, 2009 in 10:09 am
The countdown has begun…one year until our daughter heads off to kindergarten. This should be a joyous moment, a milestone, but more and more the thought of kindergarten sets off trepidation, anxiety, and competition. Unfortunately, kindergarten is not the way we experienced it. Standardized testing has expanded so much at the elementary school level that it has trickled down to kindergarten. There’s no longer a place of endless free time, milk cartons, and naps. In many suburban school districts across the country, children are expected to go into kindergarten with a certain skill set. For our generation, our parents dropped us off and took pictures the first day. There was no assessment done ahead of time.
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Posted by: J Corbin, May 30, 2009 in 1:36 pm
Any parent of a child that does not fit within the “average” expectations for their age has probably considered the idea of postponing their child’s entrance into school. Perhaps they hope that if their child is given a bit more time than average children it can catch up and even excel in his or her class. All children develop at their own pace and the school systems are not always willing to accept that and work with the ones who need a little extra help. When a parent decides to postpone the enrollment of their school-age child into kindergarten it has come to be known as “redshirting.”
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Posted by: Bad Mommy, January 18, 2009 in 11:31 pm
Last week I didn’t get the phone call that school was cancelled. Or maybe I just slept through it. Not sure. Either way, I didn’t know! There wasn’t that much snow so I thought nothing of it. I packed the kids in the car and drove to school. When I got to the school, it seemed eerily quiet. I waited…and waited… and waited. Thought I must have gotten their earlier and then checked the clock. Nope. School should have started! I called a friend to confirm. It was a Snow Day! I drove the kids back home and we all put our pajamas on and pretended it never happened!
