Well put, Joanna. Further, I wonder how many kindergarten students can hold a
pencil firmly enough to write to pass a standardized test?
Seth Sandronsky
Date: Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:16:39 -0700
From: Joanna <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Educational Chutzpah
To: [email protected]
Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
six days a week, seven days a week....
A few years ago a man in Oakland beat his three-year old boy to death because
the child could not be made to read and write. It was reported and received as
a heinous crime, which it was.
I have thought of this story lately as I note how lenience toward the venality
of the ruling class is inevitably balanced by the unrelenting punishment of the
lower classes who, it is intimated by this severity, would not be poor were
they not lazy and shiftless.
The universal educational standards now trumpeted by the Obama administration
require children in kindergarten to read and write. If you have not raised a
child, taught a child to read, or remember the process you underwent, let me
get a little more detailed. We're speaking of four and five year olds learning
to read and write one of the most difficult languages in the world. I have a
Ph.D. in English and started working on letter and sound recognition with both
my very bright children when they were two and a half. I also read to them
every night. By the time they were in kindergarten they could read a word here
and there, but no way could it be said that they could read and write English.
By first grade they were fine.
I submit that what the DC bureaucrats are proposing to do is not much different
from the father who beat his son to death. At least he had the excuse of
ignorance. They have no excuse. If their proposal becomes law, an entire
generation of children will be battered into believing that they are stupid and
cannot learn because they are unable to master a task for which they are
developmentally unsuited.
This trend, of forcing children to learn material for which they are not ready,
is not restricted to reading. When my father was in school, it was not supposed
that anyone could deal with calculus before college. He took a degree in
automotive and aeronautics engineering in Paris, learned calculus in college,
and found it very difficult. In the early seventies, when I was going through
high school, the most highly rated academic high school in Los Angeles, they
began to experiment with teaching calculus in the 12th grade. They assigned us
the best math teacher they had, lowered the grading scale because the subject,
after all, was very hard, and taught calculus to 25 out of a graduating class
of 1000. Today in the Oakland Unified School District, calculus is taught in
the eleventh grade, and the grading scale is not modified. In order to teach
calculus in the eleventh grade you must teach all previous math courses and
least one year earlier.
It can be argued that since it is possible for some students to learn calculus
in the eleventh grade, this shows that imposing harder and harder tasks on
students is a way of improving education. I would argue rather that it is a way
of turning education into a form of torture. Calculus is not a rite of passage
and it is not an instrument of torture. It is one of many mathematical
techniques that a student interested in a career in science must master.
A bureaucrat might believe that success in education is measured by how early
you can teach a subject. But a teacher knows that a good education results in
students learning to love the subject matter and wanting to explore its
mysteries long after class ends. This will not happen if learning is so fraught
with anxiety that the student wishes for nothing more than that it will come to
a quick end.
Joanna
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
