Ahaha, @cameo43–that is rich. What a gem!
Our public school:
Teachers teach six periods, times an AVERAGE of 40 students= 240 students a day.
Our BS:
teachers teach three classes times an average of 10 students= 30 students a day.
Lots of reports of LPS not grading assignments around here. Who could keep up?!?
My favorite story is the Honors English teacher who assigned a writing assignment each week, but never graded or returned them. They were all credit/no-credit assignments. I think she just looked in the online drop box, and if she saw a document, she gave the student their points. As the final exam approached, the students did not know what their midterm exam grades were. . . .
Did I mention this is a highly ranked US News and World Report school (not our district)?
I think the other reason public school teachers may feel overworked is from the emotional drain of having to teach kids who don’t want to be there, aren’t equipped to be there, or are aggressive, hostile etc. BS kids are largely a joy to teach if you love teaching, I am told.
@laenen It sounds like you don’t have direct experience with either BS or the top public schools in Boston area you are raving about? Many of the posters here do have compared different school options through real life experience. Some have attended both or have kids in different school systems they are talking about here. Don’t get me wrong. I am not at all trying to stop you from expressing your opinions but rather to gently remind you to be aware of where other posters come from.
Exactly. One of my kids - can’t remember which one - needed a graded writing sample as part of the application process for one boarding school (not sure if they still require this. Between late August and December no writing assignments took place in my kids’ 8th grade public school classes. My child arranged with the English teacher to write something and have it graded just for the application.
Another child had one writing assignment in a whole year of middle school for a total of 2 pages. Came back with an A on it and the comment “Great Job!” and 2-3 comma corrections. These 2 examples are from a public school considered the best/one of the best in our state and also highly ranked externally.
First week of BS, multiple page writing assignment and it came back covered in red. Writing assignments and rewrites became a weekly thing. And then there is the classroom discussion/Harkness/socratic style teaching that is enabled by interested students and small classes.
@SouthernHope Moms here will give you an earful on how difficult and heartbreaking it is to send their 13-14 year olds away. Let me provide some comforting words. In this day and age, 2-3 hours of a drive away, with 5 months out of a year off school days, armed with Skype and 24 hour texting, you shouldn’t think you have “sent her away” really. What would your teenager do at home? Sure you see them at the dinner table, but maybe after a text sent upstairs to let them know dinner is ready? 
Point is - is there any sacrifice coming with this choice? Sure. Is it as great as you’d imagine? I don’t think so. More importantly, the right question to ask is: what does you kid get from it? Does he/she like or even love living in that community with like minded peers and doing what he/she loves to do? If the answer is yes, then that “little” sacrifice you are making would be worth it.
There is no denying that smart and hardworking kids survive LPS every year, do great on their SAT and even are confident writers. But for individual kids, it’s vastly easier to be academically successful in more supportive and resource-rich BS environment than in LPS, based on simple logics. I am positive that stats of % of successful students with whatever standards out of total enrollment at each school types will back it up.
Dos chicos, that shocks me.
Laenen, Your contention that a handful of schools in a certain metropolitan area may be as good academically as boarding school, Is not really a terribly important conclusion one way or the other … Considering that kids come from the far reaches around the globe, and for far more than getting their SAT scores up.
MODERATOR’S NOTE:
While the majority of the posters here are adults, and although your kids may have used the word, profanity is still not allowed here. We all know that BS has a meaning other than “Boarding School”, but don’t try to use spell-arounds to make your point. Thank you.
On another note, College Confidential is not a debate society; feel free to express your opinion, but it is unlikely that any other user’s opinion will change. So once you’ve expressed your opinion, please refrain from beating the dead horse.
@doschicos, our experience with the graded English assignments, and the application, was exactly the same as yours.
@6teenSearch Yes, it is shocking that happens. I know that at our local schools, even with somewhat smaller class sizes…6-7 classes taught per day with approx. 16 kids per class = 112-128 kids taught per day. And even with those smaller class sizes, my child has multiple teachers that TELL their class that they “look” at all of their assignments, but it’s just too much work to grade ALL of their assignments so they’ll randomly choose 3-5 assignments to actually grade on top of the 2-3 tests per quarter. It’s incredibly dis-heartening that it has come to this. This is ONE of the major reasons we have chosen to pursue BS. I’m so thankful for all of you on this board that I can feel some camaraderie with, and I just try to skip over any naysayers!
Wow, just wow. Does the administration condone this?
At my kids’ public school, assignments were graded the vast majority of the time, however, they rarely got them back before the next test or quiz or two so if your child was having trouble with a concept that delay wasn’t too helpful in correcting it in time. The teachers, for the most part, are good. Its just a lot of students on their plates.
Can I also say that not having to deal with standardized testing and teaching to the test was a great thing?
Plus, at least at my kids’ BS, there are no gpas, no ranking, no APs, etc. which actually helps develop an atmosphere of more cooperation/less competition, less stress and less grade grubbing despite the academic rigor than is common in many of the more respected public schools. I have nieces/nephews in public school and there is a lot of stress and competition among the top 10% of the students.
I also think it was noteworthy that all my kids’ public school teachers were VERY supportive of my kids going to BS and thought it was best for them although it was’t very common with only a handful going every year. Also, in my school district at the time, the top administrators kids also went to BS. Again, this is a well regarded LPS where kids many kids do very well. It’s just a very different way of learning.
@6teenSearch Unfortunately, they just don’t care! It’s better for them to just not “rock the boat”. We live in an area where teachers aren’t banging down the door to come teach. It’s sad really…it’s very discouraging to many of the students. Some of the teachers will purposefully even grade an assignment that was harder on much of the class, then not put another assignment in for a couple of weeks, therefore making a few kids academically ineligible until they decide to grade another assignment. I’ve always been lucky that school is just an “easy” thing for my child so it’s never affected gradee like that, but I’ve known others to struggle with it.
The teachers we have told have been supportive in the decision to apply elsewhere, but we were very selective in which ones we told.
To a stranger you owe no explanation, really. Just stick with “It made sense for our family” and leave it at that. If the stranger keeps pushing remove yourself from the situation, simple. If it is a good friend asking than I do think there is an obligation to explain the thought process if they ask. If it is because the academic level of the local school system is lacking in some manner, tell them exactly that, they deserve to know. If it is because you think that attending boarding school is going to give your kid a leg up in the world, say so, there is nothing wrong with doing what it takes to ensure that your kid is successful. I think it is when an acquaintance ask that the wall is hit. As several of you have said you have to consider your audience. In which case you have to ask yourself if this is a person that you want to build a future relationship with, if it is, than you have to judge how much/what type of information to share.
Whatever the reason…sometimes the best way to disarm a confrontation is to own the truth. Sometimes the truth is not politically correct or expedient and that is the reason we hide it. In ideal world we would be so judgmental/competitive of our neighbors, but as we all know this isn’t an ideal world.
Re: those who have decided on a BS I have at one point or another thought (in no particular order):
- Parents are elitists - academic/culturally/socially/economically (any or all)
- Parents are lazy
- Parents are uber competitive
- Kid is spoiled
- Parents think their kid is the most special of snowflakes that can’t possible be served by the public school system and “deserve” better. (While there are a few super special snowflakes that absolutely have exceptional educational needs, I don’t think there nearly as many as parents seem to think)
On the flip side, I am certain that at least one CC poster here thinks I, and or my child, are:
- Stupid/Naive
- Woefully middle class
- Lazy
- Selfish
- Ill informed re: educational opportunities/realities
In the end you pick the environment or make the choice that works for you, sometimes you are going to take heat for it. That is the problem with choice, you have to be face the consequences, good and bad.
Labegg,
I don’t recall seeing your posts specifically so I don’t have any notions about your decisions… But, more generally, I don’t think anyone would ever ask someone to justify NOT boarding. NOT boarding is normative. Moreover, almost everyone who is seeking boarding has also shared the negatives of bs, so I think we totally get why some are not interested and it has nothing to do with your 1-5.
To me, the “stupid” are those who, as some have related, ask why you are “sending away” a “problem kid”. One, they are literally “ignorant”, in the simple sense of not being aware. But two, why would you address a parent that way… It’d be even worse if there was an issue and the school was for problems! Someone who talks to a parent that way about their child, whatever the circumstances, is either stupid or ill intentioned.
Let me throw it out there. No one outside your family truly cares about a school decision you have made for your kids. They may make some random comments and gossip about it at their dinner table but they won’t lose any sleep over it. So shouldn’t you over their comments. I “put up a wall” to let neighbors/friends/colleagues know that I’m not interested in talking about it, having no plan to brag or educate them about it. If they really want to know something they don’t know for their own benefit, they need to try harder. On the other hand, I sincerely believe that while BS works out for some, the results are not always good depending on the kids’ readiness for it and their parents’ expectations. So I am not going to sell the idea lightly. May we have peace between people making different choices in life.
@6teenSearch - my original post was back to #333. (btw - I did caveat instances where a child is sent to a boarding school for medical/behavioral/parental foreign assignment etc). I was simply giving examples of what I, a person who does not have my child/student in a boarding school situation, have at one point or another thought about parents who send their child to boarding school. I am owning my opinons/thoughts, they are certainly are not expedient, I am not proud of them AND they are not necessarily what my thought are now. I am trying to understand this issue which is what brought me to this thread in the first place. I am willing to admit it. Are you telling me that boarding school families are boarding for purely altruistic reasons? No one willing to admit that one of the important factors in choosing boarding school is because they wanted their child to be with a certain socio/economic element. I definitely bought my house in a specific neighborhood, because it meant my kid would attend X school and not Y school in the school district, which is essentially the same thing as choosing a boarding school vs. LPS for academic reason.
I am sending my D16 out of state for college and have actually faced some very similar questions from friends about “why would I pay/send/want D16 to attend out of state when there are perfectly good in state flagships”. We all face justifying decisions to friends/family at some point.
Given some of the thoughts that I have had about boarding school, it’s strange, I have actually not ever thought a parent who chooses boarding school is doing it to dump a problem child.
Ahem. I am probably guilty of this as well, but does this thread seems to be getting off track?
To clarify, isn’t it about negative reactions, not about why you do or do not support the choice of sending your child to boarding school?