mellowskipper said:Dropped by the local vocational high school today for their open house. Long story short—if you’re aiming for any of the top three programs, you basically need grades that would make an Ivy League recruiter sweat. They’re only taking in one freshman class per specialization, and honestly, the competition is looking pretty intense.
No sane person actually thinks adding an extra hour of school every day is going to lighten the homework load for kids. I guess Fuchs is just being totally shameless by pushing that nonsense. It’ll probably just force them to sit in a classroom for an extra ninety minutes only to face the same mountain of work when they get home.
It’s wild how public schools won't implement entrance exams, even though almost all the magnet high schools in Chicago have already started doing it without any real reason.
From what I can tell, even in those high-end prep schools, students still seem to pull in top-tier grades. In the ones where getting in is basically a bloodbath, the GPAs stay sky-high, and most kids just breeze through with straight A's.
But they don't necessarily have to be high school grads. I think Fuch was actually saying that kids from vocational schools tend to drop out of college early, so we need more students in academic tracks. Washington, D.C. is struggling because kids who actually want to go that route can't get into the right programs (not sure how it works elsewhere)
I guess there’s a whole bunch of kids for whom an all-day school schedule would just be a nightmare. You’ve got kids with learning disabilities, kids dealing with bullying, kids who just aren't social creatures, or maybe they're just super into extracurriculars and want their life back. I think there are way too many kids who'd rather stay out of school as much as possible. Someone mentioned earlier that some kids don't even feel comfortable enough to use the restroom at their elementary school—that tells you everything you need to know about how some of these kids fit in. If we're talking about equal opportunity and helping the kids who actually *need* more time in the classroom, then we should probably consider the fact that this plan is a total disaster for everyone else.
Paul Davis2 said:In my town, your kid would actually get reprimanded for skipping gym, and let's face it—nobody is skipping computer science in the 21st century. Honestly, it sounds like you hit the jackpot having such a great school with an on-site gym and a schedule that fits perfectly. You're lucky. And clearly, they managed to eat, too.
Gym was on the regular schedule here. And yeah, if you don't even have a gym on campus, that's a huge issue, but I guess that's something the district needs to fix rather than expecting an all-day school program to solve it. My kid is finishing up at a prep school, so they figured out computer skills just fine without needing those electives back in middle school.
The sixth period runs until about 1:05 PM. Electives, supplements, or extra credits aren't mandatory. That’s kind of the whole point—if you don't want to take them, you don't have to. My kid never had to deal with afternoon classes back in elementary school. They'd be home by 1:30, and by the time they would've been getting out now, around 3:00 or 3:30, they'd already eaten and chilled out for a bit. 🤷
The thing is, nowadays you have to nail your math exams just to get into the Juilliard School, or pass an English essay to get into MIT, whereas back when they only looked at entrance exams, it wasn't like that 🤷 It’s not even about being smart or dumb, really; it’s more about what you specifically had to prep for college admissions. Like, for MIT, you didn't even need to know physics if you crushed the math portion of the entrance test. I didn't actually take my high school finals myself, but from what I remember people saying, they weren't exactly a huge deal back then.
Betty Wood54 said:I find it almost funny when the crowd that dreads the entrance exams is the same group that found the high school finals to be a total nightmare. In my experience, those college placement tests have consistently been way more intense than anything covered in high school, at least when you're looking at math and physics.
Maybe they were tougher, but there were fewer subjects to worry about. Like at MIT, for example—you just had to nail math and physics (and sometimes, honestly, math was enough)
It’s not just MIT and Others, either—other magnet high schools count too. I can't say they all offer much variety, but some definitely do. It really just comes down to what the specific school puts on the table; like, maybe MIT offers elective computer science while other magnet schools just don't.
Anthony Ward6 said:German has always been a struggle for students, including my generation—we basically learned nothing. The language is inherently complicated, we aren't exposed to it in our daily lives, and honestly, the teachers didn't really know it well enough to actually teach us. It was bound to be a mess when they tried to set up advanced and college-prep tracks back in High School.
Yeah, true. Back in the day, I had German as my primary language in elementary school and always did great, so I hit a wall in High School because I was totally lost. It wasn't easy, since you can't just catch up on a whole language overnight.
Anthony Ward6 said:Generally speaking, all high schools require two foreign languages, including the STEM ones; the only real difference is how they schedule the classes.
Not really. In those specialized prep schools, foreign language is an elective, so if you don't pick it, you aren't learning two.