Vantaggi
Despite tutors claiming that the job is easy, they don’t seem to realize that their ease conflicts with the disservice they’re providing to students. Yes, these “lesson plans”, which are essentially just work books with assigned exercises are prepared for you; however, telling a 5 year old GT student to match a picture to a sentence adheres to any potential academic enrichment . The curriculum is fake; parents , PLEASE REVIEW Common Core Standards before enrolling your kid here. You’ll find that what the students are doing here is the equivalent of an ESL curriculum implemented in Korea. There is no critical thinking, no discussion, no context for learning , no high order thinking. At most, I’m a certified teacher who gets paid to tell kids,” turn to page 6”.
Svantaggi
Where do I even begin? First of all, the validity of RT’s reading assessments is terribly misconstrued. Books are not leveled with Fountas and Pinell, so expect a student to go from reading an early emergent book to an emergent book within a week ( which is not because of actual progress at all, but simply invalid assessment). I’ve had 1st graders ask me why they were given a book with 8 words per page one day and 30 words per page the next. I’ve had some even question why the workbooks are SO easy, and indeed, it’s because they too know that what they do at Reading Town has nothing to do with DOE curriculum. Secondly, the workbooks consist of dry, reductive, and recall based exercises which are not and cannot even be differentiated for students who are more cognitively and intellectually advanced. Gifted learners need open ended questions, exploration, and inquiry even if you’re simply teaching phonics —look, “look at a picture of a bee and write the first sound in the word” is not learning, it is drill. Then, worst of all, RT only values their GT students because of the dollars pathetic , mindless parents invest into thinking GT programs are a pipeline to Yale (rarely ever the case, more like suicide if a child has been drilled on test prep since the age of 3). So, when I have had students who refuse to do the work, question the stupidity of the activities, and pose higher order thinking questions; instead of management considering the child worthy of GT, they insist that the student is simply lazy. This alone proves that Reading Town is not an educational facility at all, but a mere trade stock post for Asian schools exporting watered down ESL workbooks. Management is totally aloof in terms of pedagogy and CCLS , management is tailored to Eastern forms of teaching that exemplify learning as drill work and rote memorization. Parents,please reconsider your options. You can easily buy the same work books on Amazon without having to pay $2,000 to have a teacher tell your child “turn to page 6”.