Posted on 08/06/2018 10:22:05 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion
A best-selling expert on education shows how to make the school system work for your child.
Our K–12 school system is an artificial product of market forces. It isn’t a good fit for all―or even most―students. It prioritizes a single way of understanding the world over all others, pushes children into a rigid set of grades with little regard for individual maturity, and slaps “disability” labels over differences in learning style.
Caught in this system, far too many young learners end up discouraged, disconnected, and unhappy. And when they struggle, school pressures parents, with overwhelming force, into “fixing” their children rather than questioning the system.
With boldness, experience, and humor, Susan Wise Bauer turns conventional wisdom on its head: When a serious problem arises at school, the fault is more likely to lie with the school, or the educational system itself, than with the child.
In five illuminating sections, Bauer teaches parents how to flex the K–12 system, rather than the child. She closely analyzes the traditional school structure, gives trenchant criticisms of its weaknesses, and offers a wealth of advice for parents of children whose difficulties may stem from struggling with learning differences, maturity differences, toxic classroom environments, and even from giftedness (not as much of a “gift” as you might think!).
As the author of the classic book on home-schooling, The Well-Trained Mind, Bauer knows how children learn and how schools work. Her advice here is comprehensive and anecdotal, including material drawn from experience with her own four children and more than twenty years of educational consulting and university teaching.
Dennis Prager, who just turned 70, said that when he was younger, he simply refused to do any homework. He was very bright I’m sure, so somehow they didn’t fail him on this behalf. But he claims it’s why he now can conduct orchestras. He spent his afternoons learning music instead.
“the POV that education has to (tolerably, at least) fit the child”
Frankly, that sounds like 70’s liberal lefty hippy dippy claptrap.
What pressure did the teacher use? I’d simply say ‘my kid gets regular pediatric appointments and beyond immunization records I choose not to share anything’. I have not (yet) been in your situation
My son liked practicing his spelling while jumping on the trampoline. To this day he is a great speller, lol!
If the republic survives another decade I think that that education will be largely of the alternative variety, home school and on line non-government provided schooling will educate our future leaders and our scientists and even engineers. Public school is more and more vaporware and conditioning and even the bright minds that would have gone on accelerated tracks will find those tracks lead only to dead ends.
I did tell her something along those lines and his pediatrician did not agree with her. She continued to make comments on his work and sometimes even to him - that he could be doing so much better with meds. I complained to the principal about this, but didn’t really pursue it because I’d already made my mind to homeschool at that point. He was crying every day over school.
Whoah - sounds close to ‘practicing medicine without a license’, a teacher presuming to decide a kid should have medication. i’d have dropped that phrase and asked her if she knows the penalty in her state.
Had any of this crap been around when I was a kid they’d have pressured my parents for sure.
Agreed. Her comments came after a couple of years of dealing with comments over his behavior (even his Sunday school teacher, lol). I was so over it at that point, and was ready to just take a different course. Poor guy thought teachers didn’t like him, and he thought he was dumb. After a year at home, lots of exercise, breaks, better diet - he started to blossom. We discovered he possibly had a photographic memory. He just absorbed and retained information and never had to study. He scored high on standardized tests, SATs, etc. He became quite the athlete too.
Anyway, he calmed down by middle school and had no problems sitting through classes. He still has a lot of energy, but no ADD type behavior since. Of all my kids, he’s by far the most natural learner - the rest of us have had to work at it.
That teacher retired the next year. Probably for the best because teaching seemed to be a real chore and burden for her.
It should not be stressful since stress blocks learning almost 100%.
For third graders, probably 15 minutes is enough. By high school, about an hour is all that should ever be required.
Susan Bauer asserts that homework in primary school has not been shown to be useful, and should be discontinued. When you figure that four hours per day of homeschooling is all it takes, an hour of homework on top of a 6 hour school day (plus commute) seems kind of exorbitant, doesn’t it?And if you take seriously the Caplan critique of the actual utility of what is taught in schools (he says that the problem is not that “Them as can, does - them that can’t, teaches” but precisely that what teachers are teaching is what they can do. And only that) . . .
. . . and then there is the Khan Academy theory that students should view youTube lecture videos after school, in lieu of homework - and that what would otherwise have been “homework” should be done in the classroom. You gotta admit, that would sure look good to any parent who found themselves hassled by the need to get her/his child to do homework which is couched in Common Core terms instead of English.
I would add that in Engineering School I found it impossible to effectively read the text and then do the problems. Just wouldn’t penetrate until I tried to do the problems and understood what I didn’t know. Only then could I read the text, and then be able to do the assigned homework.If I look at it that way, the best thing for me might have been to have the homework questions assigned in advance, and have tried to do them before the lecture. Then I would have absorbed the lecture better, and needed the textbook a little less, but been more efficient in reading as needed.
So the prof would lecture on the subject of the homework he had assigned the night before, but expect the homework he had “assigned” two classes earlier, not in the previous class. Lastly he would assign the homework due two classes hence. I think I am making sense . . .
I sat in on one of Bauer’s workshops - I think it was teaching Greek and Latin in 3rd grade. She had a program that would have brought me to my knees, let alone my homeschooler. More power to her. We un-schooled too. I finally decided that if I could teach our son to think for himself, I would consider that success. He does, I do. He got near 800s on his SATs and has a great computer science job in NYC and a family of 3 homeschooling kids.
In the old days I actually saw children left back a grade when they were incapable of meeting the required standards.
Remember that was back when there werent pthe public unions that overrode the good of the children for maximizing teacher pay and minimizing teacher work.
Its more that ‘rigid’ systems of standards are NOT being enforced (including for the education of the teachers themselves).
Susan Wise Bauer puts out a great many books that give you a roadmap on how to classically educate your children, and has authored many great grammar, writing, and history curricula for children of all ages.
I couldn’t homeschool without her.
That’s good, I think that’s what a lot of students need but it seems the teachers want them sedated.
I live near a pretty good public school and want to make a go of it but also be prepared to yank out and homeschool. I’ve thought to join HSLDA in advance. Is there a resource for parents who want to fight within the system? my boys may be gifted in some ways but are also very fidgety and I’m sure I will be butting heads with the faculty and administration.
I don’t read any of those books now. I once did but now my grandkids are being diligently homeschooled already. I do recommend them to people I meet who are worried about the public schools and have school-age kids or grandkids..
Frankly, that sounds like 70’s liberal lefty hippy dippy claptrap.“the POV that education has to (tolerably, at least) fit the child”
If you start from the POV that all the premises of standard education descended from Mount Olympus, you would see it that way. This thread is about books written by people who do not start from that premise.I am old enough to have attended the 50th, 55th, and 60th reunions of my high school class. And what strikes you if you do that is that your classmates, those teenagers of long ago, are adults now. Senior citizens, even. And they are certainly not to be sorted and pigeonholed from Class Valedictorian down to Class Screwups (and on down to Class Dropouts).
So exactly why is it sensible to allow notoriously impractical people (teachers) to create an environment with an official pecking order (class ranking) - and also unofficial pecking orders enforced by bullies?
School as we know it is premised on the assumption that after you round children’s ages to the nearest six months everyone of “the same” age can be, and should be, ranked according to how well they learn and articulate
- the particular subject matter which teachers are competent at and select
- in the particular way that those teachers promulgate it?
I myself ranked third in that class, behind two guys who went to Yale and became college professors. So from my perspective at the time, some of the people who were my classmates seemed “stupid.” I dimly understood that those people would have careers of some sort, of course, but the appearance was that they were not all that good at anything (other than, in some cases, playing sports). In hindsight that appearance, that perspective, is little short of obscene. The guy who came closest to not graduating reported at a reunion of the anguish he underwent at the time, and indeed the initial trouble he had in the Navy - but said that he ultimately wrote three books on procedures for the Navy.
Somewhere - many places, actually, a child - many children actually, are in the same fix Charlie was in back then. Education as we know it is putting them through an excruciating, pressure-filled existence which they endure just to avoid the loser “dropout” label. Ameliorating that situation does not strike me as claptrap. It is a consumption devoutly to be wished.
Funny story: One of my cousins was visiting an aunt, and was talking to two of her brother’s children.The aunt in question came into view, and his cousins told him, “She’s our teacher.”
The first cousin replied, “She can’t be your teacher, she’s my aunt!"
The last 50 years have been “educators” deciding to ameliorate that situation” and we see what has happened.
have, first of all, been educators. Within the annual promotion paradigm. They have “ameliorated the situation” by doubling down on what didn’t work in the first place. One being a continual devaluation of vocational training, another being sterile theory such as “new math.”I’ve never been a teacher, but the gene runs in the family; only one of my 6 nearest ancestors was never a teacher. And my brother was, for a few years, a JV girls’ basketball coach. The point is that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink - and in the case of some “horses,” it’s hard to convince them that what you’ve led them to is water. Teaching that kind of kid is a sales job. You have to convince the student of the value of the lesson.
You have to convince the student of the value of the lesson. If you fail at that, learning will not occur. Period. If you succeed at that, even if somehow you never see evidence that the student learned the material, that is still not a complete failure because the student will, somehow some way, learn the material.
That is looking at the student with respect, seeing the adult the student will be after graduation. And having the humility to accept that you actually are not necessarily God’s gift to the student.
I had a friend whose youngest was on the young side of the cohort he started first grade in. He struggled, and his parents bit the bullet and decided to have him repeat first grade. After that he was mature for his new cohort - and excelled in schooling and in sports, all the way through school. My friend said it was the best decision he ever made.Remember that was back when there werent the public unions that overrode the good of the children for maximizing teacher pay and minimizing teacher work.So that can be a good choice, if you bite the bullet in first grade and absorb the hit to your child’s morale, forcing him into a change of friends. But why, in principle, must that “failure” occur in the first place? In a one-room schoolhouse, for example, it wouldn’t be as obvious a distinction.
If you ever hear me saying something positive about a teacher’s union, check to see if I have been abducted by aliens who have replaced me with a doppelgänger.
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