School name is superficial concern...
An editorial in the Chapel Hill Herald today (it is not online, but here is a link to the paper) reports that the parents in Southern Village, where we used to live, are campaigning for the new high school to have Chapel Hill in its name so that the school name will look better on their kids college applicatons.
This superficial attitude is precisely why we moved our children out of the neighborhood school, Scroggs, which is in Southern Village, to a private School, Durham Academy. We could immediately see that appearances were more important than the substance of the education the children were receiving at Scroggs. We wondered why no other parents could see the problems we saw at that school, and now we know that they were only concerned with the fact that their children were going to a Chapel Hill school, and not what they were learning.
Our daughter was in a 4th grade class of 29, despite the school website proclaiming that class sizes never exceeded 22. Her teacher was a second year teacher, struggling to take care of that many children, often without an assistant, because the school wanted to put their money elsewhere. My daughter said that she often helped the other children with their work, because after all, she was repeating everything she had already learned in third grade the year before.
My son was in a 1st grade class of 22, which seemed fine, but many of the children did not have english as their first language (and I don't mean spanish). My son was saddened by the behavior problems of many of the children, which resulted in the teacher having to spend more time on behavior than teaching, which is probably why he treated them like preschoolers than 1st graders. My son realized that he had done harder work in kindergarten the year before and ultimately refused to get out of bed and go to school, which is why we pulled him out of Scroggs and sent him to Durham Academy.
Instead of worrying about the names of their schools, I think the parents should be more concerned about what is actually going on in them.
This superficial attitude is precisely why we moved our children out of the neighborhood school, Scroggs, which is in Southern Village, to a private School, Durham Academy. We could immediately see that appearances were more important than the substance of the education the children were receiving at Scroggs. We wondered why no other parents could see the problems we saw at that school, and now we know that they were only concerned with the fact that their children were going to a Chapel Hill school, and not what they were learning.
Our daughter was in a 4th grade class of 29, despite the school website proclaiming that class sizes never exceeded 22. Her teacher was a second year teacher, struggling to take care of that many children, often without an assistant, because the school wanted to put their money elsewhere. My daughter said that she often helped the other children with their work, because after all, she was repeating everything she had already learned in third grade the year before.
My son was in a 1st grade class of 22, which seemed fine, but many of the children did not have english as their first language (and I don't mean spanish). My son was saddened by the behavior problems of many of the children, which resulted in the teacher having to spend more time on behavior than teaching, which is probably why he treated them like preschoolers than 1st graders. My son realized that he had done harder work in kindergarten the year before and ultimately refused to get out of bed and go to school, which is why we pulled him out of Scroggs and sent him to Durham Academy.
Instead of worrying about the names of their schools, I think the parents should be more concerned about what is actually going on in them.
posted by Karen Mishra at 6:48 AM
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