Have you ever wondered: how are students placed in classes? How are they separated? What are the factors that are involved? Do the teachers do it or does the principal do it? Can I as a parent have some say in the matter? What about new students?

In all likelihood, you child’s school has a process just like every one of the schools where I’ve worked. At the first school where I worked as a teacher, there were 5 grade level teachers. At this school, the teachers did the bulk of the work in sorting the students into classes for the following school year.

Starting in May, we completed a grouping card for each student in our class. These were color-coded (pink for girls and blue for boys–yes gender-stereotyped colors, but simple for everyone to recognize), 4×6 index cards that included information such as: overall ability level, special needs (ie. Special Education, Gifted, or ELL–English Language Learner), allergies, wears glasses, overall behavior, degree of parent involvement, names of other students from whom to be separated or placed with together, special interests/talents, and space for the current teacher to write any additional information that may be helpful to the next teacher.

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Have you ever wondered, “Whatever happened to field trips? Do kids still go on field trips?”

When I was a teacher a long time ago, we took our third-grade students on several field trips throughout the year. From what I can recall, there were around 5 total, including a big day trip to downtown Chicago, which was the culminating trip for our Chicago unit. (At the time, the history of Chicago was a required part of the curriculum in Illinois.) This field trip was a lot of fun because we took the kids to the Sears Tower (now, sadly, called the Willis Tower) and a bus tour of the city. Although as a teacher I wasn’t a big fan of field trips, simply because they are hectic, I felt they were a value-add to the kids’ learning experience. See also this video about organizing a firld trip:

The fellow grade level teachers and I planned the field trips (where to go and when) together and then ran it past our principal for approval, almost always without any objection. Since our school district was in a fairly affluent area, there typically weren’t any issues with field trip cost or frequency.

Nowadays, field trips are not as often nor as common. There are a few reasons that come to mind:

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The past few days have been busy due to the holiday and because as of late, I have been engrossed in watching Korean dramas that stream for free on Netflix. Watching Korean dramas got me to thinking, how important is it to learn a second language? Or maybe more appropriately, I should say how important it is to learn a second language.

Thirty some odd years ago when I was a native Korean speaker entering the school system in the U.S., there was no value-add for knowing Korean or any other foreign/world language. In fact, my school teachers discouraged my parents from continuing our Korean language development and insisted that we solely speak English in order to help my English language skills to develop quicker. Back then, it made all the sense in the world.

We lived in the U.S. and therefore, we should speak English. Nonetheless, my parents were relentless in their belief that although we lived in the U.S., we were still Korean and should learn the Korean language and embrace Korean culture. There was no ESL (English as a Second Language) program at our school so I learned English through the proven teaching method called “sink or swim”. (Forgive my sarcasm. )

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One of the toughest questions that parents ask me is, “Should I hold my child back in the same grade?” As such, I’ve given this topic a lot of thought, and the various professional experiences I’ve had with students and parents/guardians helped shape my views on holding kids back a grade.

One of the books in the reading program that I used as a teacher is called The Flunking of Joshua T. Bates. At first, I wasn’t sure this was a good book to read since it was about…well…the flunking of Joshua T. Bates. Joshua is a student who finds out that he has to repeat third grade. Despite the less than happy theme of this book, it turns out to be a genuine story about the struggles of repeating a grade and the success this student finds with the help of his caring teacher.

Reminiscing about this book and the school year rapidly coming to a close got me thinking about all the decisions that have to be made towards the end of the year. Helping a parent make the final determination about whether or not to retain a student in the same grade is probably the least enjoyable responsibility as a principal.

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Modern Mom blogger, Andrea Benton, posted an article titled Why Parents Should Pay More for Educational Apps. While it’s probably not the best lead in title for someone like me (read: frugal), it still piqued my interest so I read on. In her post, Ms. Benton cites three main points:

1) Apps cost money to make.

2) Think of apps as a long-term investment.

3) The “One and done” mentality meaning, once our kids have played them they move onto something else

Here’s what I would add in support of Ms. Benton’s position as you consider how much an iPad app for kids is worth:

4) The old saying, “You get what you pay for”, definitely holds true in the case of apps. The difference between a $1.99 app and a free one is often noticeable. And typically the difference between a $9.99 app and a $1.99 app is even greater.

5) Install the AppShopper for Apple products. It costs $.99, which you will easily earn back with your first discounted app purchase, and sometimes it’s free! You can search for apps that are currently on sale and/or add apps to your wish list and receive notification when they go on sale. You can also view the price history and deduce whether it will go on sale for a lower price. The App Shopper has a 4.5 star rating with 185 reviews.

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In order to bring some meaningful traffic to my blog, I have been participating in online mom communities like Mamapedia and Modern Mom. It’s fascinating to me the questions that people have about all sorts of topics. Today, one such question got my attention:

“What is the proper etiquette for gift-giving? Do you give gifts for a 5th-grade graduation party?”

As an educator (and a mom), I’m a big believer in celebrating accomplishments: earning a good grade on a long-term project, making the honor roll, placing first in the spelling bee, earning a letter in a sport, being chosen to design the cover of the yearbook, so on and so forth. However, I am having a hard time with all of the various graduation celebrations these days.

Pre-school, Kindergarten, Fifth grade, Eighth grade, High School, College and beyond. It’s overkill. I know for some kids, maybe Eighth grade is as far as they will get, and I’ve worked at schools like that, but is this really what the U.S. education system has come to that we now celebrate the completion of Fifth grade? Fifth grade. Long ago when I was a kid, we didn’t graduate from Fifth grade. We completed it and then moved on to Sixth grade. There was no hoopla.

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My kids are 5 and 2.5 years old, and I am a chronic sufferer of momnesia. If you’re a mom, you may know all too well what I’m referring to. And the more kids you have the stronger your momnesia. I go downstairs to the kitchen and stare at the cabinets wondering for what reason did I come downstairs.

I come back from the grocery store with a bag full of items, only to realize that I forgot to get milk, which was the main reason I went to the store. I spend 30 minutes looking for my sunglasses only to find that they were perched on my head the entire time, and it’s my 2.5-year old who points that out to me.

Momnesia

One time I asked my mother-in-law if My Man (who is now 41) was a good baby. She says she doesn’t remember. I say, she has momnesia…or she doesn’t want to tell me because he was probably the devil’s spawn.

Either way, moms who have older kids often tell me that they don’t remember what their kids were like as babies and toddlers or they gush about how lovely their child was as a baby. That’s called MSM (mom’s selective memory). It’s another disorder common to moms.

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One of the things I quickly learned as a school administrator is that kids enter Kindergarten at a wide range of abilities and with differing degrees of background knowledge. This doesn’t mean that those that don’t know are dumb, and equally, it doesn’t mean that those that do know are gifted, although those parents like Read more about Is Your Child Gifted or Accelerated?[…]

There is absolutely nothing more complicated in the middle and high school than scheduling. Whether it’s scheduling for athletics, use of rooms/meeting space, or bus scheduling, it’s all ridiculously complicated. And the larger the school, the more students; the more students, the more teachers and staff; And thus, the ever more complicated scheduling becomes. Above all, creating the master schedule is the Mount Everest that every school has to deal with during the summer months preceding the start of a new school year.

The master schedule is the schedule that shows what each teacher is teaching (called sections), in which room, at what time (or periods or mods for schools that are on 10-15 minute increments). It also shows what is called the “seat count”, meaning, if you have 1600 students in the school with 400 at each grade level, there should be at least that many spaces (seats) per grade level per period to ensure that there’s space for every student as well as some “give” or flexibility for students who may want to transfer courses. A master schedule typically looks something like this:

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