Working for Lifestyle/Extras
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| Mon, 11-20-2006 - 11:13am |
Hi Ladies :)
This is my first time on this debate board and I have been dying to jump into some of the topics, but I feel as though they are sooooo long (one in particular is over 1000 replies, yikes!) that starting my own specific one might work out better.
Anyhow, a recurring theme here seems to be what Moms should and shouldn't be going to work for. It seems some are of the opinion that is OK for Mom to work if she must to pay her bills but NOT if its to afford a nice car, house, good neighborhood. This is considered keeping up with the Johnses (who are they???) and thats bad.
Well, I want to know what in the heck is wrong with a women working to have nice things? I don't mean working and leaving baby in child care 16 hours a day, everyday...thats pretty extreme.
I enjoyed a certain lifestyle before having a child, should I have downsized that lifestyle once baby came so I didn't have to work? What about me *wanting* to maintain a certain lifestyle for myself, my husband, and my child makes me a (a) workaholic or (b) striving to keep up with the Joneses?
Don't some people (like myself) simply enjoy living in a nice place with nice things and want their children to have the same experience?
So please, anyone who thinks a women is wrong for WOH if she is not doing so to financially survive but does it to maintain a certain lifestyle...whats wrong with this?
Thanks all :)

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"Of course the awareness of who's who on the learning spectrum extends to the less academically talented as well. The idea with the mixed grouping is that that child benefits from exposure to what *can* be done beyond what he's doing and will remain challenged that way."
So, mixed grouping is mainly for the benefit of the less able learners?
"Also, that child with the ten page paper might not be terribly unusual; there might be several other students with the same assignment. They're part of the spectrum of academic ability and should be educated with their age peers if possible."
Right, but those kids may not be grouped together (within the classroom) in order to make them feel less freaky. I still do not get this.
You:
PumpkinAngel
PumpkinAngel
Stephen King.
PumpkinAngel
My son read scaled down versions of the Hounds of Baskervilles a few years ago, it was pretty good.
PumpkinAngel
Why is the bilingual component so different? It was meant to illustrate.
"With mixed grouping, the point is not to deny the differences among children. One objective is to expand their social competencies by providing them experience with a diversity of learners."
Yes, I know. I got that this was the intended point even back in the 3rd grade (perhaps before, I don't remember). Problem is that it does not necessarily achieve this objective, and that is putting it kindly.
"Those differences can certainly be acknowledged. A student who feels inferior because she's doing a two-page essay needs to be shown how much more she can now do than she did last year or six months ago, and she needs to have her areas of higher competence highlighted before the rest of the class."
Again, you are focusing on how the 2-page kid feels, and automatically assuming that the 10-page kid feels anywhere from fine to downright good about the situation. In many, many cases, absolutely not the case.
"IOW, the objective is not to identify the differences among children and then reinforce them through grouping. The objective is to acknowledge differences and celebrate them, while emphasizing the commonalities."
Except the high achievement tends not to get celebrated.
"There's no problem with groups of kids with similar ability levels working together on projects. The problem comes in when this is seen as a regular, consistent, planned approach to grouping. It reinforces the differences among children rather than highlighting their similarities."
I assure you that mixed ability grouping highlights the differences, loudly and clearly, at least to the kids involved.
"Yes, kids can always tell you who's better at what. But mixed ability groupings don't entail pretending differences don't matter. On the contrary, they teach that each of us is unique, with a unique set of talents and attributes, and that we can still learn together without sorting ourselves out along any particular dimension. IOW, I don't have to be as smart as you for you to work with me and learn your best, and for us to learn from one another."
That is a very rosy view, that IME and opinion bears little resemblance to the reality of a 3rd grader's world.
"If a child can't comprehend all of the vocabulary in the story how can they enjoy the story let alone enjoy the complexity of syntactical possibilities when hearing the work as it was written? "
I dunno. My kids never seemed to mind reading stories containing lots of words they didn't understand. They would just ask me what the word meant and move on. If they weren't prepared to enjoy a story without immediately understanding all of the words the first time around, they wouldn't be very literate in the three languages they speak.
Their only exposure to English is through me and through books. I alone cannot provide them the full exposure to English vocabulary in all situations that a monolingual child growing up in an English environment would naturally acquire from school, friends etc. Sometimes there are blanks in their English vocabulary that are only filled by books. They actually enjoy learning new words from books, which also help them put the words in context.
The same thing is true with Swedish and German. Dd, for example, is currently a couple of years ahead in her overall Swedish reading abilities and has been given ability-appropriate books to read out loud at home. She can easily read all of the words but sometimes doesn't understand a particular word because it's a word that would more usually appear within the context of "home" rather than school and so she hasn't heard it before. Should she not be given these books? Should she be given much more simple books with a very simplified vocabulary so that she absolutely understands every word? Or should she be taught how to make use of a dictionary? She enjoys reading the books and we look up the words together.
LoL.
PumpkinAngel
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