Yep. Let’s see.
1, I don’t do any group work. Students stand or fall on their own.
2, I drill. I want students to know stuff automatically. I try to give them mnemonics that will help their recall.
3, I break down new words using old words. That’s what phonics is all about.
So yeah, my students are starting to pick up that I teach differently. It took them 6 months but they are asking me why I am doing this.
Good for you! More importantly, good for your students.
My children go to a very good charter school. It’s consistently the top-rated school in the district. The charter school teaches phonics. The kids have to memorize things, such as spelling words and multiplication tables. They drill a lot of basic arithmetic. It’s not a religious school, but the school’s teachers and administrators are socially very conservative. Values and character instruction are integrated into every grade’s curriculum. The school holds the kids to high standards of conduct. Hard work and achievement (rather than “self esteem”) are among the values promoted.
Even there, I see the influence of some of these pernicious educational theories creeping in. My fourth grader has algebra and geometry topics sprinkled into his math. The math curriculum in every grade skips around far too much, in my opinion. My kindergartener sometimes has to do “word shape” puzzles in which he has to find the proper word to fit into each box based on its shape. I see my kids assigned more group projects than I would like. (I’ve hated group projects ever since I was the kid who had to carry the other kids in groups.)
Some of these curriculum issues are driven by forces outside the school’s control. For example, the fourth grade FCAT (our state’s assessment test) includes some algebra and geometry problems. So, our school has to teach some algebra and geometry by the fourth grade. Still, I wonder if the school will be able to resist the trendy liberal curricula and modern educational theories long enough for all of my children to get a good education there.
I’ve taught 7th grade for 17 years, and every Friday we play a review game in class on that day. The game is usually based on whatever sport is in season (right now, it’s baseball) and win-loss records are kept on the wall for all to see.
Rote memorization earns your team points. The more you can memorize, the better you help your team. They have to know what they’ve been taught. Everything’s fair game, from stuff that I taught the previous day, to stuff that I taught in August.
Of course, they also learn a good lesson about the dynamics of working in a group, i.e., that working in a group pretty much sucks, because there’s always knuckle-heads that everyone else has to drag along. I never attempt group work for any serious assignment, because I know that the work I would get would only reflect the abilities of the best student in the group. The others would just have that kid do their part for them.
I’ve seen kids who had no motivation to do anything decide that they weren’t going to be the object of scorn and ridicule from their classmates any more and actually learn the information.
Not only that, when they pick new teams, the lazy kids get to experience the humiliation of being passed over for the hard workers.
By the end of the year, they realize the reason that they know all that they know is because they had to COMPETE, and that, if they let up, someone else will move ahead of them.
That’s possibly the best lesson they can learn, anyway.