Jonah's now in fifth grade. Up until now, I haven't had too many opinions about his curriculum. He's had to learn how to multiply and divide, write an introduction to an essay, and identify the main characters in a novel. Pretty standard stuff. I know that others are very bothered by Everyday Math and Whole Language reading, but I've never really cared too much. I always figured a smart teacher blended pedagogical methods and added a dollop of common sense. Better to focus on getting smart teachers in the classroom than getting hot and bothered by instruction, I figured.
(Exception: I have gotten annoyed at the curriculum in Health Class (visual here) and a long rant here about other stuff. Oh, here's another one. I guess I do gripe a lot.)
I am starting to get more cross about the work that Jonah's bringing home, because it's starting to venture into my turf – it's stuff that either Steve or I has taught before at college.
In his Social Studies class, he's learning about geography, but they aren't finding Tibet or Afghanistan on the map. They are memorizing the Five Components of Geography and then spitting them back on worksheets and pre-made tests. What are the Five Components of Geography? I can't remember; it was too boring and meaningless to sink into my head even though I had to drill Jonah on it.
Jonah and his friends should be learning about explorations around the world and viewing slides that identify the location of Afghanistan on the map and its neighboring countries. They should be shown pictures of the mountains and deserts and close ups of the villages looking like a bar in Tatooine. They should talk about how the unique geography of this country has affected world politics. Where in the world is Osama bin Laden?
Are the textbook writers missing the brain chip that tells them what is boring versus interesting? Are they aware that no adult will ever ask them about the Five Components of Geography, but as American citizens, it is really important to know a lot about Afghanistan?
Then there is Science. Last week's lesson was about the scientific method. They were introduced to the term, hypothesis. The teacher gave them a meaningless textbook definition to memorize, but didn't really explain it. The textbook definition wasn't even the old fashioned, "a hypothesis is an educated guess." It was something even more boring and unmemorable. Jonah was expected to fill in the word "hypothesis" in sentence with a blank, but no one really cared if the students internalized the concept.
As we drove Ian to his gym class, Jonah and I practiced coming up with hypotheses about things that we spied on the edge of the road. "Jonah, come up with a hypothesis about a fire hydrant. How about: a fire hydrant can shoot out more water in the summer time than in the winter time. How would you test that?"
It's not the teachers' fault that Jonah is memorizing superficial, boring crap. They have no discretion over textbooks and curriculum. I'm not even sure how much input the school board has over these matters. Are any textbooks interesting?
It's actually painful to see subjects that I love be turned into mindless hash.
Apt. 11d 
I’ve been ok with S’s curriculum. They’re studying explorers now. She and I watched this video last night and talked about things like how Columbus was Italian but sailed for Spain etc., and how the bubbles bursting off are countries gaining independence. It was cool.
But I wanted to (and didn’t) go ballistic this morning over something else relating to her teacher. I volunteer when I can in the school library working on a cataloging project. This morning I went for an hour, and since I was near my daughter’s classroom, I thought I’d peek in and see if the teacher was alone and ask her for a copy of an essay S wrote Wednesday night and handed in yesterday.
To back up: there was some sort of safety rule violation in the class Wednesday (pushing, something fell down), and she made the students write a 5 paragraph essay on safety rules. S worked on it Wed. night and read me the essay the next morning. It was FABULOUS! I told her I loved it, and she brought it to school, and after she left I actually set up my iSight and made a video of me reading her first draft (which I found on the table) out loud to share with my parents and sisters. She actually made a 5 paragraph essay on safety rules interesting and amusing!
Well, back to the teacher. At 10 am this morning I poked my head in and asked if she was planning to return the essay to the kids or if I could have it, and she said, I QUOTE, “I don’t have them any more.” W. T. F. She trashed them, probably unread, after 24 hours, not even returning them to the kids?
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They’re Location, Movement, Place, Interaction, and Region, apparently (as an internet search suggests). After learning those 5 words, aren’t they learning about what they’re supposed to be about in a specific context? Those words are supposed to be a means for organizing a set of information (i.e about Afghanistan). Would you be upset if they used them to learn about Djibouti instead (i.e. a country that is less relevant right now than Afghanistan)?
If Jonah is being taught boring fill in the blank meaningless words, I think it’s bad teaching, and not bad curriculum.
My daughter brought home a “book report” project, which I thought might bug you when I saw it (though I’m perfectly fine with it). They’re supposed to read a book and then do one of 4 different “projects” with it. Three of the projects require no writing (a venn diagram, a book cover, a 3-d diorama, a time line). My daughter reports that all the boys want to do the book cover.
The project isn’t a problem for me, ’cause my daughter writes for fun, and thus doesn’t need to be pushed to write. But, if I had a boy who avoided it, I might be irritated.
(and, my daughter is in the 3rd grade — I don’t know what the project would look like in the 5th).
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Wow, that sounds terrible. In Geeky Girl’s science class, they’re looking at things under the microscope. She brought in spices and they had to predict what they’d look like. Then, they looked at them and did some writing about their observations. They learned how to describe things accurately, basically writing up little mini lab reports. She was seriously excited about the arrival of some live bacteria that they were going to look at.
In the gifted program, they’re doing archaeology and anthropology, some of which is also being done in the regular classes. They’re talking about the middle east now vs. the middle east thousands of years ago, both from a physical and political perspective.
In literature, they read a book about the holocaust and tied it to geography and politics.
So, I’ve been pleased so far. It’s middle school I’m worried about, where I know Geeky Boy spent way too much time being evaluated on handwriting and his coloring skills–in middle school!
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“They’re Location, Movement, Place, Interaction, and Region, apparently (as an internet search suggests). After learning those 5 words, aren’t they learning about what they’re supposed to be about in a specific context? Those words are supposed to be a means for organizing a set of information (i.e about Afghanistan). Would you be upset if they used them to learn about Djibouti instead (i.e. a country that is less relevant right now than Afghanistan)?”
I think that’s pedagogically backwards. First you learn some stuff and then you learn an abstract framework to arrange your knowledge on. Concrete –> abstract is the way to go with kids.
“If Jonah is being taught boring fill in the blank meaningless words, I think it’s bad teaching, and not bad curriculum.”
That is curriculum. It comes in a big book that the school pays big bucks for and has expensive and time-consuming teacher training for.
Meanwhile, back in TX, C’s 2nd grade class is doing major ancient civilizations (Mesopotamia, Egypt, etc.). C has been picking up a lot on mummies that her younger brother doesn’t want to hear about. She’s been out sick for a while, but the last I heard they were doing ancient China and C was telling me about silkworms.
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Have you thought about running for school board?
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Yes, Lucy. Thanks for asking. I might do it some day.
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Some people think that the children should be taught conceptual frameworks (as in these five components) before learning any facts. Although the components won’t have much meaning initially, the kids will gradually understand the components as they hang facts on them. I’m not saying that this is in fact sound pedagogy (I truly don’t know), but it isn’t crazy. It’s like learning set theory (as I did, in the “new math” days) before learning number facts.
It’s hard to know what will interest children. My daughter has decided, at age 15, that she wants to be a realtor. I have no idea why. So for each course, she asks whether it could have any utility for her life as a realtor. Obviously, this makes it hard to defend the importance of science courses, though math is on stronger ground.
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There’s such a strong bias in education now against concrete facts and memorization. I think you need to know a lot of brute STUFF to measure concepts and abstractions against, especially if you ever hope to come up with any ideas of your own about how things work.
Then again I’m such a stick-in-the-mud I believe in memorizing poems.
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Wendy, that’s terrible. It sounds like she was treating the essay as discipline, rather than a thoughtful assignment. She should just have them write 500 times “I will be safe in the classroom” if that’s the case.
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I’m very interested in this and agree with Amy P.’s points about concrete to abstract methods of thinking and also — cautiously — with the problems of curriculum (as well as bj’s point about teacher effectiveness). Cautiously, mostly because my daughter is 2 and aside from teaching at the college level and reading the occasional educational discussion on the internets, my hypotheses (to use Jonah’s new word) are not as grounded in empirical or theoretical rigor as I’d like them to be.
That said. My 2 cents. Things like teaching assessments stress big general things like “know the 5 elements of geography” (or whatever), “understand the scientific method”, etc – things that teachers could make interesting by showing students rather than telling them the information and giving them worksheets. Some teachers would like to show their students these things, I imagine, but are constrained by mandated curricula, their school environments and resources, local level stuff that might get in the way. Other teachers likely cannot show the students these things effectively because they lack the knowledge of Afghanistan, for example, and don’t have the inclination/talent to look it up.
After reading about NCLB, I’m now wondering if it’s the very best teachers who overcome the constraints of their administrations, fighting “the man” in order to educate their charges. I hope that this is rare and overblown in the education discussion, but it does come up a bit.
One thing though: the problem with any public policy is that once one writes down a law or program, one limits it. This is a tradeoff of standard curricula (be they local, county, state or federal). Creating standards is a worthwhile and noble goal but in choosing what standards to privilege, one limits others. This is rather an obvious point, but it also means that conversations about stuff like NCLB (mentioned here — so not any sort of commentary on laura or her worthy commentariat)should probably distinguish between the elements of that particular policy or law and the problems with putting ANY sort of policy into place. There are always unforseen — and likely, negative — consequences for policy action.
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And laura, should I move to your township (a distinct possibility), I’ll join the PTA to further your school board ambitions, nascent/non-existent as they are. One need not tilt at these windmills solo.
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“Obviously, this makes it hard to defend the importance of science courses”
Radon (chemistry), mold (biology), furnaces (thermodynamics). Does that help? š
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“It’s not the teachers’ fault that Jonah is memorizing superficial, boring crap. They have no discretion over textbooks and curriculum. I’m not even sure how much input the school board has over these matters. Are any textbooks interesting?”
I recently found a great author, Steve Sheinkin, who has written three books on American History for kids (we’re making our way through the one on Westward Expansion now and loving it). The reason I mention this is that he refers to himself as a reformed textbook writer, and his back-of-book bio says that he “filled fat files with all the amazing stories and surprising quotes that textbook editors would never let him use.” So yeah. Draw your own conclusions.
I’ve also seen some homeschoolers argue that schools don’t choose specific textbooks for their intrinsic merits — that there’s no review committee that truly evaluates the books available in a given subject. Rather, the books are chosen because of the textbook company’s relationship with the school district. They buy en masse, barely glancing at content. I have no idea if this is the case, but it could well be. All of D’s textbooks through elementary school were from Houghton Mifflin, and had the same basic look and feel. Very standardized, and not terribly well written. Not bad, just not great.
Re. geography, I’ve been rooting around lately for texts that will be both fun and give a real sense of cultures and countries. As of right now, I’m planning to buy the Kingfisher & Usborne World Geography encyclopedias (Usborne has a new edition coming out at the end of this month, apparently). They’re both colorful, with tons of pictures, and they give you a sense of cultures as well as politics and terrain. They each have different strengths. Our local library has both as reference books.
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“(Usborne has a new edition coming out at the end of this month, apparently).”
Cool. Once I realized that this year was going to be ancient history at school, I got Usborne’s internet-linked Encyclopedia of Ancient Civilizations for C. If you go on their site, they have internet links for multi-media stuff.
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My theory is that they may be trying too hard to avoid anything that might generate controversy. There are some overprotective mothers in my daughter’s fifth grade class who would object to anyone learning about Afghanistan because it’s too scary, and war is too scary and the best way to deal with it is to stick our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not happening and instead focus all our attention on things like the JOnas Brothers and Hannah Montana. Hence, we get the five components of geography. (Our kids went to a public school in the south where they managed to teach about the whole civil war without ever really having a serious discussion about: racism, whether it still exists, economic inequities and racism in today’s world, the utility of reparations for slavery, the legacy of racism, colonialism and oppression — and the list goes on).
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Oh, I will weigh in here that I see an awful lot of K-8 teachers spending most of their classroom time teaching subjects outside their expertise. Watching my kid try to learn math from a smart but not math-focused teacher in grade school? Was painful and required a lot of remediation on her parents’ part. This was less of a case in language & literature or history as those were almost always the teacher’s undergraduate major.
When teaching outside their own specialty, K-8 teachers rely on usually-crappy textbooks written for the blandest of bland. Textbooks are marketed more on the educational theories they propound than how useful they are when employed by a non-specialist teacher just trying to get through grade seven math without going crazy.
Our reward with the elder child enrolled in a magnet program at her high school is to see her thrill over her awesome math teacher and flourish in all the disciplines. Every teacher works in just one or two fields for which they have certification.
If grade schools had more specialist teachers or more support for teachers who have to lead classes outside their specialty, we wouldn’t have to wait until our kids are in high school to have a hope of real classroom engagement across the board.
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“(Our kids went to a public school in the south where they managed to teach about the whole civil war without ever really having a serious discussion about: racism, whether it still exists, economic inequities and racism in today’s world, the utility of reparations for slavery, the legacy of racism, colonialism and oppression — and the list goes on).”
I had a really super AP US history course in high school (loved the textbook–wish I had a copy). It was the only good history class I had in school, very meaty with lots of use of original sources. We didn’t do anything on your list (this was rural Washington). There was a “contemporary world problems” course that I didn’t have time to take that would have been a pretty good home for some of those questions.
The problem is that the world is full of gritty realities that don’t fit very well in the bland and politicized world of textbooks. You have your list, but everybody’s got an ox to be gored. Off the top of my head:
1. effects of the War on Poverty
2. urban renewal
3. effects of school desegregation
4. busing
5. post-colonial history
6. the price of diversity (less altruism, less community involvement, see Putnam)
7. the net effect of foreign aid (see William Easterly’s White Man’s Burden)
8. majority/minority relations around the world, perhaps with special attention to the fate of entrepeneurial minorities
Speaking of conflict-avoidance, Diane Ravitch has a book on textbooks entitled “The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.” I haven’t read the book, but I remember that one of her examples was the removal from a textbook of a story about a blind mountaineer who made it to the top of Everest. I forget the reasoning, but it might have been that they didn’t want vision-impaired children to feel bad about not climbing Everest. In that environment, Afghanistan didn’t have a prayer.
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Wendy: Love you. I’ll give some of those a try.
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Well dang. My comment didn’t show up. I just wanted to say that our curriculum is fine in elementary school, but gets really boring in middle school and goes back to being interesting in high school. Fun times.
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For the realtor to be, don’t forget natural disaster risks: landslide potential, whether to buy flood insurance, forest fire danger and safe vs. dangerous trees.
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Tell Jonah Aunt Tammy is going to make him play with Google Earth to explore the world. The 3rd graders are studying Egypt and made a virtual tour of Ancient Egypt using Google Earth, iMovie and garageband. So easy to do and so exciting and engaging for the kids. Maybe we can do something similar over Christmas vacation.
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I have no real idea what the content of the curriculum is at school in third grade here. No one is learning ancient civilizations, I know that — not the first year they take the end-of-grade tests, no way, no how.
Elba’s class did a pretty elaborate world mapping project in the first quarter, but it was entirely focused on the physical world at the international level (there was more discussion of different environments, political units, and economics at the local/state/national level). All three kids did a big unit on soil for science, which involved lots of different kinds of dirt, and experiments about why clay doesn’t make a good growing medium (which is practical, at least, in this location).
I would imagine that these are the experiences that make people doubt their choice of one school district over another, or of public over private. That’s the challenge — that if you’re paying attention, it’s very easy never to stop second-guessing your decisions for your kids.
It’s not so much mediocre curriculum that worries me. It’s the medium- and long-term effects of prolonged boredom in the classroom. I don’t know what we’ll do if/when we run up against that problem.
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“It’s not so much mediocre curriculum that worries me. It’s the medium- and long-term effects of prolonged boredom in the classroom.”
Boredom is at least half a curriculum problem. I beat up Everyday Math pretty regularly here, but there’s a reason that the pendulum swung in that direction. The more cut-and-dried math I got in elementary school 25 years ago wasn’t a prize-winner either. That old curriculum would just add digits as the years went by, rather than adding conceptual complexity. As an elementary school child, I was sure that math in the later grades would just mean more digits, a pretty dismal prospect to a child sweating over what appeared to be endless worksheets. They also introduced the operations very sloooowly. I think my elementary curriculum first introduced multiplication in 3rd grade and I remember only really having my multiplication facts down cold in 5th grade. I’m not sure when division appeared, but it was pretty late. My dad (a math MA) was unimpressed with my elementary math curriculum, just as he is with his grandson’s reform math curriculum in Washington State (let’s drop math facts for a month or so and do quilt blocks for math!). (My dad has said that the “new math” was mathematically good, it’s just that the teachers were not equipped to deal with it.)
My daughter has Singapore Math at her school (lots of cute little pictures to illustrate problems, no distracting and irrelevant page clutter, few problems per page, very systematic, very fast, moves from concrete to abstract). C’s class first saw multiplication at the end of first grade and they just had they’re introduction to division in 2nd grade. This feels really fast to me (how about some more practice with carrying and borrowing?), but doing multiplication cheek by jowl with the division and so visually helps make it clear how the two are related. I remember finding division really exotic and intimidating as a child, but my daughter is taking it in stride.
Curriculum does matter. Teachers, no matter how wonderful or terrible, have a particular set of materials to work with and particular expectations to meet from their administrations, and it does matter what those materials are and what those expectations are.
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Yes, Jody, I think it’s very easy to get into a cycle of self-flagellation about the choices that we make for our kids. What would happen if we moved to a different town? If we scraped together enough money for a fancy private school? Would our kids end up with a very different life, if we made a different choice? It’s nice to think that their futures are their own and that a kid who is destined to be a lawyer or a doctor will end up at that point no matter whatever school or environment we place them in. But I’m just not sure whether or not that’s true.
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“doing multiplication cheek by jowl with the division and so visually helps make it clear how the two are related.”
My kids’ school uses “Investigations,” which I’m given to understand is more in the Everyday Math family of math curricula. But E (in 2nd grade) did a worksheet that was conceptually about division last week. He and another kid in the class asked to do multiplication, so the teacher is going to let them, but I haven’t quite seen how that’s happening yet.
And I don’t know if I’ve ever said this, but I love my son’s 2nd grade teacher. She finds him to be as incredibly delightful as we do. We are so lucky this year.
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“If we scraped together enough money for a fancy private school? Would our kids end up with a very different life, if we made a different choice?”
There’s a lot of commonality in approach and content from school to school, even counting private schools (a number of the Kitchen Table Math gang have had disappointing private school experiences). I did a lot of research in metro DC before we decided to move to Texas, and while test scores differed, all the public and private schools I looked at (not really fancy schools, just the ones we could conceivably afford) used reform math curriculum. It turned out that even the famously conservative diocese of Arlington used a reform curriculum (dozens and dozens of topics covered every year at blinding speed, followed by a death-defying leap into a traditional algebra curriculum in 7th or 8th grade). I wouldn’t change schools without a good look at the textbooks, the classroom blogs (if any), as well as more conventional methods of assessment (teachers, reputation, test scores, etc.). The thing about private school is that with two or more kids you need it to be much better than the public options to justify the expense. It’s a lot of money, even on the low end. We’re spending $800 a month for tuition for 1.6 kids. You could buy a lot of Capsela or trips to Williamsburg for that kind of money, if the private school were only a bit better than the public school.
“My kids’ school uses “Investigations,” which I’m given to understand is more in the Everyday Math family of math curricula.”
Yes. Interestingly, I’ve also heard that the reform curricula share some DNA with Asian curricula.
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“It’s nice to think that their futures are their own and that a kid who is destined to be a lawyer or a doctor will end up at that point no matter whatever school or environment we place them in.”
What, is this the new goal?
I am worried about the way children are being judged these days, but I know what I want out of education — which is to foster a curiosity mindset, a drive to know about things. I don’t know if all children are born with this, but I know mine were (and, my goal in education is not to see it destroyed or squelched).
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I just want my kids to achieve their potential – whatever that potential might be.
I can tell you, bj, that Jonah’s school is not driving him to learn more and isn’t fostering curiosity. I’m doing that at home. Yesterday, I explained why the Periodic Table of elements is cool and how scientists group up things together. He had to memorize the word “classify” and then fill the word in a sentence with a blank, but the teacher hadn’t really talked about the word. I laid out on the table some cards of animals that Ian had just cut out of a magazine and we talked about how we could group different animals together. Now the word “classify” actually makes sense to him. His teacher didn’t do that.
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Are we expecting too much of our schools? Has there ever been a school that universally reached every kid and fostered curiosity?
Most of us can remember one or two “star” teachers we had as kids; teachers who really fired us up about the topic matter, engendered a love of learning in that area. These teachers used to be considered the outliers, and we all expected one or two such memorable teachers in our school careers. Now it seems we’re expecting every single school experience to be at that level.
(BTW I can still list off all the prepositions, sung to a very memorable tune I learned thanks to Mrs. McMurray in 4th grade. Who knew diagramming sentences was such fun? Thank you!)
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“I can tell you, bj, that Jonah’s school is not driving him to learn more and isn’t fostering curiosity. ”
I see that — and I think it’s a problem with your school. Not the content or curriculum but the general attitude. I don’t think that changing the curriculum would change the experience. I think the mindset needs to be changed, and, I do worry that that can be impossible.
But, I’ll further admit that I get squirmy at the idea of trying to make sure my kids reach their potential, and having that be a responsibility of me or the school (rather than themselves). I recently stumbled on a book in the library called something like “secrets your high school won’t tell you about how to get into college.” In it the author outlines a careerism orientation education designed to foster your childs’ area of excellence so that they will be a top-out-of sight candidate for the prestigious colleges (and, presumably, that’s not an end goal in itself, but a step in helping the child achieve full-potential). I think I’ve said this before, and it might be my own personal odd worry, but if a child’s potential is very high (in anything, from math, to drama, to soccer) do you really have an obligation to make sure they achieve that potential? I’ve set my standard lower than that.
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An obligation? No. But don’t you just want to do that for your kid, as a parent. If my kids were especially good at dancing and loved dancing (they’re terrible dancers, btw, but let’s just say), I would try to sign them up for dance lessons and would probably work hard to make sure they had all the opportunities to dance as much as they liked. I wouldn’t mortgage the house to pay for lessons, but I would do as much as I could. I would also try to make sure they were balanced people and also read books and relaxed with their friends. Aren’t you doing that by having your kids in an excellent private school? You can rely on your school to give your kids a love of learning. We can’t send our kids to private schools, though we might be able to move. We have to decide whether it’s worth moving just because of the middle school. The regional high school is very good, so if we supplement at home for four years, then we’ll be able to coast in high school. If we move, it will mean a longer commute time for my hubby. It also might mean a disruption for Ian and his school, which would be a bad thing.
yeah, I think schools were always boring. I know I did a lot of worksheets in middle school, too.
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yeah, I think schools were always boring. I know I did a lot of worksheets in middle school, too.
Yeah, but now they’re in full color instead of that purple “ditto machine.” That’s got to foster more interest.
When I’m telling my kids “when I went to school stories,” they always get hung up on the fact that the worksheets were always purple.
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Remember the smell?
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“…if we supplement at home for four years…”
Ewww. OK, my compass is starting to twitch again. A more rigorous school until high school?
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“…if we supplement at home for four years…”
“Ewww. OK, my compass is starting to twitch again. A more rigorous school until high school?”
yeah, mine too. I’m sure you can do it, keep J’s love of learning alive — the family matters a lot. But, it’s quite disturbing to imagine spending 4 years as an incipient adult (i.e. pre-teen/teen) having to twiddle your thumbs in an environment that’s discouraging thinking. I had that in elementary school, and frankly, I don’t think it was all that bad. But, no one made me do the worksheets (which I systematically ignored) and, I had lots of learning by reading while worksheets were being done by others. And, I had a curious home.
But, for me, junior high was where school became about the learning — real math, foreign language, band, real literature in English class, and even real exposure/learning of sewing and cooking in home ec. Junior high was not boring, and I remember much of what I learned and enjoyed then.
And my kids are in elementary, and indeed, their private school is great. But, the public elementary schools in our area also seem great, from what I hear. None of the parents I know are feeling like their kids love of learning is being squelched in elementary, though some may believe that their kids aren’t learning as much as they could. I’m guessing I’m answering those parents concerns (learning not as much as you could in elementary is not such big deal) rather than yours.
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“But, for me, junior high was where school became about the learning — real math, foreign language, band, real literature in English class, and even real exposure/learning of sewing and cooking in home ec. Junior high was not boring, and I remember much of what I learned and enjoyed then.”
I had junior high, too, and while it wasn’t exactly on par with bj’s school and it wasn’t quite as intellectually stimulating as high school, it was definitely a better intellectual experience than elementary school. Part of that was just me, though: starting around 6th grade, I was finally awake enough to pay attention to teachers and actually take in information from them.
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OK, you really want to know how bad it is? It’s worse than I’ve told you. I spent five hours on Thursday afternoon doing homework with Jonah. Part of that time, he was dragging his feet, because the assignments were so boring. Worksheet after worksheet. Part of that time was spent trying to breath life into the topics, so he wouldn’t hate them. I was trying to find a way to make the Five Component of Geography interesting.
These hours and hours of homework are killing us. I have to spend five hours in the kitchen keeping him company. Ian’s done in half an hour with his work, so he’s off doing stuff on his own. There’s no time for Jonah to just pick up a book on his own and read it. He’s not playing games, watching TV, tossing a ball, playing video games, whatever. He’s just doing homework.
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S is in 5th grade, too, and she has nowhere near this amount/kind of work. š¦ She’s still in elementary school, though. Will it change in middle school? I have no idea what’s ahead for us in middle school. A friend is the librarian there, so I am hopeful for at least awesomeness from that angle.
Middle school scares me. I have no idea what happens there, and already I want to change it. If it were up to me, it would be all project-based, hands-on learning. Think of all the kids who used to apprentice to printers and candlemakers and such at the age of 12 (Franklin, Clemens).
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Laura,
This is the sort of stuff that radicalized the KTM people, this weird American combination of a time-consuming lack of rigor. Time for Allison to drop in again and urge you to homeschool. You’re doing the work anyway, it sounds like.
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I think suffering boredom is an important lesson of school, especially now that so few children have to sit through long dull religious services. (I also suspect that part of the change in executive functioning in small children is the removal of that expectation.)
However, if you’re going to be bored it would be nice if you had something concrete to take home at the end of the day, even if it’s only the eight times tables or the principal products of Bali or the Charge of the Light Brigade.
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To my mind, there is a difference between a middle-of-the road, sometimes-boring curriculum that the child doesn’t even notice because he or she is too busy enjoying school, and the boring curriculum that actively interferes with learning, and “poisons the well.”
In general, we are very satisfied with our public schools. It hasn’t stopped me fretting, even panicking, about certain issues that are outside my control. Sometimes I envy my mother, who figured that I would turn out fine no matter how unengaged my teachers or how mediocre my curriculum.
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“Think of all the kids who used to apprentice to printers and candlemakers and such at the age of 12 (Franklin, Clemens).”
Didn’t Franklin run away from his apprenticeship?
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I also think that since I think that there’s a lot of good schools out there, some boredom is OK, as Marya says, and that middle of the road is fine, as Jody says. I usually find myself explaining that I do happen to love my children’s school, but I find this “love” a luxury that I am happy to be able to afford (like Manolo Blahniks’, if I had them or wanted them) and not a necessity, like internet access. But, I’m starting to think you’re describing a problem that’s worse than that. Five hours doing homework, with me, is not something that I would tolerate. Something can’t be right. At the very least, there’s a bad fit here, between what you want from school, what the school is offering, and J’s own needs (I refused to do workbooks, but have friends who loved them. A school that forced us to do workbooks would have affected us differently.).
I’m at a private school, and so it’s easy to imagine that my experience is special, but honestly, the people I know are pretty happy with their schools, in lots of environments (as are a bunch of your commenter). This isn’t something that just has to be accepted, I imagine. I hope that you can figure out something that will be better for you and J.
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“Think of all the kids who used to apprentice to printers and candlemakers and such at the age of 12 (Franklin, Clemens).”
Didn’t Franklin run away from his apprenticeship?
My daughter tells me that Franklin’s apprenticeship was with his brother, and that he ran away because he wrote so well, that when his brother found out about it, he was jealous and treated Franklin really badly.
True? I don’t know, but perhaps someone else will fill me in.
I don’t think apprenticeship is the right model for most students (but, perhaps, it is the right model for more than I know).
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The Infallible Wikipedia (citing Van Doren, Carl. Benjamin Franklin. (1938). Penguin reprint 1991.) says, “He then worked for his father for a time and at 12 he became an apprentice to his brother James, a printer, who taught Ben the printing trade. When Ben was 15, James created The New-England Courant, the first truly independent newspaper in the colonies. When denied the chance to write a letter to the paper for publication, Franklin invented the pseudonym of “Mrs. Silence Dogood,” who was ostensibly a middle-aged widow. Her letters were published, and became a subject of conversation around town. Neither James nor the Courant’s readers were aware of the ruse, and James was unhappy with Ben when he discovered the popular correspondent was his younger brother. Franklin left his apprenticeship without permission, and in so doing became a fugitive.”
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My point isn’t the apprenticeship model per se but how the model met certain kinds of developmental needs.
My daughter is teaching my son division right now via multiplication (i.e., if 2 x 5 = 10, then 10 divided by 5 = 2).
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Just ran across this on Free Range Kids:
http://stophomework.com/the-milleys-capture-canada-and-the-u-s-and-u-k-as-well/1857
I am not finding a problem with homework, but I did hear S say today that 9 kids in her class failed the math test and so they had to stay in for recess. That drives me BATPOOP CRAZY. I think recess is as important as lunch. You wouldn’t refuse to allow a kid to eat, nor should you refuse to let a kid play during a recess period. I’ve e-mailed the principal about this, and there’s been no change. It will be going into E’s IEP that he will never be denied recess; the psych and I have already discussed this.
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The best thing about teaching American Social Studies textbooks in Korea? Since there are no tests on the facts (just monthly projects) we can just use the textbooks as a jumping off point to interesting discussion. Much more fun – not just for the students, but for me.
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