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This is what my husband refers to as "the race to the middle." As a teacher, I am charged with "differentiating instruction" so that I can meet the needs of all of my students, no matter how disparate their needs and abilities might be. (The argument that grouping students by age is arbitrary and not necessarily the best way of doing things is a topic for another day). Although I try my best to differentiate, when I am overwhelmed by everything I have to do, I don't worry about my advanced students or my students on grade level; I worry about my students who are struggling. They get my full attention, and it is often at the expense of the average and high achievers.
A nice summary of the teacher's predicament.
But to bureaucrats and legislators, those empty words "provide individualized instruction to students, 30 kids at a time" is their path to avoiding accountability for the shameful neglect of their responsibilities for administering public education.
It's just so easy for them to make unrealistic, contradictory demands on teachers, when they themselves have little or no concept of the impossibility of actually performing what they deem routine.
My ex-wife and I realized our son wasn’t up to kindergarten graduation level despite the teacher giving him a pass onto the first grade. We discussed it and had to sign papers at school to hold him back. He was able to improve and truly earn moving up a grade. He had no more problems and was able to go to college when he graduated. I’ve always believed it’s best to hold students back in elementary school if they aren’t developing at the same level.
This is what my husband refers to as "the race to the middle." As a teacher, I am charged with "differentiating instruction" so that I can meet the needs of all of my students, no matter how disparate their needs and abilities might be. (The argument that grouping students by age is arbitrary and not necessarily the best way of doing things is a topic for another day). Although I try my best to differentiate, when I am overwhelmed by everything I have to do, I don't worry about my advanced students or my students on grade level; I worry about my students who are struggling. They get my full attention, and it is often at the expense of the average and high achievers.
This is one of the reasons I talk about a National Recommended Reading List. When a kid is in 4th grade how does s/he know what is out there to be interested in and how to find good books about the subjects? I pick 4th grade because that is when I stumbled across science fiction books. They contained words, information and ideas that the nuns and other adults never mentioned.
Are "high achievers" just those who are quick at learning what you teach or should they explore things your are not teaching? With e-books and computers and Youtube this should be really easy now.
No doubt plenty of these are obsolete crap. Why they bother with things like anatomy books from the 1850s is beyond me. But plenty of worthwhile stuff is available for nothing besides having a tablet or smartphone.
I read White Fang when I was in grade school and Black Beauty much more recently. I
think BB is better because of the historical perspective internal to the story. Karl
Marx could have read it. He was in London at the time. And we much never forget the
Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894.
Many of the public domain works in Project Gutenberg have been read into public domain audiobooks. I had to read The Scarlet Letter in high school. Now I could listen to it while walking to school.
You mean like Shakespeare and the Punic Wars and Plato and so forth? Yeah, what can you do with that stuff? I mean, you can look most of that stuff up on your phone if you need it.
It's part of the long-used process of teaching people how to think. Having a knowledge base is useful in learning how to think. Exercising the brain.
Why not just graduate everyone who knows how to use their cell phones?
Critical race theory, are you kidding me?.
Time to teach kids about the one subject they don't want us to know about...money.
What on earth are you talking about?
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