10.27.06
Facts? Who needs to know facts?
I responded to a comment on another blog of mine, thought you’d like to read it.
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October 23rd, 2006 at 4:07 pm eWhen I was in elementary school my grades 1 - 4 were in split classrooms. Half the class was one grade, the other the next grade above. This was supposedly for the kids in the lower grade to get a better education. (It wasn’t due to a lack of money, teachers or room.) It vanished when I moved and went to a different school. Perhaps it was an experiment.
To try to bring in the larger theme of your blog …
While I’m not transgendered or unmasculine I’ve always felt that as a little boy I most strongly identified with my mother. Given that she read and did things like crossword puzzles - unlike my “hunting and fishing” father - might explain why I’ve always been fairly verbal.
Once in junior high (middle school in some states) I found myself in one of the classes geared for the bottom. When a student went up to the map of North America and asked where Russia was it was an education of a different sort.
Well still trying to get back to the topic.
I do remember that in junior high it was normally the girls who did their homework, had read the assigned books. But I’d have to say I never felt they were brighter than the males, just more studious.
The increase of violence and misbehavior in classrooms tended to pick up thankfully after I’d left public school.
October 27th, 2006 at 4:43 am eThere weren’t any multi-age classrooms in any school I was in as a small child, but I don’t know how representative my experience was, since I spent grades K-4 in a private school. They do stilll have multi-age classrooms in grades K-3 in one of the systems I work in. The purpose is to increase the emotional security of a child not to have to change teachers every year. But this shows the priority of the school and the education system: education in the lower grades is about nurturing, not about teaching facts, or very much of anything else, either.
Well, the whole educational system has gotten away from teaching facts, so why should the lower grades be any different? Who needs facts, anyway? Well, hopefully nobody, because they don’t seem to be learning any.
In elementary school, we hire teachers for their nurturing capability, not for any expertise or interest in knowledge. Come middle school, we start to teach, but kids get good grades in order to support the development of their psyches, not based on whether they have learned the material.
Throughout the system, there’s some sort of a “it’s ok if you don’t learn this now, you’ll learn just by being present where I’m teaching, and can choose to learn it the next time we teach it to you” attitude going on.
And then, the kids show up in high school, and only the few who have decided voluntarily to read and learn on their own know anything. The rest of the kids can’t understand anything they read, can’t perform simple arithmetic problems, and the only “scientific facts” they know are incorrect.
Like, excuse me! Let’s not just waste everybody’s time. Teach it the first time. Then spend the rest of my tax dollars on something worthwhile.
Personally, I have always known that I do not think like a girl, for what that’s worth.