School Shopping

This morning the FP Gal and I went on a couple of school tours to see where Relia (and probably the rest of our litter) will go. The best school we went to was one that is an International Baccalaureate school. When Wikipedia comes back up I'll see if they have a good explanation of what that is. The basic concept is that they have a program with schools all around the world and they concentrate on creating thinkers.
What amazed me both at this school and at the more traditional one we visited was just how aggressive the teaching is nowadays. At the public school we went to we stopped in to see a third grade classroom that was working on 'literary theory'. On the screen they were working with bullet points that emphasized things like 'Recognize the use of onomatopoeia' and 'Recognize the importance of understatement'. We might have hit on such things later in school but certainly not in my third grade classes. The FP Gal said that math teaching is pretty aggressive too.
Frankly, I did not know this. I'm sure my kids will do fine and it looked like the kids in the classroom were all following along well. But this makes it tough to really compare how kids are doing now with how they did when I was back there.
One other example, at the IB school we popped our heads into a second grade classroom and saw that they were working on a project about money. It was explained to us that several weeks ago they had started with some play bartering, then they developed products. And now after learning about markets and supply and demand, they were finishing up by spending their own made up currency on things they had created. Wow!
Needless to say, we came away very impressed.