- Joined
- Feb 13, 2004
I know this will never happen, but I've always thought that elementary school kids would be well served if schools concentrated on making absolutely sure that every child could just read well (and hopefully love it); write a decent paper with a beginning, middle and end; and is rock-solid on basic arithmetic (add, subtract, multiply, divide, percentages, fractions.) If a child enters 7th grade with the confidence of that behind him/her, there isn't anything s/he can't be ready to learn in the upper grades.
As extras, maybe teach the things kids learn best when they are very young. A foreign language. A musical instrument. A physical skill they can use the rest of their lives without having to gather entire teams together - during a pandemic tennis comes to mind. Give them plenty of recess time to use their big muscles, and even make time during the day to daydream instead of piling on the homework.
Of course any child who has mastered the basics and is bored can, and should, move on to more complicated material. But so many children come out of elementary school shaky on the basics, and losing confidence in their ability to learn. I couldn't care less if a kid is reading piles of Calvin and Hobbes comic books instead of great literature. Is he reading? Is she happy? Great. I am an extremely fast reader today, and I attribute it all to books like Cherry Ames, Student Nurse. No book reports, no questions at the end of the chapter. Just devouring "junk" books because I wanted to. It set me up for reading and understanding plenty of complex material and actual literature in high school (except, please God, not Silas Marner!) That has to be among the most soul-crushing book a kid was ever made to read.
I got lost in the second grade in math. I went up to the desk and asked my teacher why something worked the way it did, and she said, "just do it." So I figured arithmetic was magic and gave up for a very long time. It took forever for me to realize I actually had a good head for math. I made sure that never happened to my kids. My children were well grounded in the basics in elementary school, and they both did really well in school, all the way through college.
I'm just wondering if, during the pandemic, we could just back off a little. Make sure elementary kids can read, write and do basic arithmetic, and let everything else go. Parents and teachers are stressed enough without adding anything that can easily be learned later by a confident child.
As extras, maybe teach the things kids learn best when they are very young. A foreign language. A musical instrument. A physical skill they can use the rest of their lives without having to gather entire teams together - during a pandemic tennis comes to mind. Give them plenty of recess time to use their big muscles, and even make time during the day to daydream instead of piling on the homework.
Of course any child who has mastered the basics and is bored can, and should, move on to more complicated material. But so many children come out of elementary school shaky on the basics, and losing confidence in their ability to learn. I couldn't care less if a kid is reading piles of Calvin and Hobbes comic books instead of great literature. Is he reading? Is she happy? Great. I am an extremely fast reader today, and I attribute it all to books like Cherry Ames, Student Nurse. No book reports, no questions at the end of the chapter. Just devouring "junk" books because I wanted to. It set me up for reading and understanding plenty of complex material and actual literature in high school (except, please God, not Silas Marner!) That has to be among the most soul-crushing book a kid was ever made to read.
I got lost in the second grade in math. I went up to the desk and asked my teacher why something worked the way it did, and she said, "just do it." So I figured arithmetic was magic and gave up for a very long time. It took forever for me to realize I actually had a good head for math. I made sure that never happened to my kids. My children were well grounded in the basics in elementary school, and they both did really well in school, all the way through college.
I'm just wondering if, during the pandemic, we could just back off a little. Make sure elementary kids can read, write and do basic arithmetic, and let everything else go. Parents and teachers are stressed enough without adding anything that can easily be learned later by a confident child.