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I mentioned the other day that our interim curriculum director recently told the community that: "We're getting away from textbooks."
In practice, "we're getting away from textbooks" means the curriculum is Google. Teachers Google lessons and download them from the internet.
I've been observing the Googleization of the curriculum for years now, but I was surprised to discover that even some textbooks have turned into Google.
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OK, I'm not against Google!
But when Google is the curriculum, I think it's quite difficult to have a coherent curriculum (and I say that as a person who has endlessly Googled worksheets and teaching materials...)
I'd be interested in hearing how much of the material in your kids' backpacks were downloaded verbatim from the internet.
yeah, this drives me nuts. A couple of years ago, my son, who was 3rd grade at the time, had an assignment to write about some kind of bug. The bug that was assigned to him was pretty obscure. The teacher told the kids they had to find the information on the Internet. Try as we might, we couldn't find anything. Finally, I marched my kid to the library and told him to talk to the children's librarian. When she heard the request, she started laughing, saying that the school does this project every year and of course she knows exactly which books have the information. She went off and returned with a few insect reference books. Within minutes, my son had every fact he needed, as well as the alternate names for the stupid bug, which if we had known, might have made it easier to find the info on the net. So, the lesson here was - your local children's librarian is usually far more efficient than Google because she KNOWS the standard school projects.
I google math worksheets... the basic skills variety, because Everyday Math has pitifully few of them. I also subscribe to a couple of worksheet sites. For an annual fee, I can generate exactly the fact practice I need. In first grade it might be a worksheet with drill on just adding 3. Edhelper is the site. It's quite marvelous actually!
"Each time a grand initiative comes along to reinvigorate the curriculum-- a new math pedagogy, a laptop for every student, etc.-- test scores two years later dash the hopes of the innovators."
~Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation
"I'm skeptical that any of this has anything to do with learning. It sounds like it's a lot of encapsulated entertainment... This all, for me, for high school students sounds like a gigantic waste of time. If I was competing with the United States, I would love to have the students I'm competing with spending their time on this kind of cr@p."
Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems
My son sometimes has the opposite experience. He is told to find and cite references from 'N' number of real books. (It's OK if the book is online, I guess, but it has to be an official book.) When we go to our library (which now has less books and more PCs), many of the books are very old. You can't find a source for "nanotechnology" at our library. Libraries have also evolved over the years. My son played a chamber music piece in one yesterday in a concert that included an electrified funk/fusion band. Libraries aren't quiet anymore.
There also seems to be a knee-jerk dismissal of anything that's on Wikipedia, as if there is something official about books. Google isn't the problem (but it's not a curriculum, either), and books don't absolve one of critical evaluation. I find Wikipedia enormously helpful. See what they have for "nanotechnology". It is the second Google listing for the word.
Elementary school included classrooms had a lot of science worksheets off the internet.
I printed out the math worksheets for fifth grade from the publishers website. Ds's teacher would teach 2 sections, skip and have the students idle while she taught included students, and then teach the last 2 sections. I would just print out the middle 6-8 sections and have ds do them at home while she idled them...made a lot of difference in the test results. It was Houghton Mifflin, not a bad curriculum really.
In middle and high school, we see more demand to use EBSCO and use of other databases the school has subscribed too which are all difficult to use for writing reports as they lack a lot of info compared to googled sources.
Google did save me for Spanish. There are some very very good websites out there for kids who don't memorize everything they hear. My kid is failing the class, but doing well on the midterms and finals thanks to learnspanish.com which has all the necessary details and practice his teacher does not provide.
What is EBSCO?
I love edhelper!
Have subscribed to it off and on for years now.
This all, for me, for high school students sounds like a gigantic waste of time. If I was competing with the United States, I would love to have the students I'm competing with spending their time on this kind of cr@p.
WOW
Thanks for posting!
I wish some of you could have been at the big "Celebration of Teaching and Learning" conference in NYC a few weeks ago.
There was a complete and total absence of CONTENT -- and even the Math for America presentation, on permutations and combinations, was all about using children's books to teach counting to high school students.
We saw endless videos - made by students! - of other students cooking in geography class.
Then we heard a British guy who is teaming up with PBS to post zillions of videos of US classrooms doing hands-on projects like having the kids build structures out of toothpicks, after which the teacher blows them all down using a leaf blower.
The winning team is the group whose structure is still standing.
Then the kids draw conclusions about why the sturdy structure was sturdy.
This consumes huge quantities of time.
Ds's teacher would teach 2 sections, skip and have the students idle while she taught included students, and then teach the last 2 sections.
Sorry to be thick -- I'm not following.
You're saying there would be a 10 to 12-unit chapter (?) & the teacher would directly teach only four of the units?
My kid is failing the class, but doing well on the midterms and finals thanks to learnspanish.com which has all the necessary details and practice his teacher does not provide.
This may be my major beef with constructivist schools, if I could boil it down to just one thing.
The only way you learn is through practice; this is a universal truth.
But current educational philosophy dismisses practice ("drill and kill;" "memorization and regurgitation"), which, of course, relieves the school of any need to create and oversee a regimen of deliberate practice.
Some of you may remember that a few years ago we met with the chair of the math department here about the myriad problems our son was having in the middle school accelerated math course.
The math chair kept talking about "understanding" until finally I said, "He doesn't need more understanding. He needs distributed practice."
Her answer: "If students need distributed practice, parents can find worksheets online."
That is a direct quote.
At that time I had a 4-inch binder filled with worksheets I had found online and a subscription to edhelper.
The unit they were doing in C's class was an algebra-in-geometry unit, where the kids had to calculate the measures of angles in complex angle arrays. There were no worksheets online - none that I could find - so I ended up constructing my own.
Leaving it up to parents to "find worksheets online" is the end of education as far as I'm concerned.
Yes, I could find worksheets online. I have a treasure trove of worksheets I've found online over the years.
But I don't understand the discipline well enough to know what worksheets a student should be doing and when - or to understand what the component skills that need to be mastered first are.
Moreover, the worksheets I found online rarely matched the work he was doing in class well.
Students need schools to create, assign, and oversee not just a coherent curriculum but a coherent program of deliberate practice.
Instead, everything is about "understanding."
Which is docent math, to take a phrase from chemprof.
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