Posted on 01/28/2013 2:01:44 PM PST by FewsOrange
Huh? Say what?
The short version: Kids need to read something besides text messages on their cellphones
All of my elementary teachers certainly subscribed to the vocabulary-building theory of education, especially Mrs. Johnson in the 4th grade with her regular spell-downs even as we were lined up for dismissal or recess. Turned me into the Internet spelling fanatic that I am today!!!
I had Mrs. Moffatt in the 4th grade and she did much of the same thing. And she would have those contests where the class would try to find as many words in a word written on the blackboard. I won a small flag for that once. That was in 1964 and I do remember it. Back to basics.
Words are the building blocks of thoughts.
Great article, until he starts going off on Core Curriculum Standards.
All centrally planned, top-down curricula will ultimately be geared to the lowest common denominator. The answer is in motivated and knowledgable teachers given the autonomy to place higher expectations and motivate students and impose consequences for failure.
We are having this fight right now in Texas as C-SCOPE is being imposed on teachers despite what their knowledge and experience tells them to teach. We need to train and employ more good teachers.
You and I appear to be the same age as my 4th grade year was 1964-65.
Exactly on point about the basics sticking with you when a dedicated teacher really cares about the students. Hope you still have the flag or maybe it’s still in the keepsakes in your parents’ attic...
He makes some excellent points, but I almost stopped reading when I saw his use of the feminine pronouns as the default near the beginning of the piece.
Strongly disagree with the idea of starting 2-year-olds in preschool unless their mothers are complete idiots. Funny, I don’t think I have ever met anyone from my Boomer cohort who went to preschool (quite a few of us did not even attend kindergarten), and my generation’s reading and writing education was in many ways far superior to that of our children’s. And the verbal abilities of later cohorts are truly abysmal.
How were those 4th grade spell-downs constructed? Just curious.
I’m not sure I agree with you there. You can have great teachers, but I think the article is saying that if there isn’t a coherent, cumulative curriculum in place going from preschool to the 12th grade, then kids won’t pick up nearly as many words, which are really just a proxy for knowledge. In math, this reality is much easier to understand. You can have a great 8th grade math teacher, but it won’t make much difference if you didn’t learn what you needed to know before you got there.
I disagree with his idea of kids learning the meanings of words by context. When I went to Catholic school, they gave us dictionaries and expected us to use them.
To expand your vocabulary: (1) Read from the Great Books, and (2) use the dictionary on unfamiliar words (or words which seem to make no sense in the context — there might be another meaning you haven’t learned). It also helps to read the etymology of the word.
A randomly chosen group of half of the class versus the other half. The "randomness" was managed by the teacher or by choosing up sides by team leaders making choices. Of course, these methods are certainly educationally and socially unacceptable in the current environment.
The word list would be the week's spelling list, previous spelling lists, and would wrap up with challenge words that had not yet occurred on the spelling lists. It got to be quite the contest by the time it was down to the last two students. I was a finalist quite often and I'm still FaceBook friends with the girl that was the other regular finalist.
Thanks for that description of your spell-downs.
Sadly, many of today’s teachers would probably not have the students compete with one another. Just give everyone a trophy so nobody feels bad.
Why do feminine pronouns bother you?
I remember having a similar experience in the 6th grade. The teacher would put all the students on our little “stage” and we would then be eliminated upon the misspelling of any word. Don’t want to toot my horn too loudly but the OldPossum (then YoungPossum) was usually one of the last ones standing, and sometimes the only one standing.
Strangely enough, this was at a “one-room” school in a very rural county in Alabama. It was so rural that we had mountain lions still roaming those woods.
My 4th grade teacher was a 1-room school teaching veteran --while I was in her class, I learned she taught my godfather in the 1-room school out in the country across the road from where I lived the first 5 years of my life. My school experience was enriched by her superior skills that were built in that 1-room schoolhouse.
bttt
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