Whole Brain Teaching is being promoted all over the web as the latest and greatest in "teaching". Watch the video, if you can stand it. Warning -- have a bucket nearby, and a paramedic crew on speed dial.
Whole Brain Teaching: Kindergarten
Can you imagine being one of those kids, having every moment of the day scripted, down to the gesture? It's antithetical to learning, because there's no possibility of actually forming a thought in your brain. As the website boasts, "students don't have any mental area left over to create challenging behavior!"
I find this video deeply offensive to everything I believe about human beings and how they should be treated. I can only imagine the levels of boredom, frustration, anger, and depression experienced by kids who are treated this way. It's hard for me to understand how anyone can watch this and think it's a good idea, although apparently many people do.
Mother of God that's scary!! ( I could stand it for all of one mintiune ) I mean it's a goose stepping cult!!Even the title, supposedly a positive, is scary ...whole brain...like you don't get even a speck for yourself and whole brain leaning WHAT? WTF? They are little robots! This video has 75 likes!! help!
ReplyDeleteWhat's even scarier are the MULTITUDE of other videos that are listed off to the right of the screen. I took a peek (with one eye covered and the other half closed) at the one of 4th graders being taught something...I'm not sure what the teacher (Supreme Leader) was teaching if I'm totally honest, and the language level he used was certainly not at the 4th grade level. There is so much hand movement going on I can't concentrate.
ReplyDeleteThis is sad. At no point in the video do you have the sense that the teacher sees these kids as individuals with unique personalities. In fact, the whole program seems designed to keep wayward personalities in check. I also find the teacher's manner and tone to be totally condescending (respect is clearly a one way street in this program). Calling everybody "friends" is something the teachers did in my daughters' preschool, and I found it vaguely creepy even then, though they didn't do anything resembling this so-called "whole brain" stuff. But after a year at the preschool, my daughters thought "friend" was simply a synonym for "kid." In this unnatural way of speaking and teaching, personal feelings are suppressed, and everyone is your "friend." It is quite Orwellian.
ReplyDeletePsychMom here: I just listened to a part of an old radio interview with Seth Godin, talking about education and its failure to provide the kind of education that kids today need. What he talked about is the last century's need for compliant automatons to fill their factories and how schools churned them out. And then I thought of this posting and how non-thinking these children, exposed to whole brain teaching, are being programmed to be. Looking at supposed results of studies on this style of learning is not even going to be helpful because the outcome measures will be test scores (who cares), not creativity, not self direction, not ability to think critically or imaginatively. Heck, will these kids even be able to talk in a normal voice?
ReplyDeleteThere's an interesting discussion (from February 2010) at Kitchen table math on this very video. Here's the link: http://kitchentablemath.blogspot.com/2010/02/power-teaching-revisited-now-whole.html
ReplyDeletenorthTOmom, now that you mention it, I'll provide this as a true link:
ReplyDeletekitchen table math on whole brain teaching
The discussion gets a little ugly. It's amazing to me how many people can watch this video and not see anything wrong.