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Seriously? Stop with the RWNJ crap and you aren't even a parent, so I'll give your parroted nonsense the value it deserves.
Maybe I'm not, but my tax money finances local circuses, I mean schools, just the same. So I have full rights to criticize the school system. And the circus our schools have become are one of the reasons I don't want to have kids.
To get back on topic, yes, it's perfectly fine to miss school for a travel experience.
Is this a Colorado thing? It seems like every year I have 5-10 students miss because their parents got a deal on a cruise... Never have I had any student demonstrate learning from a family vacation despite my best efforts.
Personally I'm a big believer in educational travel... I just don't often see it done well.
My kids got all their schooling in Colorado, so I don't have much to compare it with. Certainly when I worked in Illinois, pre-kids, it didn't seem like everyone was going off on a cruise every few months.
We did it a little in elementary and jr high, but not every year. In high school they didn't want to miss school, and I didn't feel it was proper to expect math and science teachers to tutor my kids after school due to our traves. We managed to travels economically during school holidays by booking long ahead.
Maybe I'm not, but my tax money finances local circuses, I mean schools, just the same. So I have full rights to criticize the school system. And the circus our schools have become are one of the reasons I don't want to have kids.
To get back on topic, yes, it's perfectly fine to miss school for a travel experience.
Anyone who blathers on about "liberal indoctrination" still doesn't have an opinion worth listening to but no, just because you pay taxes doesn't mean you actually know the details of what is happening in a school beyond what you hear on the clearly biased sources you listen to
My experience with that was in mid-February 1972. My district had a week-long President's Day break. Actually I think that was the first or second year they migrated President's Day to the third Monday in February but I digress. To get a flight to Barbados, where my parents made reservations, we had to fly out on non-holiday Friday. My vindictive English teacher would not give me the 1/2 grade supplement, i.e. from a to A+ for perfect attendance because I missed that day. My parents would not call me in sick because I was not, that year, particularly popular with the school.
Fast forward to January 3 or 4, 1973. My father was about to pass away and I was waiting to see that year's English teacher (their offices adjoined) to get my work in advance of an absence of a few days for bereavement. She said to me "I see you're having problems again." I told her what the problem was and she slinked back into her office.
But I digress. There are some teachers that can and will penalize such an absence. I consider such an absence acceptable in rare situations, such as the absence being for a trivial period and the student making arrangements to be current on his or her work.
Edited to add: I missed 1/2 day of school in April 1964 for the NYC World's Fair, with no notable consequences.
We are planning on traveling a lot in the next few years with my son. He is now 4 and will travel overseas for the first time next year. (we are going on a cruise to mexico in nov this year but that's not really overseas travel). Scotland first, then hopefully Iceland, Germany, England, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Peru over the next few years. We want to continue this travel through his school years, going further and more daring locations as he gets older.
I think that a week/ week and half abroad is well worth its educational value and therefore I don't feel guilty taking him out of school in the spring or around the holidays to travel.
Do you think that educational traveling is worth more than sitting in a class room?
At age 5? Way more educational than moldering away in a classroom. One would have to be a complete bureaucrat to have a problem with your doing this.
My experience with that was in mid-February 1972. My district had a week-long President's Day break. Actually I think that was the first or second year they migrated President's Day to the third Monday in February but I digress. To get a flight to Barbados, where my parents made reservations, we had to fly out on non-holiday Friday. My vindictive English teacher would not give me the 1/2 grade supplement, i.e. from a to A+ for perfect attendance because I missed that day. My parents would not call me in sick because I was not, that year, particularly popular with the school.
Fast forward to January 3 or 4, 1973. My father was about to pass away and I was waiting to see that year's English teacher (their offices adjoined) to get my work in advance of an absence of a few days for bereavement. She said to me "I see you're having problems again." I told her what the problem was and she slinked back into her office.
But I digress. There are some teachers that can and will penalize such an absence. I consider such an absence acceptable in rare situations, such as the absence being for a trivial period and the student making arrangements to be current on his or her work.
As do I. The only time my kids missed school was to go to the doctor and to go to my parents' funerals. My own parents took us kids out of school 1/2 day to go to a Pittsburgh Pirates baseball game back in 1960 when they were doing quite well and about to win the NL. We also got some time off for my grandmother's funeral. However, a lot of people on this thread are supporting fairly frequent, fairly lengthy absences for travel.
There have been many such threads both here and on the education forum, probably more there. They're all the same. If you've read one, you've read them all.
However, a lot of people on this thread are supporting fairly frequent, fairly lengthy absences for travel.
Me again. There's education, and there's "education". Today's schools are overwhelmingly the latter, especially elementary schools. They spend much of the time preparing for standardized tests, policing students' homemade lunches, demanding obscene quantities of supplies, and raising hell over toast bitten into the shape of a gun. Whatever time is left over is used for imparting knowledge. Missing even a week of that, let alone a day, is barely a blip on the radar. It's not that the knowledge isn't important, it's that there isn't much of it taught in comparison to fluff. But truancy laws. Gotta keep that federal school funding flowing somehow.
Until we drain the swamp and rebuild the entire school system from scratch, I'll keep believing what I believe.
Last edited by MillennialUrbanist; 07-04-2019 at 02:29 PM..
In this day and age, schools are basically liberal indoctrination centers (LIC). With communal school supplies (with 40 pencils per student to be brought in), confiscations of "unhealthy" homemade lunches (read: a turkey sandwich without a lettuce leaf in it), sugar-filled Breakfast in the Classroom, bans on dodgeball in gym, and pumping the boys full of Ritalin, actual learning takes a backseat, anyway. So I'd much rather have my hypothetical kid visit a historic site (with "historic" being 1000 years old, rather than 100 years old) and actually touch the wall of a building he only heard of, rather than learn to recite the tenets of liberalism by heart. We lambaste Russia for "communism", yet we embrace its aspects for our schools. George Washington is turning over in his grave as we speak (post).
That said, there are truancy laws we gotta follow. Can't let the LIC's lose out on federal funding due to lack of student attendance. So I'd begrudgingly follow the letter of the law, and take my kid on vacations during Christmas and summer.
You apparently have never been in a school in this day and age.
First, of course, every school district has different standards and the only ones you hear about on the news are the ones that do things poorly.
As for bringing in extra supplies, there is nothing wrong with those of us who have money helping supply the poorer children.
In second grade, they did bring in 44 pencils, but only 2 erasers, 2 boxes of crayons (1 for each semester probably), 2 black dry erase markers, 1small bottle of glue and 2 glue sticks, 1 pair of scissors, some construction paper, some loose-leaf paper, 2 spiral notebooks, 2 composition books, several folders of different colors (1 per subject), a pencil bag and 2 boxes of tissues.
Note that the tissues are shared and maybe the pencils, but most things are for the individual child even the loose-leaf paper and construction paper was usually for the individual child.
My grandchildren have *never* had a lunch confiscated despite the fact that my autistic grandson never ate a healthy lunch. Breakfast is served in the lunch room not the classroom and in general, it is not sugar-filled. There is sugar since that is what the kids will eat, but it has been like that since I was in school way back in the 1950s for kids who had free or reduced price meals. Pizza is the preferred meal for most of the kids and they have a breakfast pizza as well as a lunch one. Packing lunches is usually healthier.
I wish they had banned dodgeball in gym when I was in school because I hated being hit by a ball and it was often hard and hurt, but they also don't ban it in most schools in the US today. The fact that a few schools do does not make it a rule.
In case you have not read it you should read the things that your history teachers got wrong and the ones that are incorrect even on the monuments. Try Lies Across America by James Loewen and Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong by the same author.
Some examples - Napoleon was not short - they used French inches to measure him and those are longer than English inches - so he was actually taller than the average European at the time at 5 feet 7 inches (not 5 foot 2). Henry Ford did not invent the automobile although he did create the Model T. George Washington did not chop down the cherry tree and he did not admit that he did. Mason Locke Weems, a Washington biographer, invented the story to uplift children. Christopher Columbus did not discover America. He never even set foot on North American soil. He never made it past the Carribbean where he brutalized the natives. The names of the ships taught to kids were nicknames not the real names of the ships at all. The Thanksgiving story is a big lie. The modern, feel-good story is propaganda that's only 120 years old, but there was a celebratory feast in Massachusetts in 1637 — proclaimed by Gov. John Winthrop for the return of Puritan gunmen from hunting and murdering hundreds of Pequot Indians. Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb. It was a group effort with many scientists collaborating, but he took all the credit (he did put up the money and hire the scientists). There were actually only 12 original colonies as Delaware was a part of Pennsylvania. There were also two loyalist colonies in Florida that you never heard of in school. Abraham Lincoln was NOT an abolitionest. He said publicly and repeatedly that he would tolerate slavery to preserve the Union. His anti-slavery sentiments, at least early on, seemed more pragmatic than moral, as revealed in his famous "house divided" speech. Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation was limited in effect — first limited to slaves in rebel states, and then not universally known. Slavery did not end with the civil war. The 13th Amendment supposedly ending slavery still allowed forced labor as punishment for a crime. Convict leasing existed in every Southern state for decades after the Civil War. Tens of thousands of Black Americans who committed no real crime were kidnapped off the streets by corrupt local sheriffs, convicted in informal local courts for vague "crimes" such as vagrancy, issued fines they couldn't pay, and sold to businesses to work in mines, timber yards, farms and railroads in conditions often worse than slavery.
The above are only a few of the lies you were taught.
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