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One-Room Schools and synchronicity:
1. At a recent homeschool convention, Andrew Pudewa, an engaging speaker with many interesting ideas about writing and thinking and education, talked about the excitement and excellence generated in what he calls "Mixed-Age" classrooms. You can read his thoughts about this and other things he's thought about on his website.
2. I read an interesting article which I commented on about One-Room Schools in Pajamas Media.
3. I was re-reading Irene Hunt's "Up a Road Slowly" and found she lamented both the demise of one-room schools and History and Geography as social studies.
Of course, our phonics website features pictures of One-Room Schoolhouses and states, "welcome to our virtual schoolhouse," so I might just be noticing the topic, but it is a little strange.
While I do like a lot of things from the past, especially education things lacking today like handwriting, Webster's Speller, Latin, math with real answers, and One-Room Schoolhouses, reading Susan Strasser's "Never Done: A History of American Housework" cured me of any lingering desire to live in the era of one-room schools. She lays out in excruciating detail what they had to to to cook and clean and keep their houses running, and the time spent each week lugging water and cleaning lamps (7 hours per week cleaning oil lamps!) I'll take my computer and my dishwasher and running water any day.
I would have enjoyed helping out younger students when I was in school, and I don't think it would have hurt my education at all. In fact, the class I learned the most in in college was one where the students taught. Our teacher had pregnancy complications that prevented her from standing, so she sat in the back while 10 of us (it was a small senior level micro-biology class) took turns teaching. We all tried to do a good job and have good notes so studying for the test would be easier. I was amazed at how hard I had to work to do a good job teaching a 1 hour class. She would occasionally pipe up with something we missed, but she generally just sat back and watched. I learned a lot more from learning at the level required to teach someone else than when just sitting back and listening. Plus, a lot more good teachers could find their calling this way--and perhaps even more importantly, some poor teachers could find out they weren't cut out to teach.
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4 comments:
Montessori schools have groupings of children within 3 year age ranges (3-6 year-olds together, 6-9 then 9-12). She believed that the older child would develop a sense of leadership and further their own understanding by teaching lessons to the younger students. That is just one way Montessori teachers have many children in their class room and still have every child operating at their own level.
Here's a great related argument
From Paul's link:
"But there’s an old saying that you can’t fill a broken bucket by pouring more water into it. Maybe it’s time to fix the bucket."
Unfortunately, any discussion of education in our town is centered around the budget. The presumption is that more money means better schools; less money means worse schools. Some of our school committee members don't help the situation. They talk about improvements, but what they really want are reductions in the budget. They mix up the two arguments.
There is no way to have a discussion of improvements without talking about money. The school will not allow it. Improvements always have a cost. Besides, few would say that the bucket has a hole in it. It's just needs a little fixing, and that costs money.
I'm not sure that multi-age classrooms would help unless this allowed kids to move along at their own pace. It's not clear that this would happen. If it does happen, then I wouldn't be thrilled to see a school allow my son to progress through Everyday Math at his own speed. It's also not clear that any student would get the instructional support they needed.
I attended multigrade classrooms --Gr. 2 in a 1/2, Gr. 6 in 5/6 and both Gr. 7 & 8 in a 7/8 -- with all of Gr. 6-8 being in a four room school house (Dept of Defense, overseas location). The reason that multiage works IMHO is that children are forced to think for themselves while the teacher is working with another group. This is not the case in my district's full inclusion classrooms, with paras and a learning resource specialist swooping in to clear up any 'confusion' at the first sign of struggle or if Joey doesn't copy quickly from his neighbor under the guise of 'cooperative learning'. I learned excellent study skills and how to ask intelligent questions to get the most out of the material. All of my ms teachers were competent and easily handled ability groups and independent learning contracts.
I did give up a study hall and tutored math for my high school years - did sped m.s. and reg. ed. elementary. I learned efficient communication skills and how to rapidly assess another person's knowledge and thinking - helpful skills used later in engineering. Didn't uncover gaps, as Pudewa seems to think would happen. Of course, in my era, you didn't get an A for turning in homework or good conduct, you earned the A by showing mastery to the master on well-designed exams that could not be passed by rote algorithm memorization.
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