Posted on 10/10/2014 3:18:27 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
The media would not know the truth if it came up and bit them on the a$$.
My husband is a teacher as well & refuses to send our kids to school. Homeschooling is not easy and I am tempted to at least send our oldest back to school, but he sees what goes on both academically and socially and will not subject our kids to that.
He feels like a rebel or missionary within the system, but curriculum and requirements are set by others so there is only so much that teachers can do.
The one good thing I will say about inner city schools is that they are so desperate for teachers who can keep the kids in the rooms and not running through the halls vandalizing stuff is that they leave curriculum pretty much up to the teacher. In English, anyway. I choose the books and movies we cover. I have to teach them the “skills” the District wants, but that’s fine. As long as I get to choose the books and movies.
They have been doing group work at least since my oldest children were in elementary school. That was in the late 90s and early 2000s. It doesn’t seem to have destroyed their ability to think and learn. Amazingly, they can read after being taught sight words AND phonics. All of my children read well.
I have a lot of issues with the current methods for teaching. But I have noticed that children continue learning in spite of the curriculum. They are human. They have natural tendencies to seek knowledge.
My second oldest son is in college now, and he does group work in his computer classes. I don’t know if that is a good thing or not. He is happy that he is in the smartest group in one of the classes. They just happened to be sitting near one another the day the groups were made. My son has learned from others and vice versa. My husband is a programmer, and they do a lot of group work as well as individual work. He has learned a lot of valuable information from working with others in groups.
My son in computer classes has been subjected to group work all his life. He was invariably the smartest person in his groups. (Except when he was taking Spanish. He was grouped with native Spanish speakers. He let them do all the work.) Son worked better in groups because he had pressure to actually do the work or his friends would make bad grades. If he had assignments that he had to do alone, he wouldn’t do them. He would take a bad grade. He would even do other student’s homework for them and not turn in the very same assignment for himself. He was an infuriating child.
We live in a small town in the Midwest so it’s very different here.
When in the history of humankind has it been possible to reform a monopoly that is fundamentally a price-fixed, government-run, union-controlled, compulsory-use, compulsory-funded and socialist-entitlement?
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