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Last week, my son came home from school with a study sheet for the last big test for the year. The test covered some basic US geography, including the names of the Great Lakes, some facts about the Mississippi River, some facts about the US Flag, and locating some major geographical features. In addition, the students were supposed to be able to name at least 25 of the states, given a list showing only the first letter of each state.
Over the next one-and-a-half weeks, A. and I studied for his test about 15 minutes each night. This studying was the exactly the sort of studying that ed. schools teach as being the most harmful: pure rote memorization.
Early in this process, A. objected to the continued practice of the entire list on the basis that, "I only have to know 25 states, not all the states." My sympathy was notably limited; we studied the whole list. 8-)
By a couple of days before the test, A. was pretty reliably naming all the states starting with a given letter when prompted with that letter. (BTW, "M" is particularly annoying.) By this point, he was starting to think that getting the entire list right was pretty cool.
The day before the test, the teacher announced to the class that any child who could name all the states would get extra credit and a small prize.
Of the 26 kids in the class, 8 named all the states on the test the next day. None of those kids needed to have his or her self-confidence artificially boosted after the test, and they all now have a much better understanding of the value of hard work.
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15 comments:
".. and they all now have a much better understanding of the value of hard work."
Ahhhh! What a nice Christmas story.
But Mr Ed School Scrooge would say that it's all just "superficial knowledge". "Bah, humbug. There's no linkage between memorization and understanding."
And they also all have a much better understanding of US geography, which will provide multiple rewards of its own over the course of their lives.
What a lucky boy your son is to have this teacher and this school!
Early in this process, A. objected to the continued practice of the entire list on the basis that, "I only have to know 25 states, not all the states." My sympathy was notably limited; we studied the whole list. 8-)
I love it!
Ed, who has always opposed memorization and thought history was horribly taught & made boring by constant memorization, now says teachers should be supplied with the best textbooks on the market and told to teach from the text.
mugged by reality
The day before the test, the teacher announced to the class that any child who could name all the states would get extra credit and a small prize.
yay!!!
The crazy thing with all this is that ed schools have replaced rote-memorization drudgery with project and WAC drudgery.
Staying up 'til midnight helping your kid produce an "analytical" paper comparing Andrew Carnegie to Archie in The Chocolate Wars instead of watching the football game is drudgery.
Make no mistake.
Doug, I bet you have to pinch yourself every once in a while just to make sure you're not dreaming. Choice is such a wonderful thing and your son is very, very fortunate to live somewhere that offers core knowledge.
It seems Hartford is making a big push for charter schools. They are actually recruiting for a principal for a K-8 Core Knowledge school as well as a Paideia school.
Paideia is very much what our homeschool is about given its roots in Mortimer Adler's philosphy. I'll be watching that development very closely.
Like most parents, I suppose, I mostly concentrate on the things that we are still working on, not the things that are going well. 8-/ That said, my wife and I are are not willing to move to someplace that wouldn't allow us to have a curiculum much like the one that our son has now.
Good luck; it sounds as though you might be able to get into a more sane curriculum in the near future.
What is Paideia??
All I know about them is that they have fantastic reading lists.
Paideia is a philosphy of teaching based on Mortimer Adler's philosphy.
Here's a link: http://www.paideia.org/content.php/system/index.htm
Many private, charter and magnet schools are based on the Paideia philosphy. Basically, it's Mortimer Adler's take on a Classical Education. Mortimer Adler is the Great Books guy.
DECLARATION OF PAIDEIA PRINCIPLES
We, the members of the Paideia Group, hold these truths to be the principles of the Paideia Program:
*that all children can learn;
that, therefore, they all deserve the same quality of schooling, not just the same quantity;
*that the quality of schooling to which they are entitled is what the wisest parents would wish for their own children, the best education for the best being the best education for all;
*that schooling at its best is preparation for becoming generally educated in the course of a whole lifetime, and that schools should be judged on how well they provide such preparation;
*that the three callings for which schooling should prepare all Americans are, (a) to earn a decent livelihood, (b) to be a good citizen of the nation and the world, and (c) to make a good life for one’s self;
*that the primary cause of genuine learning is the activity of the learner’s own mind, sometimes with the help of a teacher functioning as a secondary and cooperative cause;
*that the three types of teaching that should occur in our schools are didactic teaching of subject matter, coaching that produces the skills of learning, and Socratic questioning in seminar discussion;
*that the results of these three types of teaching should be (a) the acquisition of organized knowledge, (b) the formation of habits of skill in the use of language and mathematics, and (c) the growth of the mind’s understanding of basic ideas and issues;
*that each student’s achievement of these results would be evaluated in terms if that student’s competencies and not solely related to the achievements of other students;
*that the principal of the school should never be a mere administrator, but always a leading teacher who should be cooperatively engaged with the school’s teaching staff in planning, reforming, and reorganizing the school as an educational community;
*that the principal and faculty of a school should themselves be actively engaged in learning;
*that the desire to continue their own learning should be the prime motivation of those who dedicate their lives to the profession of teaching.
—The Paideia Group
I read the Paideia book around 1990, when my HS US government teacher made our semester paper be "research and defend your vision for the US public school model." (We had to do the social security system in the second semester.) I didn't know who Adler was at the time, and didn't read his other work until last year.
A thing I remember well was the way he marked the papers -- he used smiley and frowny faces to indicate where I did not give sufficient support for the supposed benefits of my program and the negatives of the current program. :-)
-m
"He" being my teacher, not Adler, of course. (The danger of adding parentheticals and not re-reading for context!)
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