Posted on 06/13/2017 12:06:08 PM PDT by re_tail20
As first-time parents to a kindergartner, my wife and I recalled images from our own early experiences. Letters, numbers, colors, shapes, and lots of play. We lived in a good school district and had high expectations that our son would find his first school experience enriching, encouraging and nurturingjust as we remembered it.
We could not have been more wrong. What we found were great teachers, shiny new facilities and good-hearted administrationyet they were all hamstrung by the prescribed implementation of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
My wife and I volunteered time to help in the classroom and we saw the true situation ourselves: five-year-olds spending most of their day rooted in their seats, drilled to memorize CCSS-mandated buzzwords that would appear in their CCSS-mandated testing, three years in the future.
Very little interaction was allowed. Recess was held perhaps twice a week, for 15 minutes at a time. Silent submission to the projected lessons and teachers rapid, droning script of rote memorizationfor five-year olds!shocked us. We would not have believed that modern kindergarten was this way, if we had not seen it with our own eyes on multiple occasions.
It was heartbreaking to see what public education had become, but we could not ignore what wed seen with our own eyes and heard in our sons persistent complaint that things just go too fast and they dont make sense.
Public schools are caught in the middle
Students are not the only ones having a hard time coping with real-world realities of CCSS.
We saw good teachers who were not allowed to use their talents to individually engage with their students. Instead, kids were handed off to social workers at the slightest indication of boredom or discomfort, as if a five-year-old getting squirmy after half an hour of a...
(Excerpt) Read more at patch.com ...
If you have time to volunteer in the classroom you have time to home school your child.
For kindergarten at least. We spent about half an hour a day doing ng our kindergarten work. Phonics, math, history, handwriting.
They were all happily reading before kindergarten was halfway over. Unless you are dealing with serious learning disabilities it’s not that hard.
“great teachers”?....hardly if they put up with this...
There are some good things about Montessori schools, but I wasn’t a huge fan of our pleading allegiance to the earth.
Ensure the child is sufficiently self-motivated & focused for the largely hands-off nature of Montessori. I’m enamored with the teaching style, and thought my daughter would excel therein (being wonderfully focused & systematic when practically nobody else was in the room), but she proved to be too distracted by the goings-on of other kids.
You can homeschool your kindergartners along Montessori lines. There are books and,I think, organizations out there that can inspire and inform parents about this. No need for little kids to be in a day-orphanage atmosphere experiencing less-than-individualized care.
I took a tour of a Montessori school to see if I wanted to put my kids in it.
The admin lady could not explain the philosophy. She told me at least twice to go read the material on their website. That was the first strike.
I toured the school. It was a mess. The buildings were in terrible physical shape for a fairly new school. Seems like no money was spent on maintenance.
Classrooms were chaos. Kids drifting without direction.
The majority of kids do need direction. Even the ‘focused’ students need to learn things they are not interested in.
That being said, Common Core curriculum is no better.
I've had experience with multiple other schools for young children that seemed much better IMHO.
It is my understanding that Montessori schools basically let kids do what they want to all day. If little Johnny pulls his drawers down and craps on the floor, it’s OK as long as it was a good crap and Johnny enjoyed it. Suspect this is just another gateway to snowflakedom.
I was enrolled in a Montessori for 3rd grade, and I flunked 3rd grade and had to repeat it.
I blame Montessori and the hippies that ran it. I had 4 grades in one room (3, 4, 5, and 6) and all we did was play all day!
There was a lot of that with my son too. I’m glad we pulled him after we found a cheaper daycare!
Our daughter homeschools her children and our son’s attend a private classical Christian school.
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