I am loving the sparkly picnic tea set.

There was this article in the Washington Post a few weeks ago about a school that's been able to get really good results on reading and math tests, pulling up kids who'd been failing into passing, but everyone's all skeptical about the program because it involves splitting the kids up so that each group can be taught at its own level, and there's clearly something wrong with not having every kid doing the exact same thing: [link]

I am loving that there is something called "penetrating oil"

everyone's all skeptical about the program because it involves splitting the kids up so that each group can be taught at its own level, and there's clearly something wrong with not having every kid doing the exact same thing

!!!!

But - you guys must differentiate too, though, right? I mean, I get that it's not going to be as extreme as us, maybe, since our kids don't get promoted to a new grade, they just, you know, get older and thus are in your class regardless of whether they're whizz kids or special needs. But it isn't normal to have every kid working on the exact same thing, surely? Or is it? Maybe you can afford to do that, if kids are all being held back and promoted so that your class genuinely DOES have kids who are on the same kind of level? (But even then - how would that work? Because any given kid will have areas that they're stronger in and areas that they're weaker in, so just because they're a high flyer in Maths doesn't mean they're a great reader/writer/sciencegeek/artist/whatever...)

t / a bit puzzled

But it isn't normal to have every kid working on the exact same thing, surely? Or is it? Maybe you can afford to do that, if kids are all being held back and promoted so that your class genuinely DOES have kids who are on the same kind of level?

Being promoted ahead of age level is pretty rare, and even rarer now than it used to be. Getting held back is more common.

I had some teachers who'd do things like find me and a few other kids some more difficult stuff to work on sometimes, but that was very much not an official thing. And even my high school didn't have separate regular and honors classes for most things until eleventh grade -- I hated tenth grade English class with a passion. So much time taken up on just explaining what vocab words meant. (That was another one where the teacher would sometimes leave little notes for some of us, with some more interesting things to think about, but that was really not part of the official program.)

Ah, the old inferiority/superiority complex. Count me in.

I think that applies to most of us.

I had the opposite of skipping grades. My birthday is late so I should have been younger than most of my class. Instead, mom wanted me to go to school with another little girl (who became my "best friend" until middle school) who didn't test up to my grade and whose mother was friends with mine. It was like bizarro social promotion.

that one can, indeed, have too many sequins, that ruby slippers are not the norm, and that using chocolate perfume is not neccesarily the most grown up of choices.

Nuh uh! if you try to tell me this again I will shove my fingers in my ears and hum.

Not that I dress as enchantingly as Fay, but it is important to have the option.

I know we had different levels of reading and spelling and probably math when I was in Elementary school, but that was ages ago and my niecephews were homeschooled and/or Waldorfed so I have no idea what's "normal" these days.

But - you guys must differentiate too, though, right? I mean, I get that it's not going to be as extreme as us, maybe, since our kids don't get promoted to a new grade, they just, you know, get older and thus are in your class regardless of whether they're whizz kids or special needs. But it isn't normal to have every kid working on the exact same thing, surely? Or is it? Maybe you can afford to do that, if kids are all being held back and promoted so that your class genuinely DOES have kids who are on the same kind of level? (But even then - how would that work? Because any given kid will have areas that they're stronger in and areas that they're weaker in, so just because they're a high flyer in Maths doesn't mean they're a great reader/writer/sciencegeek/artist/whatever...)

When I was growing up I'm pretty sure different reading, etc. groups within a class were the norm. It certainly was in my school. The "don't be eliteist" trend seems to be in the last ten or twenty years.

From the article:

Test scores rose dramatically in 2004 and 2005. But official discomfort persisted. In the 2005-06 academic year, Roberson was instructed to halt performance-based grouping, for at least one year, "to see if it really had an impact on student performance." Students returned to mixed-ability classrooms. Test scores fell.

My son's class just started "book club" (he is in 5th grade). The kids are grouped into reading circles and each circle has a different set of books - with different reading levels.

That just made me realize I forgot to ask him which book his group is reading. Must remember to ask tonight. For free reading he is zooming through a reread of all the HP books.