Posts by redridge13

Interesting read here

Basically, this explains why they won't let religious studies be the first or last period in NYC schools, while high schools in places like Austin or San Diego can do whatever they want. It’s a perfect example of who actually holds the power in the American school system.🙄

"....But students in Austin or San Diego don't have to deal with this nonsense. Their schedules are usually set up so religion class is either the very first or the very last period, meaning kids either roll in late or head out early. Why on earth can't NYC schools follow the same logic?
– Apparently, that kind of schedule just doesn't work because of the religious teachers' other commitments – or so the principals claim...."

That old guy from the neighborhood is basically illiterate, to begin with ☕

Honestly, there's no way I'd let my kid sit through religion class either
If I actually wanted them listening to all that absolute bullshit, I would've just enrolled them in a private academy

Or just dragged them out to Coachella instead

While my kid is stuck in the library during religion class, they’re busy coloring 🙂
Only three kids from the whole class skip out on religion class. Given how much this neighborhood has changed lately, I was honestly bracing myself for even fewer than that.

I hear things are a bit different downtown, though apparently, over at Lincoln Elementary, they’ve got double the amount of first graders signing up for religion this year.🤷

wanderingbadger44 said:Of course not. It’s just like trying to measure how much someone loves their hometown; you can't really put a number on it, which is why everyone ends up getting an A. 👏

They all get a 5 just so the teacher can keep their headcount and save their damn job.

Honestly, once word gets around the neighborhood that a teacher is actually trying to raise the bar instead of just letting kids slide, I bet the enrollment for those electives would absolutely crater...

🙂 🙂 🙂

I'm officially throwing in the towel 👋

Donna Taylor5 said:So, those little pseudo-intellectual first graders sitting in their own special classes today will eventually become the arrogant snobs of tomorrow, right?

I get the feeling you throw around theories a little too recklessly.
You clearly have no clue about the actual number of first graders or how many special education requirements dictate class sizes, yet you’re already jumping to conclusions. You think this is all just a scheme to protect some colleague's schedule? Please. It's not that simple.

Yeah, and?

edit: obviously I know exactly how many freshmen there are and which specific classes they're in.
As for the kids with special accommodations—I don't know. Maybe that's why they didn't pull them into a separate group.
Or maybe it isn't... ☕

rowdypanther12 said:They asked us if we had any specific preferences when it comes to arranging the kids' schedules

Not for us. Not even close. They basically scattered them just to make sure the little religious groups get totally broken up.

Donna Taylor5 said:Have you considered that maybe enough kids signed up for a non-religious track, but there are still too many other students to simply merge or shrink the existing classes?
To make everyone happy, the Department of Education would have to create an entirely new classroom, which would automatically blow up the weekly schedule for every single teacher, not just the one teaching religion.

Oh, for crying out loud...
🙄 Look,
the smallest class—and yeah, the class sizes aren't all equal—has fewer kids in it than there are non-religious students in the whole grade level. The number of "lost sheep" is exactly enough to fill one single class.
Every single first grader takes the exact SAME curriculum except for that one subject; there isn't some other variable in this equation.
What kind of "extra classes" are you even talking about?
I don't get what part of my posts isn't making sense.
Or are you just playing dumb?
🤷

Lawrence Torres56 said:Have you even checked with the administration at your school, just to confirm that things aren't actually happening exactly the way you're assuming?😁

Look, I really don't want to step on any toes by commenting on how things go down at your specific school since I don't know the local vibe there, but from what I've seen at mine (and the other two nearby), the staff goes absolutely overboard trying to play ball with whatever parents want...
For instance, we have two kids in our class who skip the religion lessons, but it wasn't because the school was trying to pad out some teacher's hourly quota; it happened because it was the only way to satisfy their parents' specific demands.

I'm not "guessing,"🙂
just using some basic common sense here...
As a parent, this stuff doesn't really get under my skin enough to start a massive protest, but honestly, I think the teachers and even the kids would have a much easier time if things were handled the way I'm describing.

When we were doing enrollment, nobody bothered to ask me about my personal preferences or anything like that.😕 So, I have no clue what the "traditions" are like in other school districts out there.
The only thing they asked was whether my kid was doing religious studies or after-school care, and that was pretty much the end of it.

P.S. Mods, sorry for the delay—I'm reading these in chunks so I can reply to everyone individually.🙂

Robert Rodriguez9 said:If they did it that way, the classes would be set right at enrollment, which would prevent all this messy reshuffling later on.

Spot on.

Donna Taylor5 said:Right.
Not necessarily. It all hinges on total enrollment (like I mentioned earlier, @nosorogu) and how many students require accommodations.

My point is that at this rate, we're heading straight toward forming entirely secular classrooms. 😉.

Look, I'm talking about what's actually happening on the ground at our school.
During enrollment, everyone knew exactly how many kids weren't doing the religious studies, yet they still stuck to the class groupings they did.
Why? Because some administrator refuses to let their precious master schedule get messed up.

They’d rather screw over five elementary teachers by leaving massive gaps in their schedules just so one religious studies teacher can keep a perfect, uninterrupted block. Pure nonsense.

Donna Taylor5 said:You think that if 8, 6, or 3 kids out of a class of 20 opt out of religious studies, those remaining 43 religious students would just be redistributed into two classes?
That’s a stretch.
The Department of Defense—or rather, our school board—hardly ever decides to merge or split classes, especially since almost every single classroom includes students on specialized IEP programs.

Actually, the situation you're describing could only happen if fifteen students from two different classes of twenty opted out at once. Then you'd be left with five students wanting religious instruction in each, forcing those two groups to merge into one class.
I'm exaggerating, but that would be a massive shift.
It’s a scenario that’s hard to imagine, and it would hit the other teachers too, because everyone would lose instructional hours due to that merger.

Fine, let's go.
So, we have three classes of 20 kids.
If five kids from each of those three classes decide they don't want religious studies, you form one new class of fifteen kids.
You still have 15 religious students in each of the original three classes 😉, so the religious instructor still has 6 hours of teaching time across those three classes.

@nosorog, a 16-hour weekly load isn't even a bad schedule.

No, no, no, 🙂
Try reading with actual comprehension for once. 😉
Here’s the deal: now you have five different classes where 3 to 5 kids aren't attending the religious studies sessions.
The teacher, naturally, ends up with 5x2 hours a week just dealing with the first graders.
If they try to tweak the schedule so there are four religious study classes and one non-religious one, the number of kids and total classes stays identical, but the teacher loses 8 hours of pay a month—and all that loss comes strictly from their first-grade sessions.

rowdypanther12 said:You can get mad at me if you want, but doesn't separating kids into religious and non-religious classes feel a bit like ghettoization to you?

Honestly, what bugs me even more is watching them pull a handful of kids out of the classroom mid-lesson just to go do their religion studies. It’s such a mess.

Donna Taylor5 said:What exactly does a teacher lose if the rest of the class decides to take the religious studies course?

The real culprit is the Department of Education, which dictates how these class sections are structured. As soon as you split them up, you're forced to expand the weekly schedule for everyone—like giving a history teacher two extra periods. And once those hours go up, the payroll follows.

HBT, it’s all just one big conspiracy.🙄.

I don't know about that, let me run some quick math on the first graders for you 🙂

Now that we have these "mixed" classes, you've got N first-grade classes at 2 hours a week. If they lumped all those non-religious students into one single class, you'd only have N-1 classes at 2 hours a week.
That's an 8-hour drop per month in total instructional time just for the first grade.

The number of classes stays what it is; it just comes down to how the school decides to shuffle the kids around.

edit: rhinoceros 🙂

Lawrence Torres56 said:If you ask me, I honestly think there's actually a tiny fraction of parents (on both sides of the aisle, really) who genuinely give a damn about the other kids while their own are taken care of; most people are just being stubborn and using these kinds of debates as an emotional vent to blow off steam...😁

Maybe I’m looking at this all wrong, but I seriously don't get why anyone has such a massive issue with religious ed classes, having a chaplain on campus, or school-based theology... provided it isn't some forced imposition of a specific ideology, right? What's the actual problem? Is it not the hypocrisy of parents who dutifully sign their kids up for religion class one minute, then turn around and claim they only did it so their kids wouldn't be wandering aimlessly through the hallways the next?🤦

At my local public school—and based on what I hear from friends who work in the field, like one psychologist and one teacher I know—everyone would find things so much easier if they could just form one single group consisting solely of students who aren't attending religious studies. But no matter how hard they try, or how much they reach out to parents to explain the logistics, they just can't pull it off year after year... out of a freshman class of maybe 80 to 100 students, the school can almost never scrape together that minimum requirement of, say, 14 students needed to form a standalone elective class... so, does it even make sense to treat religious education as this huge, controversial flashpoint when it's mostly just a logistical headache?

Nah, that’s just not how it works...
At my local high school, they definitely could have put together a separate group for the kids skipping religion, but they chose not to.
The real reason? It's probably because doing that would actually free up two hours of instructional time in the weekly schedule, and heaven forbid anyone disrupts the status quo. 🙄
We all know whose interests are being protected most within our American school system. ☕

Man, we ended up running late because of those preschool plays
and getting toward downtown was a total nightmare—they were letting cars into the main garage one by one like it was some kind of bottlenecked drill

But hey, we finally made it and it was absolutely killer! 🙏 🙏 🙏

Look at how the President is desperately trying to spin this mess to save face🙄

And don't even get me started on that pundit on CNN; I can barely stand listening to him🤦, isn't he just a complete moron?

I am seriously looking forward to the protest tomorrow! 🎉

I am 100% down with bringing back entrance exams

whether we’re talking about getting into college or even high school. ☕

Look, I actually know a handful of people who went straight from nursing school into medical school and actually made it through
but let’s be real—we’re talking about people who had the grades and the bank account to get into pretty much any university they wanted 🙂

plus, those vocational medical programs were never just three-year stints anyway

Betty Wood54 said:I can't believe some of the nonsense I'm reading here. It's honestly incredible. This is just pure speculation without any basis in reality.

First off, saying English and American history aren't as important as English and American history makes zero sense. For admission to >, 320 points come directly from high school grades. Then, 80 points are based on the average grade of core subjects on the national exams, where the difficulty level of English or American history doesn't even change the point value. Those 80 points are the only place where language and history matter, and even then, math is factored in, so it's actually a very small portion. After that, you have 600 points left, with 360 coming from AP Calculus and 240 from Physics.

As for suggesting that what you learn in a vocational high school counts as "technical expertise" in the context of >, that’s just laughable. > is a university, plain and simple, and things are done at a university level. Technical subjects are covered much faster and in far greater detail than anything in high school. If you compared the two, the high school curriculum wouldn't even look like a basic outline compared to the college courses. Plus, the mathematical tools used in high school are extremely limited compared to university-level math, so it’s perfectly logical that high school subjects can't be compared to college work. A vocational high school is designed to train students to become skilled tradespeople, electricians, and so on, whereas a university is meant to educate engineers and scientists.

But what's even funnier to me is how you—who likely haven't even brushed against computer science or electrical engineering at a higher level in your life—think you know more about "the field" than people who hold professorships and have dedicated their entire lives to it.

And that whole bit about anatomy being a prerequisite also smells fishy to me. Based on that logic, it would imply that before ten years ago, you could only get into med school through health or medical vocational schools, which I am absolutely certain isn't true.

I won't even bother commenting on the part about wasting money on retraining people from scratch.

Of course it's not true—that's just straight-up nonsense. 🤣 🤣
Back in the day, getting into med school was all about your high school GPA and passing entrance exams in biology, physics, and chemistry.
The idea that you need anatomy just to *apply* to med school... 🤦

As for Ford, I actually have no clue what their current requirements are, but back when I was hitting the books, you'd get a max of 400 points from your grades, and then the entrance exams in math and physics accounted for up to 600.
Most students at Ford when I was studying were coming straight out of prep schools.
You had a few people from technical high schools, but most of them I remember dropping out (unless they were those hardcore workaholics)—I mean, jeez, we crushed calculus, while they couldn't even wrap their heads around basic math.

we're all on our way 🙂
heads up, we're gonna be running about half an hour late because of these preschool plays—honestly, kids' stuff always trips up the schedule. hope you guys don't head out before we roll in