First off, I live in a predominantly upper-class area with a high tax rate going to the local school district so if there was a district poised for success, this should be one of them. There is not an excess of poverty, English as Second Language (ESL) kids, or kids who have serious behavior problems. If we can't figure out how to educate kids when the kids mostly don't have to worry about their safety, food or shelter, how do we expect to figure it out when a large percentage of the kids can't take those basic (Maslov) needs for granted?
Here's what I've seen in my 10+ years of volunteering. Note that as a volunteer, I haven't had to endure the bureaucracy that the teachers do but I have heard a lot about it.
- Parents proudly stating that they "can't do math" when they are the parents of 1st and 2nd graders. Imagine the outrage if these parents stated that they couldn't read! Talk about challenging a teacher to get kids excited about math when their parents are giving up without even trying to understand the assignment. I do understand that many parents are not comfortable helping their kids with algebra or calculus, but please. for all our sakes, set a positive example and show your kids how to get help rather than throwing up your hands and giving up. If you as a parent are really struggling to do the math of your elementary school child, please talk to the teacher and let them help you. Education isn't just for kids :-)
- Students who do homework during recess because they have so much to do after school that they can't get it all done. I am not one to believe that school work should be the only thing any child does, but a little balance is necessary. Sometimes, a little sacrifice is necessary. In the case of some kids, they sacrifice their recess time when they really need to stretch their bodies and refresh their brains. In the case of other kids, they sacrifice the practice that comes from doing the homework because they have "no time". I'm not sure I believe that there is "no time" to do homework, but I do believe that sometimes we don't think about the choices we force our kids to make. Certainly my kids got adept at doing homework in the car as we drove to drama or karate or out to dinner. I did set a reasonable limit on how much time each night I would let my kids do homework but it was predicated on honest effort on their part. I never counted time they whined or fidgeted but I did count time they were actively trying to do the homework. Sometimes they had too much to do and we wrote a note to the teacher to that effect. When I worked with the high level kids, they almost always had all or some of the homework done. When I worked with the lower level kids, they often didn't even have their names on their papers nor had they even looked over the homework to see if they understood it or not.
- Practice makes permanent, not perfect. Kids do need to do homework to practice skills. If a 1st grade child reads 100 words a day outside of school, they'll have read 36,500 extra words by the end of the year. For a struggling reader, this adds up quickly to help them be successful but they fall farther and farther behind the average reader who is reading 300 words a day. As the years go by, the divide gets bigger and bigger so the kids who are behind grade level readers in 2nd grade end up being a whole grade level below by mid-4th grade. Believe me, I'm happy to have them read at all but imagine how many more words they'd read in a day if they helped grocery shop to find items or if they worked their way through finding out what the toy in a box of cereal is or learning how to read a map. The more words they read at a younger age, the less catching up they have to do later. Whether it's math or reading or spelling or whatever, spend a small amount of extra time thinking about the skill areas that aren't as strong and figure out ways to make them feel successful rather than failures.
- Anyone who thinks class size is irrelevant has never had to chaperone a birthday party alone. People work better where they feel valued regardless of how old they are. It's hard to feel valued when there are so many students that they can't stretch at their desks without accidently hitting someone. It's hard to have a great relationship with a teacher when you have to wait 10 minutes to get every question answered. It's hard to feel valued when you work 7 hours in the classroom, then another 6 hours planning and grading before the next day only to go home and find out the school district has to cut funds again. Would you assign a really creative assignment that encourages the kids to think if you knew you were going to have to grade all 30 (or 60 in junior high or 90 in HS) of them over the weekend? Teachers want to be good teachers but many teachers have to go into survival mode in order to make it through the day. For your sanity, you give the kids boring, cookie-cutter assignments because they can be graded more efficiently. Bringing class sizes down small enough for teachers to form relationships with the kids that are close enough that the teacher can augment assignments to take advantage of the class she has this year rather than the classes he's had for the last 10 years.
- People learn more through play than through rote. Which uses higher thinking skills: memorizing 6x8=48 or working out the problem because you know that 6x8 is really 6 groups of 8 so if 5x8 is 40 you need one more group of 8 to make 48. Memorizing is faster but it demonstrates much less mathematical understanding than figuring out the answer. It can be a real challenge to get kids to memorize flash cards of multiplication or words or whatever but if you turn it into a game, kids tend to play longer and remember better because it is connected to them. Want to teach your kids the multiplication facts? Play multiplication war. Want to help your kid learn to spell? Have them write the words on one side of a flash card with consonants in one color and vowels in another. On the other side, draw blank lines using the right colors for the letters and draw a weird picture. Have them try spelling the words backwards or just the vowels or just the consonants. It's challenging even for the adults which makes it even more fun for the kids. There are lots of ways to make the homework fun or enjoyable but it does take effort.
- I've never met a kid who didn't want to learn but I have met kids who didn't want to work. When I can show a child why they are being asked to do this work and when I treat them like respectful and responsible individuals, they always respond, even the kid who is constantly in the Principal's office. When I can get a child to relax about whether they got a problem right or wrong but instead focused on whether they understand why they are doing what they are doing, I get a child who starts to pull his/her learning from me rather than me trying to push it into the child. I have had to teach kids how to handle frustration (which helps the problem child tremendously elsewhere) and I have had to teach kids confidence which I find much harder to do.
- Math is a foreign language. We forget that when we teach kids but if you think about math that way, particularly in the junior high school setting, it explains an awful lot. In elementary school, kids are learning English but that's not too bad because most of them have spoken it their whole life. Those students in bilingual education are often learning the second language. This is great long-term, but it tends to slow down the acquisition in the short term. When we teach them arithmetic (+,-,* and division), we teach them a huge vocabulary of words they don't tend to use outside of math class. When kids go to junior high, many of them get into their first real math class, usually some variant of algebra which uses a completely new set of vocabulary terms and way of using and manipulating numbers. In essence, we're teaching them a foreign language at a time when their adolescent brains are scrambled from hormones and reorg and often they are learning another language like French or Spanish. Is it any wonder why so many kids get to algebra and throw on the breaks? When kids hit calculus, they learn a third and (mostly) final language. There is some similarity to the languages of arithmetic and algebra but many terms are used in completely different ways and the ways of manipulating equations is very different. Learning these languages is a fantastic thing but it needs to be realized how challenging we are making their lives.
- Arithmetic and math are not the same thing. Many kids believe they are lousy in math because their arithmetic skills are subpar. In many cases, these kids have excellent math skills and intuition, but they can't do the addition correctly to show their knowledge. I just don't understand why we punish these kids so strongly for not being fantastic at arithmetic when there are calculators that can check their work. Yes, they should do the problem for the practice, but rather than force them to use the "traditional" methods of solving arithmetic problems, can't we brainstorm different methods that help the child be more successful? There is an awful lot more math in the world than arithmetic. Using a calculator should be no more shameful than using spellcheck. We should all be good at arithmetic and spelling but at least give us credit for knowing we should check our work.
Ok, enough of my thoughts. What do you think? What do you see in your schools aside from the too-little-money problems?
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