I talk with my cousin and favorite government school teacher, Trisha, regularly on the subject of pedagogy and traditional school politics. There is always drama and it is always interesting. Her current school leadership makes her situation way more interesting than it should be. It sounds like the school board is on top of it and is in the process of fixing some pretty serious stuff, but it takes way longer than it should and the kids and classroom teachers are the ones who suffer. Much emotional and bureaucratic effort is unnecessarily wasted on this drama that takes time from the teaching of the kids.
At any rate, Trisha got a highly deserved teaching award the other day (see the cool picture of the apple trophy). Her students regularly outperform their peers on standardized tests. Part of this is a result of Trisha’s hard work to find appropriate methods for each particular student and situation. She really knows how to teach the kids. Her biggest challenge in doing her job is the demands placed on her by government regulation, school management and by disruptive students in the classroom. It is interesting that the school board appears to be very much on her side, but through no fault of their own–again because of government restrictions–have to move at a glacial pace to fix bad stuff.
This was all in my mind when I read about a letter to the editor written by a parent in Seattle that was linked on the Sonlight blog. The author of the letter really nailed it with something that, in our experience, is very true. Schools have successfully taught math in some parts of the world for many years. The idea is to find the methods that work so well in these places and use them. That is precisely what we tried to do in our homeschool with some level of success, especially in Math. Here is the well stated salient point from the letter:
Math has been taught to children at least since ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt, and those kids grew up to use their mathematical skills to build the Parthenon, aqueducts and pyramids, which are still standing. The math taught in K-12 hasn’t really changed much since Gottfried Leibniz and Isaac Newton invented calculus in the 1600s, so one would think that educators have had enough time to figure out how to teach it.
How about if educators stop experimenting with our kids, adopt whatever approach the Finnish or Singapore schools use, and get on with it?
Betty Blonde #317 – 10/02/2009
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