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...And she tore the stickers off

© Mary Pantazis

Sometimes learning comes very hard for my daughter. There are parts of school that just do not make sense to her. Sometimes she has trouble with those numbers that just do not want to be added and subtracted multiplied and divided. Those stubborn numbers often can upset my daughter for a whole day. She feels so frustrated when she does not understand something that the other kids understand and she will come home and tell me all about it. We will work out the answers together, alone, with no other kids around to watch and then she will begin to understand and to feel better. She needs time to work out the answers and truly understand what she is learning rather than just memorizing an answer. My daughter does not want to memorize she wants to understand.

My daughter is in third grade. She is not a coded child, but she has trouble with learning that only I know about. She does not want the teacher to know when things are hard. She struggles with the tests and the reading comprehension. She works very hard for her good grades and is very proud of them.

The last few weeks of school have been littered with tests. I can only assume that the teachers are preparing the third graders for the mandatory third grade testing that is approaching. The approach they are taking with the tests is to give the kids a lot of tests and quizzes before the mandatory ones so that the kids will not fear the tests that are coming.

While this approach may work for some children, it is creating a major learning block for my daughter. Information is being thrown so quickly at her that she is struggling to absorb it. She wants to understand everything she is learning rather than just memorize and send the information back to the teacher. School is becoming tiring and exhausting as she does her homework and goes to school to take another test or quiz. My daughter is 8 and she is managing, but I at 36 would never be able to keep up with all of the tests she is getting lately.

I can only imagine how the children who are coded are feeling with the stress of these tests. No one is exempt from the mandatory tests, modifications are allowed, but very few.

Yesterday my daughter got one of her tests back from the teacher. She had a 100% on it and the teacher had put a sticker on it. As the class began to correct it together my daughter realized that there was an error on it and she actually had one question wrong. She raised her hand and showed it to the teacher. The teacher walked over to my daughter's desk, crossed out the 100 and ripped off the stickers. She said, "Well, I guess you don't deserve the sticker then". The teacher walked away. Leaving my daughter with her stickerless paper and her crossed out 100.

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