All Things Hold Together

A kindergarten teacher had her class vote on whether or not to send a student to the principal’s office.

Excuse me, but isn’t that the teacher’s job to determine?

“The teacher decided to bring him in front of the class and let the other kids tell him what they didn’t like about him, kind of ridiculed him,” said officer Michelle Steele, spokeswoman for the Port St. Lucie police.

[The teacher] then had the class take a vote on whether to boot the boy out of the class and send him to the principal’s office.

I empathize with what teachers have to put up with in their classes. Even with only three “students,” The D can bring everything to a halt with his behavior on some days, but to subject that boy to such embarrassment and psychological stress is just cruel.

This post has a little something for everyone - a homeschool tie-in, a local tie-in, and a national tie-in, so I am posting it on She’s Right (my political blog) and Crafty Mama’s Homeschool (my homeschooling/crafting blog).

Yesterday, I was reading one of my favorite homeschool blogs, Why Homeschool, and they had a link to an interview with Oak Norton, a father of five from Utah, who is fighting to get good, old fashioned math back in the schools there.

He now publishes a single-frame comic on the website Weapons of Math Destruction.

A little background, from Norton, about the problem (from the edspresso interview):

A few years ago my oldest daughter was finishing up her third grade year and at a parent/teacher conference I asked her teacher when they were going to start learning the times tables since they hadn’t yet and I’d done it nearly thirty years earlier in third grade.

The teacher replied, “Oh, we don’t do that anymore.” [pause for picking my jaw off the ground]

“You don’t do that anymore?”

“That’s right, it’s not part of the curriculum.”

“Well then how do you expect the children to learn their times tables?”

“Well,” she thoughtfully paused, “the smart kids will just pick it up as they go.” This time my jaw cracked hard when it hit the ground and I was off to the principal’s office.

The principal explained that although this method was different from how we had grown up, there were problems with traditional math and all the research showed kids were really excelling under these discovery learning methods. I left with a serious intestinal problem and promptly purchased Singapore math workbooks and flashcards for my children to make sure they knew their basic facts.

I was reading through the WMD archive, I noticed a familiar curriculum: MathLand. Wait. That’s what they use in Burlington.

As it turns out, MathLand is one of the not-really-math math programs that is responsible for dumbing-down our kids here in America.

And they do use it in Burlington. In other words, they want us to approve a spending of almost $11,000 per pupil, but the kids will likely leave without a mastery of mathematics.

Thankfully, for me and my kids, the curriculum we use, Saxon, is one of the programs recommended by the WMD site. It focuses on - gasp! - rote memorization of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts AND the correct answer matters!

Why does all this - My math is better. No my math is better - matter? It just so happens, I came across a You Tube video, called “Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth,” (Hat Tip: Chanman) where examples from two leading fuzzy math texts are given (you won’t believe how profoundly stupid this is) and the real world implications for our children’s future.

The video is 15 minutes long, but you really have to see it to believe it. It is worse than you thought.

It is no secret that the United States lags behind the rest of the world in Math and Science Education. Watch this and you’ll see why.

Both the woman on the You Tube video (which is a quality video - she’s a TV weather woman) and Oak Norton recommend picking up Singapore Math to supplement your children at home.

On a side note: Did you know there is a name for that? Afterschooling. You know American Education is in trouble when supplementing your child’s education is so prevalent that there is a name for it.

I know I can’t keep my kids young and innocent forever, but my boys just came in from playing with two fourth-grade public school girls in our neighborhood and they told me that tomorrow someone is going to the school to teach the grade 4/5 classes (yes, they do 4 and 5 together in the same class rooms) about “the private parts and where babies come from.”

Blech. I see nothing good coming out of a group of fourth-graders discussing that on the playground.

I understand that I will have to deal with the inevitable at some point in time, but for now I am happy that when my oldest sees a commercial for “The Nature of Sex” on PBS, he shuts off the TV in disgust.

Just so you know, they do know about private parts and where babies come from. Big D even knows how babies are made, but I think he might have blocked it out!

Here are just a couple of reasons that make me glad that we decided to homeschool.

In this story, a local school is talking about whether or not they should start school later. The freshmen and sophomores have to be present at 7:39 am! My kids are just getting out of bed at that time and they go to sleep before 9:00 pm. This was one of the most immediate benefits we saw of homeschooling. My kids are not early-risers, at least not that early.

In the article, the principal points out that some kids are tired in the morning, but others are ready to go. Again, another benefit of homeschooling; it is custom-fitted to each child by the people who know that child best!

Then I read this story, “10 is the new 15 As Kids Grow Up Faster.” Just typing that makes me shudder. I think back to what I was doing at 15 and imagine my soon-to-be 10-year-old there. (Granted, what I did at 15 I was much too young for.)

The article says tweens (kids ages 8-12) are “going on ‘dates’ and talking on their own cell phones. They listen to sexually charged pop music, play mature-rated video games and spend time gossiping on MySpace. And more girls are wearing makeup and clothing that some consider beyond their years.”

By contrast, my two tween boys think girls are gross (except for our tomboy-ish neighbors), hate talking on the phone, listen to Christian rock (and are offended by music with bad words in it), play video games like Mario Brothers and Veggie Tales, and have no idea what MySpace even is.

I like it that way. So do they.

Just the other day, one of the boys was talking about something he likes to watch that is a “baby” show and how he is glad that he doesn’t go to school anymore where other kids try to tell you what you should like.

My kids are going to grow up before I know it anyway. I see no reason to force them to grow up before they are ready. I would rather let them have a few more years of being a child before they have to deal with the problems of grown-ups.

If 10 is the new 15, I am glad I homeschool. Here 10 is still 10.

Spunky has a post about the decline of recess time in schools. It reminded me of my own situation when my kids were in school.

When Big D was in Kindergarten, they frequently did not have recess. I went in to talk to the teacher about it and she said there just wasn’t time because she had to get the kids ready for the testing that would be done at the end of the year.

This continued for first and second grades, too.

He would burst out the door full of energy at the end of the school day and run around. Big E was the same way. I always let them stay after and play if they had no recess, but this was hard sometimes in the winter because I had Little E with me.

The most frustrating part was that the teachers wanted Big D to sit still all day and were frustrated that he could not. Not only that, but he finished much of his work before the other students and was not allowed to talk. So, this poor kid, having had no outlet for his energy, had to sit still with nothing to do, while the other kids finished their work. I was told that they could not give him extra work to do. He was allowed to read, though.

To top it off, the teachers were frustrated because they saw him as a problem, but they couldn’t really identify the problem. He was not doing anything blatantly against the rules or warranting a trip to the Principal. They admitted that they had a hard time putting it into words. “He doesn’t respect the other kids while they are working” was the best they could come up with.

Basically, my son can be annoying if he has no stimulation. You’ve heard that idle hands are the Devil’s tools, well so are idle minds. Kids with no mental stimulation will think of ways to annoy people. Trust me.

Of course, I have learned this by homeschooling him last year and this. At that time, I did not get what they were complaining about. The fact that they could not explain it didn’t help either.

If they had just let him outdoors to play a couple of times a day and given him enough to do to keep his mind alert and active, they would have found that he is a wonderful kid, even polite and helpful. But when he has nothing to do, or is stuck inside all day, he can be a real pain. And that is what they frequently got.

It really is no wonder that there are so many problems these days with kids in the classrooms.

Concerned parents of public school children can join the recess movement here.