The Maple Street School and the Prospect Lefferts Gardens CSA are collaborating on "The Art of Pickling," a workshop to learn about all things pickle. The event is free and open to the public at the Maple Street School (41 Lincoln).
New American Academy Open House: Thurs., February 17
A new public elementary school in District 17, the New American Academy, will be holding an open house on Thursday, February 17, at 6:30 at the school (map). Anyone may attend. This is a chance for parents exploring all their public school options to check out a promising new school.The school is now accepting applications for 2011 classes of Kindergarten, First Grade, and Second Grade.
I wrote about the New American Academy on Hawthorne Street last year because its programs (trilingual education in English, Spanish, and French, for instance) and progressive model sounds promising. You can read more about it here.
(Thanks, Michiko!)
Public School Information Session Tonight
If you are willing to travel a bit to send your child to public school, there is an information session being held tonight at 6:30 at The Co-Op School in Clinton Hill (87 Irving Place, between Fulton and Putnam (gmap).
Joyce Szuflita from insideschools.org and representatives from PS 20, PS 11, PS 46, PS 9, Academy of Arts and Letters, Ethical Community Charter School, Community Partnership Charter School and Leadership Prep will be giving presentations. Beyond the opportunity to hear about the range of options, Joyce Szuflita is a great resource; an opportunity to talk to her for free is one that parents should take.
If you don't mind a little (a lot) of snow, that is.
Public School Information Session
Wednesday, January 26th 6:30PM
The Co-Op School
87 Irving Place
FREE
New Elementary School To Open in District 17 This Fall
The New American Academy in East Flatbush is a collaboration between the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the NYC Department of Education, and the United Federation of Teachers. Unlike the Lefferts school, New American is a public school, not a charter. But unlike conventional zoned schools, New American has an ambitious, progressive program. I'm not going to bother repeating the brochure bullet points, which you can read yourself; rather, I'll simply point out why I'd seriously consider sending my kid to a school in East Flatbush.
Trilingual Education: English, French, and Spanish. For kids raised in educated, middle-class homes, the primary benefit of elementary school is social. I can teach my son how to read, write, and add; I can't teach him French or Spanish. If he finished elementary school fluent in three languages, that alone would be more worthwhile than my entire 13 years of public schooling (pre-college, that is).
Unusual classroom structure: 60 students and four teachers in one large room. Classes are heterogeneous, meaning that students all along the bell curve, including special needs kids, will also share the classroom. Teachers stay with the same group of children from Kindergarten through 5th grade, so they can hit the ground running each school year rather than having to create relationships anew every year. This is important considering the school's emphasis on providing differentiated, individualized instruction. My neighbor Alison Wildman, whose son, Jelani, will be attending in the fall, said this was a big plus for her. When she toured the school, she was told that part of the school's mission is to make sure that if, say, a student is ready for algebra in 4th grade, he'll get it. (Jelani tested in the 99 percentile of the gifted and talented test, i.e. high enough to get into the city's most elite schools.) The downside, of course, is what if you get stuck with a crummy teacher? But as Wildman put it, "There's four teachers -- they can't ALL be bad!" Plus there's good reason to suspect that they won't be...
Focus on quality teachers. One major innovation at New American is that, according to the New York Post, the school will be the first public school in the city to promote teachers based on merit rather than length of service.
Daily exercise and longer than average lunch (recess!) periods.A major problem in public schools is that the emphasis on standardized testing has meant cutting out "frills" such as physical education and art.
No homework.
It's ridiculous to give elementary school kids homework on a daily basis, yet many schools do, particularly at gifted and talented programs.
Not terribly inconvenient.
Though the school ain't exactly next door — it will be housed in P.S. 398, The Walter Weaver School (gmap) — a free school bus from PLG will take students there. It is also on the B12 route, which proceeds slowly East from Parkside and Flatbush.
Book Documents a Year at a PLG Public School
That the book follows the year in a life of a New York City Teaching Fellow wasn't what grabbed me. The surprise was where that teacher was working: at PS 92, right around the corner on Parkside.
The book was written by a New York Times reporter, Abby Goodnough, and much of it appeared in the Times' Metro section back when. It follows a first-year Teaching Fellow a decade ago, when PS 92 was considered one of the city's most troubled schools. (It no longer is, as Dept. of Education reports show a great deal of improvement.)
I don't know much about the book or PS 92, but I ordered a copy. If anyone else is interested in reading and discussing it, book-group-style, email me and let me know (brooklynite282 (at) gmail).
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