Today was A and S's first day of school in America, at long last, after being sent home yesterday. I am happy to say that they both seemed to have had a good experience.
A is in the highest grade of the middle school, which sounds rather like ADC's memories of high school in Brookline: moving from one classroom to another, different people in every class, and the homeroom being mainly for administrative announcements and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance (both boys were rather bemused by that). He has already heard of a class trip, to Annapolis, for science where this semester they will be focussing on earth sciences. Yesterday, in a rush, he had to choose three electives, and picked Spanish. He regretted that today and has already requested to change it: it turns out that most of the children studying Spanish I are in the sixth grade, and have break and lunch with the sixth grade (each grade has a different recess and lunch time , as well as being on a separate floor, thus A does not get to see Y). A reported that most of the children in Spanish class were Asian, with almost all the rest African-Americans, and only a few white students (maybe they prefer to learn French?). At the middle school, the different classes are numbered (e.g., 1 - English, 2 - maths, 3 - history), and on odd days one has classes in odd-numbered subjects and on even days one has classes in even-numbered subjects. Odd days are not Tuesday and Thursday while even ones are Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but the first day of term was an odd day, today was an even day, and the rest of the year rolls forward that way, thus school holidays do not affect the number of classes in any subject. Is this weird, or is it just me? I must say that my immediate response to this was "I am amazed that America is still a superpower."
S is in the final year of the elementary school, and he greeted me by saying "Mr Allen is the best teacher in the world!" Mr Allen, whom I met after school, as the fifth-graders have "specials" (art, music, library, sports - today it was the library) first thing while the homeroom teachers meet, struck me as very pleasant and approachable. Sl is in group 1 - the class is divided into groups which sit together, in his case three boys and three girls - and the only difficulty he reported was not understanding when they did a maths worksheet that involved rounding decimal fractions up and down. This is because he has not learned decimal fractions at all, he is familiar with rounding up and down, and at least part of the problem was not knowing the terminology . Mr Allen asked all parents to e-mail him so he could create a class mailing list, so I took the opportunity to point all this out to him. I hope I came across as a concerned but confident-in-her-child parent and not a helicopter one.
Next week both schools have "Back to School Night," which is where we will hear about the various clubs and activities, as well as get outlines of the syllabi in the various subjects (A's math teacher already sent her one home: a detailed list of topics, learning objectives and more). I must say that I thought that the Jerusalem high school had a great deal of contact with the parents, but American schools clearly are much more concerned with keeping parents in the picture.
As for ourselves, ADC started going in to the Smithsonian yesterday, and has put the finishing touches to two articles. I have not been too productive yet, although I edited an article last Friday. I've been unable to concentrate with the children in the house, so today was my first real work day in a while, and I started on a long-overdue translation project. Research will wait until that, and another few paying projects, are finished, hopefully by the middle of September.
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