My Kindergartner Is a "Slow Poke"???

Recently I have was informed and appalled that my child was being called a "slowpoke" at school. Hmmm....the child is five,the child is male, and the child is a kindergartner. Apparently he is not finishing his assignments during classroom time. Is he displaying bad behavior by distracting other children, is he being inattentive, is he daydreaming?
NO! He is doing the best he can, but he is just a little slow at completing his work. Now, what is more upsetting is what I have found out what form of motivation "tactics" his teachers were using to get him going. He was not given snack during snack time unless he had completed his assignment, he was to stay in the cafeteria after lunchtime instead of going to recess, and he had to move his name to "yellow" or "red" ( yellow is the warning of "bad behavior" and red referring to "bad behavior" after the child has moved his name to yellow. Oh, and let's not forget that he is being told he will not be able to participate in the Christmas party unless his school work is completed. Absorb all of that and then, remember: 5 years old, male, kindergarten.

What has our education system come to when they are depriving children of food and much needed playtime during recess? And let's not forget about resulting into name calling! You know, it broke my heart when my 5 year old child broke down into tears one morning and told me he was a slow poke and would never be able to finish his work because of his teacher's and classmates' name calling. He feels like a complete failure and has low self esteem about himself. And this is a coming from a child who is a smart and bright child who had complete confidence in himself. Last year he loved school, and this year, he doesn't want to have anything to do with it! What is happening here?

I'll tell you what's happening. Kindergartners are now under intense pressure to meet inappropriate expectations, including academic standards, that until recently, were reserved for first or second grade. These expectations and the policies that result from them have greatly reduced and in some cases obliterated opportunities for imaginative child-initiated play in kindergarten. Research shows that children who engage in complex
forms of socio-dramatic play have greater language skills than non-players, better social skills, more empathy, more imagination, and more of the subtle capacity to know what others mean. They are less aggressive and show more self-control and higher levels of thinking (Alliance for Childhood, p. 7). Yet, the curriculum has been revamped and has had children behind desks with pencil and paper in hand for the past 15 years. What happened to play? What happened to learning and having fun? What happened to all of the "learning centers"? There's nothing but worksheets after worksheets after worksheets.

Yeah, he's a boy. A team of twelve neuroscientists found that the various regions of the brain develop in a different sequence and tempo in girls compared with boys, resulting that the pace of the girls’ development is two years ahead of the boys’ (Sax, 2007). For many boys, there is a huge difference of readiness to learn between the age of five and seven, just as there is a huge difference in readiness for a girl between three and five.

So, why the reprimanding and demeaning and degrading name calling if my slowpoke child is a perfectly NORMAL, five year old boy?