Education compared to the days when
I was in first grade, which seemed like … wait a minute … it was ions ago, has
changed drastically.
I witness what my daughter has to
contend with already with my five year old grandson, Nicholas and it astounds
me the pressuring expectations our educational system places on not only young
parents, but their children.
I agree that school should be a time
of learning, however, whatever happened to fun?
Shouldn’t it be naturally engaging, exciting and appropriate to the
degree it meets the level of such young minds and not frustrate the heck out of
them? Granted most parents nowadays
start their children off in some kind of preschool program to learn
socialization skills and some basics, which is great.
Have you seen first
grade math lately though? It
boggles my mind when I look at work sheets that weren’t introduced to us until
the later grades. Most educators today
will stand true to the ideology children who do well very early on in their
elementary years more likely will graduate and live successful lives. Well, we turned out plenty of physicists,
doctors and engineers back then without overtaxing young minds. The concept of slowly transitioning our
children into learning has literally been thrown out the window with the bath
water.
According to the Common Core State Standards Initiative, it’s
important our five year olds instructional time should focus on four critical
areas: (1) developing understanding of addition, subtraction, and strategies
for addition and subtraction within 20; (2) developing understanding of whole
number relationships and place value, including grouping in tens and ones; (3)
developing understanding of linear measurement and measuring lengths as
iterating length units; and (4) reasoning about attributes of, and composing
and decomposing geometric shapes.
Kind of makes you wonder if we’re
setting our expectations way too high and laying the stress onto our children
way before they need to start contending with it.
5 comments:
Hi Cynthea. Now following your blog.
Ruth
http://www.rozziki.com/
My son is in first grade and already told me he wants to "drop out" because it's too hard. The pressure they put on kids starting in Kindergarten is insane! He's having panic attacks over getting words wrong on a spelling test. Panic attacks! At six! We actually got to have some fun in school when I was his age, and I think I turned out okay.
It's a huge issue and one of the biggest issues is the standardized testing. We pulled our children out of public school and put them in private. . . Our stress level has disappeared over-night. I know we are lucky to be able to do this. . . But shouldn't every child get a good education without all the worry and stress. It is so sad what's going on in the public school system.
Cynthia, you hit the nail on the head. When my 6th grader comes home with mind-boggling math problems fit for high school students, I wonder, how on earth am I supposed to help her :)
(Now following you from MBC)
My 5th granddaughter is in KG. Teacher said that today's Kg was last years 1st grade. Oh,my, the amount of homework she has the we have to read the directions to. I don't understand all of the directions and I went to college and I speak English. We have always read to her and provided math learning opportunities in every day life. But with so much homework, when do we get the time to go out and throw a ball around?
Malika/No Non-cents Nanna
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