Dealing with Frustrating High School Experiences

TiggerDad
Sat, 28 May 2016 23:16:04 +0000

After what both my sons have had to deal with at their high school, I pretty much came to the following conclusion:

Most of teachers at this high school have rather unimpressive academic backgrounds to begin with. I think some of them are frankly over their heads taking on IB courses that they’re not prepared to do so. Understanding that IB courses are “tough,” I really believe that they try to make the course “tough” and “college-ready” by being unnecessarily difficult – NOT with the course contents per se but with their unreasonable grading.

Example? A year ago, an MYP English course required my son to go shop for a mask with which he had to do some coloring on. I was furious when another such useless but time consuming assignment was yet again given to the students that is unrelated to the course. No English courses ever taught the students the rudiments of grammar at the high school, so my anger when an English class is demanding an art project on the students. It took us driving to three stores before we could locate a mask. My son then diligently and meticulously worked on the assignment for hours. When the grade for the assignment came out, he received B for the assignment to his big surprise. When my son consulted the teacher to ask why the grade was lower than he expected, her response? “The eyes on the mask were too small.” It took me days to suppress the welling up urge to go see the teacher and scream at her.

Another example? How about the MYP Earth Science that my son took as a freshman? The teacher didn’t know her material, so all she did were two things: 1) read the materials verbatim off PowerPoint, and 2) assigned a laptop to every student in the class to go information hunting on their own so she could do some other things instead of teaching. Once, when my son needed a further explanation than what the Internet was able to provide, he went up to the teacher to ask only to find her busy texting surreptitiously under the desk with her cell phone. It was a complex question, so my son went through a long and winded question all the while she was still busy texting under the desk. Then, when my son was done with his long and complex question, she looked up and asked him to repeat the question again. He did – only to find out that she didn’t know the answer so she had to Google for the answer right in front of my son.

Another sad story is that, although my son is musically talented (won competitions at the state, national and international levels and held CM position at his high school, local youth orchestra, All State and National Honor Orchestra), he CAN’T ask his own high school orchestra teacher for a letter of recommendation for his college and conservatory applications. The orchestra teacher can’t write a decent sentence of English. My email communication with him displayed his English command at the level of an elementary schooler with run-on sentences and no recognizable grammatical rules – and he’s no James Joyce. I’m not a good writer myself, but I swear I’m Hemingway in comparison!

One lesson as a parent that I learned from my boys’ high school experiences: a regional location is often a very poor choice to send the children to a high school in. Regional locations often do not have well educated and trained teachers, and if I had to do it all over again, I’d have moved the family to a larger city well stocked with good colleges which serve as pipeline to the city’s high school teachers, coaches and administrators. Of course, I’m generalizing as I’m sure there are many exceptions to the rules. But from my own experience, this is what I learned most painfully.