Not A Sitting Animal?

[mk9750]

SagerScout,

 

Your point about schools training us to accept working long hours is valid, of course. The difficulty I have is two fold:

 

1st, the premise that new techiques are an improvement over old techniques. Much of these new techniques I think are like liberal's ideas about our country: They sure sound good, but they haven't proven to work, for the most part. I mean, seriously, who can argue against setting up school so that grades (if they exist at all) are based on how hard Jack and Jill try, not on whether they answered all the questions correctly? Compassionate people just have to accept this, right? Well, unfortunately, I believe that outcome-based education has shown that these students don't compete as well for slots in college, nor for jobs. But certainly, until our society is as touchy - feely as our schools are becoming, victims of outcome based education will be disadvantaged.

 

2nd, the assumption that we are entitled to any education at all. I believe we are not, and that therefore renders any of the first issue moot. As you mentioned, the framers of the Constitution were primarily self educated. And to pull public education out from underneath our population leaves education for only the well to do (at least initially). But our education is our own responsiblity. If groups of people find it convenient, or more valuable, to band together to educate communally, that is there decision. But for us to clammor that we have a right to education, or a certain level of education, or education formatted a certain way, is contrary to the individualistic ideals those framers envisioned.

 

Eamonn, sorry that I have participated in the hijacking of your thread (I may have even been the culprit!). If I have further posts on your topic, I will add them here. If other posts concern the educational system politics, I will move the discussion to the issues and politics section.

 

Mark

[sctmom]

I never said that the Constitution gave us the right to an education. I do believe that society is better if people are better educated. When I talk about the best education for a child, I don't mean that every parent should dictate each and every moment and detail of what the public school system should provide. With a kid in special ed, I know other special ed parents. Let me tell you some of them are nuts! I know the parents that everyone talks about catering to every whim of their child, the parents who ALWAYS blame the teacher or someone else. I'm sure all of you have met them too..at school, in your neighborhood or at scouts. It's the same parents! My son got moved out of special ed in the spring, partly because he had improved SO much and partly because they teachers saw the influence the other kids in that room were having on my son. They saw my son heading in the wrong direction following those other kids.

 

You can't put 30 people in a room and expect them all to learn exactly the same.

 

New teaching techniques are NOT always better. Like the open classrooms mentioned and the clusters of desk. My son does not do well in that environment. The fancy posters on the wall distract him too. He does better with set guidelines, clear rules. If he has a teacher that does this crap of a reward system, he spends more time trying to figure out how to work her system than doing the work!

 

I wish we could go back to one room school houses. Like someone else mentioned, a child might have 3rd grade math and 2nd grade reading. They didn't move forward until they had mastered that subject. If they were a whiz at math, they moved right ahead, didn't wait for the rest of the class.

 

Also, teachers now have to worry so much about the standarized tests. The state I live in has had seriously problems with the test being graded correctly! Yet they are determining the future of students and teachers and schools on this! The teachers can't worry about if the children are really learning, just can they take the test.

 

 

[LauraT7]

i don't know if there is a law guaranteeing an education for everyone.

 

but I do know that the law says that every child has the right to THE SAME educational opportunities as his peers. In other words - if Johnny is blind, he has the right to get his textbooks in braille and be taught to read them so that he gets the same opportunity and the same material as any sighted child.

 

the idea is to level the playing field so that they ALL have the same opportunities. What people make of those opportunities is their own choice.

 

my son's school does have a gifted program - they call it Talented Student program (TSP) it is a pull- out program where they do special projects, think outside the box and do extra educational field trips - Like studying archetecture, designing & building models and visiting the Frank Llyod Wright Studio, home and churches in Glenview. they are expected to maintain the classrtoom work they miss while they are out. It interested my son enough to ask for a trip to Talesin this summer up in Wisconsin. Kids can also take advanced courses in jr high and high school - but the take-out program ends in Jr high. No money for a high school version. Expanding his mind 'out of the box' of school - is mainly my job.

 

As for regular school field trips - i am very frustrated with those - what a waste of time. Our schools use field trips as a reward for good behavior - but only a few don't go - and most of those are because they can't aford it - not because the failed the behavior requirements. They go ice skating, roller blading and to Great America. where is the educational value of that???? The choir/band goes downtown for lunch and a matinee live musical each year - 'Cats' and "Joseph" were the last two year's treats. the last week of school - even without snow days - they do NOTHING.

 

at least our field trips were educational - we went to the Field museum to see the working coal mine for social studies and science. the observatory for science. A historical farm, or living history museum, the aquarium, a railroad museum, the zoo, a factory, a conservation park where we mapped a pond, a city newspaper. All were loads of fun - but they also tied in to our lessons and made them real.

 

Now i have to take my son to these things, which I love to do - we have a ball - but it amazes me how many parents DON't - and it amazes me how little these kids get to experience and retain.

 

would it be THAT hard to give them some MEAT with the pap?

 

 

[SagerScout]

Gotta go with you on those kind of field trips - Great America? Sheesh. In our town the kids go on REAL field trips ,like to the Institute of Texan Cultures and the Witte museum. Cool places.

 

The one I remember most from my own childhood was the Decker meat plant - wouldn't eat hot dogs for a year....and the bakery. Jr. High and high school offered band trips, but they were mostly weekends.

 

On the demise of "traditional teaching methods" - this parallels the demise of the traditional student. That is, a child raised in a home where a nutritious breakfast was always served before school, where the television only had 4 channels and so fairly often offered no serious distraction from reading or homework, where even a latchkey child (such as myself and my 4 older siblings, from my 2cd grade on) was expected to call mom as soon as we got home.

 

Summer was boring. We stayed home. We read. Sometimes we watched cartoons. All that tedium made school look good come fall. Our weekly library trips were highlights, at least for me and my sisters. Brothers didn't read much- almost surely both would be classed ADD now. One would have surely been Spec Ed, as he kept flunking stuff. Took him 5 years to get out of high school and 6 to get his college degree - in engineering, from Texas A&M - he ain't dumb AT ALL... Back then they called it "he's a boy."

 

None of us did sports, but all were required to do ONE extracurricular activity - my sisters did theatre/choir, brothers were FFA, I was in band. That was all we could handle. We never, ever went out on school nights, not as a family and not as an individual, unless it was a school related event or in support of our ONE E/C activity. We didn't gather around the dinner table - but we did have dinner every night at about 6:30, leaving time to clean up and do homework. (when I was a full-time salaried employee I was lucky to get HOME by 7 PM, much less have dinner then...)

 

Cub scouts and Camp Fire Girls happened immediately after school and were therefore OK - we could walk to them and we walked home afterwards. No one thought twice about seeing an 8-year old walking alone back then.

 

Kids now are acclimated to a constant TV-commercial pace of life - 30 images in a minute - and school is just toooooo sloooooowwww. I know the feeling, I'm the same way now. We're in the Windows world where someone can be working on a presentation and surfing the Scouter board at the same time (idid I say that out loud?) Is it bad? maybe. Is it life? Yep. Eight-yearolds can't really walk alone anymore, in most areas, and Mom hasn't got the time to scramble those eggs in the morning as she's having to work much longer hours than my Mom had to - because Dad is often in another county, working long hours to support BOTH his families (we hope).

 

I've thought about going into teaching but I'm not sure I could stand it, although I do like children. Seeing sleep-deprived, nutritionally deficient children show up -Pop-Tart in hand - day after day, dealing with the parents that allow their early-elementary kids to stay up until 10 or 11 and then scream at them for making them late in the morning... I just don't know.

 

 

[Fat Old Guy]

Sleep deprived kids? No. . . not in this world. ;-) I am continually astounded that we expect middle school and high school kids to be at school before many of us are at work. In twenty years, I have never had to be at work before 8 AM unless it was an unusual situation. In college I never had a class before 8 AM and I avoided, usually electing to have my classes start at 9 AM.

 

I never found summers boring, there were bikes to ride and baseball to play. If you find summers boring, look at todays kids. They sit around and stare at video games all the time.

 

The title of this thread is "Not a sitting animal?" I'll dispute that. I came home to find four 12 year old boys sitting on my porch playing with Game Boys. "Why don't you guys do something?" "Nothin' to do," I'm told. Within a mile of my house is a pool (they all have passes), football field with goal posts, a baseball diamond, six basketball courts and tennis courts. The field and courts are open and available but no one uses them. It is a national tragedy.

 

 

[Eamonn]

Reading some of what has been said, has me more mixed up then ever, - If that is possible!!

Please bear with me if some of this sounds kind of odd. I went through the English education system. (Where the school day started at 8:50 AM)

Most of us as we get older, tend to look back on the time that we spend in school, with very fond or very bad memories.

I thank the Good Lord,that I can look back with mostly fond memories. That isn't to say it was good it might be that at times, I was able to make the best of a bad job or rise above it.

Back then and back there it seems that we as kids were under a constant threat. "Don't do this and you will be in dentetion." Or if you get caught doing this you will be hit. Corporal punisnment was big in them days.

While many will state, "It never did us any harm." And in my case it didn't!! It is still wrong.

We were expected to: Sit, Listen and Learn.

For the most part we took in, what they gave out.

Which does work in areas such as math and the like. It does little to help make people think for themselves.

If the taking in of information and retaining it, is what education is. Then this does work.

If we want people who can think for themselves, we may need to look at alternative ways of getting the message across.

I just love the last paragraph of LauraT7's posting, where she states that "Their interest in anything expands"

While some of the ideas out there about how to teach our kids are new and untested, I do think that maybe the need to be given a chance. If there is a way to get education so that it falls in line with that last paragraph, we would have such a great system.

[Fat Old Guy]

"If the taking in of information and retaining it, is what education is. Then this does work.

If we want people who can think for themselves, we may need to look at alternative ways of getting the message across."

 

Today, they aren't concerned with with thinking, the teachers are concerned with passing standardized tests.

[SagerScout]

And to return this thread to it's origin - yes, children are not sitting animals. And yes, many ADD kids do quite well in classrooms such as you describe. Maria Montessorri wrote the definitive works on this about a hundred years ago and there have not been significant improvements to her plans since. With a well-trained Montessorri teacher around, children learn at a prodigious rate. Do not confuse "open" classrooms for Montessorri, they are not necessarily the same. For one thing, Montessorri materials are not brightly colored and do not feature attention-getting graphics. She believed that muted, calming environments promoted concentration for children. For another, there is an enormous emphasis on order and peace within a free community - so while these classrooms have conversation there is no need for screaming. And the teacher does not need to "teach" much, as the materials do most of the teaching and there is little to grade - so the teacher is free to move about and direct or redirect as needed. The net result is that a good Montessori teacher mystically knows EXACTLY where all her kids are, both physically and academically, even if she's the lead teacher of 22 youngsters.

 

My ADD son was reading well at age 5 after a couple years in his Montessorri preschool, run by an incredible Sri Lankan tacher named Ms. Pyaseeli. I hardly could understand her but the kids worshipped her and had no trouble at all with her accent.

 

I'll never forget her answer when I asked the weed-out question: What if my son doesn't want to sit at a table and work on his letters? He was 3, and strong-willed does not begin to describe it. And remember, pretty much impervious to pain. I had never been able to read to him, as much as wanted to share my love of books with my beloved first born, as I could not hold him in my lap for more than a hug. I had a vivid image of him spending most of his day in time-out in a traditional preschool setting.

 

With an expression of total shock, she replied "I do not choose the child's learning. The CHILD chooses his learning. If he does not want to sit, he can go to the practical side. "

 

And my son did not want to sit. So by the time he was 4, he could peel and cut carrots (yes, with a sharp though child-sized knife), pour juice, sweep the floor and wash dishes. He later lost all these abilities! Every day, she presented him with letters and books; every day he looked at them for a minute or less, and zoomed off to do something else. Then for a while, all he wanted to do was count and learn numbers. So for weeks he counted, and stacked, and learned to add, subtract, multiply, and divide using blocks. (This was a shocker to his kindergarten teacher later.)

 

Then, one day, she she presented him with the letter activities again, for the hundredth time - and suddenly he was interested in that and was reading pretty fluently within a week. It's a matter of being there at the right time for the child. After that, I sent him to kindergarten, where he learned that he was abnormal, different, and too active, and after a year, he'd forgotten how to read.

 

Sent him back to Ms. P for the summer, he recovered all he'd lost and forged ahead to second or third grade reading level. Went back to public school, and they quickly had him back to his grade level.

 

If I had had the money, I would have kept him in private Montessorri education, but with two younger kids in full-time child care, it just couldn't happen. Young industrial hygienists don't make that much, we were already scraping it to buy the generic mac and cheese.

 

It is worth pointing out that the exceptional Ms. M. only expected children to work in this educational setting through what we would now call middle school (but starting in what we call preschool now). The level of basic literacy she expected most students to achieve after 8th grade is pretty much about the level to which we're trying to remediate our high school seniors - competent in reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, with a good basis in mathematical comprehension on which one could build calculus if desired.

 

At about age 13, she believed that the focus should change to readying for "real" life - learning to use real tools, build wood projects, fix things around the house, and other practical skills. (Of course, preparing meals is already covered in the elementary Montessorri curriculum, along with table manners and family life skills.) During adolescence, she believed, there was little benefit to most young people in attempting to master academic stuff as they are unable to concentrate. However, she felt that there was great educational benefit to working "on the practical side" - the application of the literacy they had developed to become responsible and productive adults.

 

What does that sound like to you? Could it be SCOUTING? I don't know if Baden-Powell and Maria Montessori were in contact but their ideas are remarkably similar.

 

 

[dsteele]

SagerScout hit it right with the comparison to Scouting. I've worked with a couple Montessori schools who were also very good charter partners for their packs.

 

DS

[OldGreyEagle]

Having been to several IEP (Individual Education Plan) with my learning diaabled son, and he is learning disabled in the sense he doesnt learn like the norm, he is much more visual that auditory, meaning a straight lecture bores him out quickly while hands on and visual presentation hold his interest. The fact he is dyslexic doesnt help either.

 

Anyway I digress, in all the IEP meetings we always get a packet outlining the parents rights, and a child in Pennsylvania is enitled to a "Free and Appropriate Education", I will let the lawyers on here translate that

[NWScouter]

I do not believe that the US Constitution give a guarantee to education but check your states constitution. Here in Washington State it states It is the paramount duty of state to provide education. The courts have said that means basic education has to be funded out of general funds of the state not local levies . Local levies are to fund extras. The great debate is what is basic education. When this ruling came down in the late 70s or 80s special education was included in basic education. I believe that if you want federal funds you also have to comply with their guidelines which the least of them are the American with Disabilities Act.

[Twocubdad]

The right to a free education is guaranteed by our state constitution as well: "The General Assembly shall provide by taxation and otherwise for a general and uniform system of free public schools, which shall be maintained at least nine months in every year, and wherein equal opportunities shall be provided for all students."