New Middle School Coming to Fort Greene
According to The Local, Fort Greene will get a new 300-seat middle school starting in the Fall of 2010. The Fort Greene Preparatory Academy, as it will be called, will be located at 100 Clermont Avenue where PS 46 currently is. The academics will be structured around Socratic seminars and the arts. The goal of…
According to The Local, Fort Greene will get a new 300-seat middle school starting in the Fall of 2010. The Fort Greene Preparatory Academy, as it will be called, will be located at 100 Clermont Avenue where PS 46 currently is. The academics will be structured around Socratic seminars and the arts. The goal of the school is to be driven by student inquiry, said Paula Lettiere, the intended principal. We’re seeking to move away from traditional curriculum. This sounds like a pretty conscious effort to provide an alternative to the PS 20 approach that has turned off so many of the families that have moved to the neighborhood in recent years.
New Middle School Coming in 2010 [Local/NYT]
Photo by silk cut
This is probably too late for anyone to read, but I defy you to find a trade that lets a person make a living wage without some basic computer skills,
Teaching!
This is probably too late for anyone to read, but I defy you to find a trade that lets a person make a living wage without some basic computer skills, which necessitate some math and some English, to say nothing of science.
You might as well toss the kids who are tracked for the know-nothing schools, or at least make sure they know enough English to fill out welfare forms and enough math to be bookies.
As I wrote before about my daughter’s middle school, there are plenty of project kids whose families are totally clueless and unsupportive and Chinese kids whose parents board their kids so the parents can work 6 days a week at Chinese restaurants within a 4-hour radius on a Chinatown bus. But most of them learn enough to have a chance to do well at a decent high school, despite class size in the low 30s. So yes, it can be done–not perfectly but satisfactorily, in a standard NYC Dept. of Education format.
“…but many posters here don’t really understand at all the reality of how the NYC school system works….” – Posted by: CGfan at July 16, 2009 5:49 PM
Very true CGfan, very true.
I grew up going to NYC public schools and I’ve been an NYC public school teacher for 6 years, and it still amazes me how unique, complicated, convoluted, etc our system can be. When I explain stuff to people not familiar with the system I usually start with “I know this may sound nuts but…”
There’s an interesting discussion to be had about various teaching philosophies, but many posters here don’t really understand at all the reality of how the NYC school system works.
This is a middle school. In many districts, middle schools are all by choice. Fifth grade students rank their middle school choices and match with ONE school, ideally their top 1 or 2 choice, just like medical students do with residencies. So, if this middle school intends to teach via socratic method, it very likely means that it will choose students who can easily learn via that method, and parents who want their kids to learn via that method. It will choose kids who have high test scores, and have already mastered the basics that so many posters bemoan aren’t being taught. These students will, ideally, thrive with a more progressive curriculum because they are already at least above average students and if a school has a good enough reputation, far above average students. If the school does a crappy job of educating these students, believe me, no students will rank it anymore and it will fail. But the school will have an advantage because it will likely attract more students from middle class families who will do well academically regardless.
Minard Lafever, if you are going to criticize a school (PS 8) on its F “grade”, you had better be prepared to rave about it next year if it suddenly gets an A or B. There’s an excellent chance that will be the new grade at PS 8 because the DOE’s rating system is based on IMPROVEMENT, and it is far easier to improve if more of your students had a down year the previous year. It’s the schools that got an A last year that will likely go down — whether a student misses one additional question or one less question on a standardized test makes no different statistically except in DOE report cards.
knickerbocker- I think creating a system where kids will not get trapped is probably the hardest part. I remember Walden and remember thinking it was a waste of school space. By the way- I did have a really good education though you wouldn’t know if from the typing errors in my first post. 🙂
bxgirl, I’m not a fan of ‘open education’ either. There used to be a private school in Manhattan called Walden (which merged with New Lincoln) where the kids could attend whatever class they wanted. 6th graders could finger paint, 1st graders could sit in on biology. It was a disaster and the whole thing folded about 20 years ago.
Fun is not my criteria. First you need to sort (which I agree is the really hard part – see my last post), then you can teach the kids according a combination of their ability and desire. As long as you don’t end up with kids getting trapped (which still happens today) then I believe everyone will get a chance to do better.
Otherwise – good point.
“Do we really want to bring down the education level of entire country just to avoid a sensitive race/class issue? You still teach basic math in auto shop school, just not pre-calculus, etc.”
Knickerbocker- you make some interesting points, but what kid has enough information at that point to know to make an informed decision for the rest of his life? I do think trade schools are a great asset- but not if they are going to be a dumping ground for those kids who you might find difficult. I’ve seen too many kids who were impossible in their teens grow up into wonderful, responsible and hard-working adults- because they were pushed. The level of education is not low because of the kids- its because we don’t have a good way to educate them. So you think its better to just dump these hard cases somewhere so those with more advantages can get getting more advantages?
Sixyears, that’s what I meant about not knowing what the administrators of the new school have planned — “seminar” to me means a small class size. But I also don’t know that the Socratic method wouldn’t work with 34 middle schoolers in a room. It does with law students, obviously. The teacher would have to make a point of making sure each student regularly was put on the “hot seat” for a Socratic dialogue, and you would need students who would respond and not be bored. My overall reaction is that options are good, but I don’t live in that district, and my son is a decade away from middle school, so in true Socratic fashion, I have a bunch of questions, but no answers to provide.
Not too long agao someone sent me an email with standard questions from an 1898 English school quiz. Suffice it to say I could not answer a single question. that’s how hard it was- the overall level of education today is both more advanced and less detailed than it was then. That said, I love creative thinking and approaches but kids cannot get decent educations without discipline and structure. Both my niece and nephew went to a very well regarded magnet school in Manhattan where creative thinking went overboard. Creative teaching is not taking your class to the movies every week to “teach ” them about life. Yet that’s what happened. kids in the school had trouble with their exams and my nephew had to take basic english and math courses to be able to catch up to his grade level. Because they didn’t get structure and discipline in their curriculum.
Teaching has got to be one of the hardest and most important careers anyone can do (kudos to you teachers). But by trying to make education more “fun” and exciting, we seem to have lost sight of one thing parents know from the getgo- kids need structure and discipline. Real life begins in school- and not that it has to be boring and awful. It shouldn’t. But we aren’t doing kids a favor by play into our fantasies of what school should be as opposed to what tools for life kids need to make good lives for themselves.
I’m with denton re trade schools. But unlike Knickerbocker, I wonldn’t let it go at learnig to grease axles- that’s all you need. Reading Shakespeare, learning quantum physics, staring at a Van Gogh- these are a miniscule few of the influences that make up our world. Whether or not a kid likes it, or ever uses it, all that stuff will expand his horizons. When he decides to be an auto mechanic, it should be because he really wants to, not because that’s all he knows how to do.