Marocco

When I attended my liceo, several years ago, "history" consisted of memorizing a series of names, dates, and tidbits of (sometimes incorrect) information. The students who were able to recite these in the same way as the teacher got the best marks. Anything else, including doing your own research, could get you into trouble.

In the last year, I got a different teacher. The new one did not believe in tests, he just gave everybody the same mark.

Lorna at Vicenza

Well it seems that the mentality around here towards school hours is finally changing.
Results from a question all parents of elementary school children were aked to respond to and sign clearly show that 79% are in favour of the "settimana corta".
From September there will be no more Saturday school at the elementary school.

I hope it eventually reaches middle school too.

It's bound to piss off the other 21% though.

K in Modena

Even the asilo nido seems to be open on Saturdays in the South. My in-laws were surprised that we weren't sending our one-year old to nursery on a Saturday!

duffer

There's an over-reliance on the extended family, e.g. grandparents to look after the children but it's getting more and more of a problem, especially as couples are leaving it later in life to start a family, meaning that grandparents will not be around to pick up kids in the afternoon. Perhaps people are leaving having children until later because they cannot afford to any earlier - which leads us back to school hours, it might have been OK in the 'old days' when the mother was not working and could go and pick up the kids but today? Surely it's cheaper to find a minder for a couple of hours from 3pm to 5pm than for the whole afternoon? I don't see the benefit of going to school 6 days a week and getting a pile of homework. Rather than all this homework, how about some teaching in the afternoons? And weekends free to play. These are children at the end of the day!

HADENOUGHPIZZA

My youngest does mondays -fridays 8.30 to 4.30 , saturdays are free but she gets loads of homework as well . Its not idea this year but its worked well up until now. For a whole load of reasons we are sending her to a middle school next year that offers afternoons . I have anxieties about her managing long days but they do get supervised homework time each day and it has to be better than the other options I have .

Lorna at Vicenza

Chloe finishes middle school every day at 1pm, including Saturdays.
If I wasn't working from home I have no idea what I'd do with her.
I hate the school hours.

HADENOUGHPIZZA

Exactly so either they are at home alone which often means TV / Snacks / Computer or at Nonna's which in my case at least means TV + snacks and she moans on at me about it. Some people have offspring that go home , cook, clean, study and are delighted to do so ... or so I am told anyway .

37100

My sons went to full time middle school + Saturday mornings + homework.

Lorna at Vicenza

I'm off to the parent rep meeting at middle school soon.
I hope the nasty mothers don't piss me off as much as they did last time.

MarkRD

We were lucky to live near to a primary school which only did Mon-Fri - and that was in the late nineties so we were pretty avanti in that sense, and lucky too not having the nonni to rely on..
I seem to remember there were two or three afternoons (ie. two hours in the afternoons!)... school dinners were horrible but that was the price to pay for staying home on Saturdays.

Scuola media was a shock in that sense .. plus the metality was so retro, they never would have agreed to working afternoons to stay home Saturdays .. I was on the parent-teachers committee and I remember once we tried to extend the term by one day before Christmas, for some reason, but the teachers wouldn't agree because they wouldn't have had time to make their tortellini .. .
FAIL

duffer

Yep, #epicfail

Lorna at Vicenza

Well the teachers had some positive things to say - for once.

The nasty mothers were quite pleasant and friendly. Totally different to last time.

They did however ask me to write up the summary of the meeting for all the other parents.
I suppose it serves me right for criticising what they wrote last time.

Lorna at Vicenza

I'm feeling ready to get into a fight with a high school teacher.

Last week my neighbour's kid came to me for clarification about the comparitive and superlative.
After going through it all, with a hundred examples, she asked me why I said "slower" and in her book the teacher had given them all "more slowlier".

I basically told her that was crap. Slow is an adjective and works with comparisons. Slowly is an adverb and adverbs do not go with comparisons.

Happier exists ... slowlier doesn't.

By all accounts the stupid teacher is basing her teachimgs on the fact that a Y becomes an IE and totally forgetting the difference between an adjective and an adverb.

My poor neighbour did her verifica based on the truths I had given her and still only got a 6 because all the things she did as I would do, were marked wrongly.

When the poor girl had the nerve to question her results and say that she'd spoken to a mother tongue, the teacher got royally pissed off and told her that instead of wasting her time with a so called lettrice - she should have been studying the grammar rules more.


It's ****ing pathetic. Excuse my bad language but these kind of things really, really piss me off.

HADENOUGHPIZZA

You want to get the childs mother to go in armed with a grammar book preferibly in Italian and ask to see the Head !

Lorna at Vicenza

I should do. I'm sure I've got a couple of grammar books here where the rules are explained in Italian.

If the teacher thinks slowlier is correct, I wonder if she thinks quicklier is the opposite.