Holidays and Conferences

• I just spent 3 days off line. There's something to be said for that, although I'm having fun catching up with all of you friends-in-the-computer.
• We stopped at the National Bottle Museum. I love quirky museums, and I love Politica, who stopped to park even before I'd finished my "It's open!" sentence as we drove by. And Curious Girl clapped when I said we were going into the bottle museum, and wondered whether she should bring in the blue water bottle she'd been drinking from.
• Curious Girl's first report card came home last week. We have a teacher conference in the morning. I'm looking forward to it: kindergarten is clearly going well for her, and her teacher seems to have connected with CG quite well. I'm curious to hear a bit more about CG's social habits in class, and I have a few questions about how persistent she is with challenging tasks at school.
  
• I like CG's school quite a bit. But the report card? Spectacularly uninformative in some key ways. The scale refers back to the state standards, for several reasons, including that "A standards-based report card gives "parents a clear understanding of what their children know, what they are able to do, and what they need to learn in relation to the standards." So the scale on the report card is "Exceeds/meets/nearly meets/fails to meet standards and then "little evidence." Problems here include:
• "little evidence" is not actually on the same scale of exceeding-to-not-meeting any given standard. There might well be little evidence of a student meeting a particular standard; little evidence sounds like a comment about what there is to evaluate, not an actual evaluation.
  
• the report card does not actually point us to anywhere where the actual standards are explained. I remembered that there is an explanation of the report card on the school website, but the explanation there focuses on the transistion from the old (2 years ago) format of report cards. I had to google the state standards.
• the school website does gloss the scale, though, and says that "little evidence" means that "Student's achievement shows little evidence of meeting grade level standards."
  
• When your kid "meets the standard" in October, does that mean she has met the (end-of-grade) standard? Or that she meets the where-we-think-we-are-with-this-standard-in-October-standard?
• CG "exceeds" the standard in music performance. (Yay! I got a 5! she said as we looked at the report card together. She has no clue what the numbers actually mean but clearly has solidly grasped the notion that 5s are bigger than 4s, and at the moment, bigger is better in her book.) On the state standards site, the document I found about arts standards says that there aren't kindergarten level music standards.
• All of this is more philosophically troubling me to me than parentally troubling: CG is having a fine time in kindergarten, and we already knew that this is totally the right time for her to be in kindergarten. (Anyone reading here who's obsessing about whether to repeat a year of pre-K: do it. CG wasn't ready for kindergarten a year ago, and she is in totally the right place now. I could have obsessed about something else during her first year of pre-K. It was such the right call.) So it's not like I have serious questions about what's going on in kindergarten. She's learning to read, she's loving math, she's quizzing us on what are living and non-living things (the subject of the science unit this fall). She likes school, and she's making friends. That's pretty much my idea of good kindergarten outcomes right there.
  
• I really need to come up with a good Thanksgiving entree. But not tonight. Magpie suggested a potato pie, but I am hoping for something with protein (to go along with the turnips braised with maple syrup, and turkey and traditional trimmings my sister will prepare). I'll make bread or rolls of some sort. But what protein? Time to get decisive.
• Except it's time to go to bed. So decisions will have to wait until tomorrow. But comments on non-turkey Thanksgiving options are welcomed!