The
New York Times has a great article that points out that schools are really focusing too much on things that are not directly related what the goals of primary education should be. Basically, we now understand much more about how the brain develops, and the school methods are not in line with this. For example:
In order to design a curriculum that teaches what truly matters, educators should remember a basic precept of modern developmental science: developmental precursors don’t always resemble the skill to which they are leading. For example, saying the alphabet does not particularly help children learn to read. But having extended and complex conversations during toddlerhood does.
Ok. So if we are teaching the wrong stuff, what is the right stuff? Let's think about what a student should know by the time they complete primary/middle school.
So what should children be able to do by age 12, or the time they leave elementary school? They should be able to read a chapter book, write a story and a compelling essay; know how to add, subtract, divide and multiply numbers; detect patterns in complex phenomena; use evidence to support an opinion; be part of a group of people who are not their family; and engage in an exchange of ideas in conversation. If all elementary school students mastered these abilities, they would be prepared to learn almost anything in high school and college.
This actually seems much easier than whatever we are forcing our children to excel at, doesn't it? So imagine a 3rd standard classroom based on these principles:
In this classroom, children would spend two hours each day hearing stories read aloud, reading aloud themselves, telling stories to one another and reading on their own. After all, the first step to literacy is simply being immersed, through conversation and storytelling, in a reading environment; the second is to read a lot and often. A school day where every child is given ample opportunities to read and discuss books would give teachers more time to help those students who need more instruction in order to become good readers.
As a parent, what can you do?
As a parent, I understand that we cannot change the school system. But we can control what we do at home. Instead of spending time helping the kids with homework, or doing tables, or spellings, or improving handwriting, or whatever it is that they are currently struggling with in school, we should just have long complex conversations with them.
What I've found is that picking up a newspaper and trying to explain any news item results in a nice complex conversation. Shiv Sena has banned My Name in Khan in Maharashtra. Why? It takes about 10 minutes to explain that in terms the kids can understand. "good man", "bad man", "man who speaks a different language", "man from a different country", "India is a country. Just like that Pakistan is a different country", etc. We have been able to successfully explain such concepts to our son when he was 5-years old, and were surprised to learn that 6 months later he still remembered the gist of the argument.
Or read a novel to them. We are reading Hardy Boys novels to our kids. To the 7 year old, we simply read the text. The 5-year old also wants the same story, but is unable to follow the English straight. So we explain the story to her in Marwadi (our mother tongue). This is a daily ritual, both at night just before they go to sleep, and in the morning when they're getting ready for school. In fact they love it so much that, "I will read you only 2 pages instead of 4" is considered a major punishment in our household.
And we encourage them to write. See
here and
here. By write, I don't mean the physical act of writing. I mean the composing. They usually dictate the story to one of us, and we type it in for them (without corrections) and post it.
Until now, we were doing these things just instinctively, because we enjoy the activities, and the kids enjoyed them too. Now, this article seems to suggest, that what we're doing is the right thing.
Read
the whole article. In addition, also check out
this article about reading, language, mother tongue, and vocabulary is also interesting in this context. As are
these tweets by
@drbhooshan
Posted via email from Navin’s posterous