Posted by Anthony Susa on 12/11/05 20:10

On Sat, 10 Dec 2005 21:27:53 -0800, Alpha wrote:
> The problem I see is:
> 1. What did your child learn from this (other than you are a hero???)
> 2. Why were you put in the position to create the project?
> Poor conceptually all around.
> You should have the teacher who required this explain.

Hi Alpha,

Thanks for the advice. Nothing in an educational system for a chile is
perfect and every day is an experiment by some teacher somewhere somehow in
a better way to teach children, not all of whom learn the same things the
same way at the same time.

This particular teacher, for example, is well known to be the toughest in
the school system for the fourth grade. For example, homework is given
EVERY DAY (including double doses on weekends and holidays). And once a
week, the kids have to hand in a project that was generally scheduled the
prior week.

This week, for example, my 9 year old was handed a CDROM containing
hundreds of digital photographs of Slaves, Indians, Filipinos, & Asian
immigrants (as far as I can tell by perusing the thumbnails). Our project
is to digitally combine no more than five of these photographs into atwo
digital mosaics - one portraying the bad and one portraying the good of
immigration in America. The one-paragraph slice of paper explaining the
project says the CDROM is an open-ended CDROM and we're supposed to
additionally burn onto the CDROM the two collages. I don't even know WHAT
an open-ended CDROM is so that's our next challenge. :)

All in all, I can't say that this California educational system is good or
bad - but I can say that I'm learning as much as my kid is by helping with
the projects!

I very much appreciate all of your help and I hope that this thread serves
as a useful help to the students who come after us next year with the same
or similar weekly class assignments,

Tony Susa

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