The Ruinous Culture We’ve Created in Elementary Schools

Shaun Johnson makes a clear stand on the testing culture that pervades our school system:

“Throughout January and beyond, social studies, science, and other expendable subjects stop. That’s right, they stop, for months at a time. Schools become mobilized as math and reading academies. And no, it’s not this idealized culture of inquiry and intellectual curiosity; students are not reading and discussing literature of their choosing or building mathematical models to simulate concepts.”

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Talking Numbers Counts For Kids’ Math Skills

This article/interview from NPR may be talking about preschoolers, but at it’s heart, it’s a great endorsement of experience-based education. When children learn by rote memorization, they are not learning the deeper meanings and qualities of the material – whether it’s numbers or ABC’s. They may learn to read, for example, but without making connections to their own lives and the world around them their ability to really understand what they are reading is deeply limited.

University of Chicago psychology professor Susan Levine finds that “for children to develop the math skills they’ll need later on in school, it is essential that parents spend time teaching their children the value of numbers by using concrete examples — instead of just repeating them out loud.”

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Building a Better Teacher

I’m a little late posting this so you’ll need to register with the NY Times to read it, but it’s free, and – trust me – it’s worth it! This article reports on the work that is being done to identify what great teachers actually do in the classroom and how to pass this information along to other teachers. It’s a long article, so here’s a question you can try to answer as you read: What should a teacher do when a kid starts the class by saying, “I was just thinking about six,” Sean began. “I’m just thinking, it can be an odd number, too.” … Sean went on, speaking faster. “Cause there could be two, four, six, and two — three twos, that’d make six!”

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Where the Bar Ought to Be

Deborah Kenny is the woman behind the amazing group of charter schools known as the Harlem Village Academies. In starting her charter schools, Kenny felt that one thing was more important than all others: quality teaching. “If you had an amazing teacher who was talented and passionate and given the freedom and support to teach well,” she said, “that was just 100 times more important than anything else.”

Don’t miss the five tenets she had in mind when raising her own children, and that represent the core expectations for students at the Harlem Village Academies.

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