Jay Mathews Doesn't Get It

From the comments to Who Says I'm an Over-Involved Dad?:

washingtonpostid4comment wrote:

Dear Parent,

SOLs are coming up. If you child is struggling with any subject tested you need to immediately TEACH your child the material they must know. I have limited time but you only have 1 child to teach. If it is a project that I sent home with unrealistic expectations for the age of your child, I urge you DO NOT HELP your child. Otherwise I won't be able to tell your child they didn't put enough effort into the project. I know 4th graders struggle to break down large projects into chunks and are just learning how to summarize information from the 4 sources they are required to gather independently. But I don't have time to teach these skills in my class. Therefore, I am sending this home even though I know they aren't capable of doing this independently. Don't worry about the hours spent in frustration not learning what they should be learning from the project. It is something that I would love to teach in my classroom if I had time. Their work will proudly be displayed in the hall for teacher conferences.

Remember, your time should be devoted to teaching your child to read, write, and do math.

thank you, Teacher

jaymathews

Very nice. A side of this I did not consider.

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trace1

I'm pretty sure that post was sarcastic.

Who did the project?

(From The Secret Life of  a Slummy Mummy, by Fiona Neill.)

Then I remember what it is I have forgotten.  Sam's "Six Great Artists of the World" project has to be handed in this morning.  Three down, three to go.


... Down in the kitchen I assess the situation while searching for paintbrushes and paint ...


I must be making more noise than I think, because during the course of this flurry of activity, Tom [the husband] wanders into the kitchen.


"I've got to do Van Gogh, Jackson Pollock and Matisse," I say, waving tissue paper in his face, "all by eight o'clock."


"What are you doing, Lucy? Go back to bed ... You're having some kind of nightmare about abstract painting," he says.


... "Sam has an art project.  He's done half of it, but luckily I remembered that the rest has to be handed in today.  And if Sam doesn't finish this, then it is me who will be held responsible."


"But Sam isn't finishing it, you are doing it for him."


"It's quicker and less messy this way.  If he were involved it would never get done.  Most importantly, if he doesn't hand it in, that means I have failed as a mother."


"Lucy, that is ridiculous, nobody judges you for something like this."


I put down the paints and take a deep breath.


"That is where you are wrong.  If Sam fails, it is a reflection on me.  It's just the nature of mothering in the new millenium," I say, jabbing a paintbrush in the air to illustrate my point.

Happy Mother's Day!

"Whenever Mother's Day rolls around, I regret having eaten my young."

(From The Complete Cartoons of the New Yorker.)

Whole Brain Parents

From the Whole Brain Teaching Forum:

This comment was written by a kindergarten teacher:

My parents love the notes sent home letting them know exactly what rule their child broke! I actually haven't had too much trouble having them returned and most of my parents, although I explained that the home practice should be 2-5 minutes, have signed the paper returning it saying their child practiced for 30 or so minutes. My parents are pretty creative for example:

Kid gets a practice card for Rule #2. Parent will have their child spend the evening having to raise their hand and be called on for ANYTHING they want to say or ask for the entire night! LOL! My parents have really bought into the WBT and love that their child isn't SCOLDED for misbehavior but are given the opportunity to practice the correct behavior! We have had great success!

Those poor kids. Not only has school been turned into a compliance factory, but now home is just an annex.

Richard Elmore re: Beliefs vs. Practices

(From I Used to Think ... And Now I Think, by Richard Elmore.)

I used to think that people’s beliefs determined their practices. And now I think that people’s practices determine their beliefs. As a child of the 1960s, I believed in the power of ideas to shape people’s behavior. I believed, for example, as many in my generation did, that the problems of failing schools originated in the failure of educators to “believe” that all children were capable of learning or — to choose a more contemporary framing of the issue — that changing teachers’ attitudes about what children can learn would result in changing their practices in ways that would increase student learning.

The accumulated evidence, I regret to say, does not support this view. People’s espoused beliefs—about race, and about how children learn, for example—are not very influential in determining how most people actually behave. The largest determinant of how people practice is how they have practiced in the past, and people demonstrate an amazingly resilient capacity to relabel their existing practices with whatever ideas are currently in vogue.

Horrible Histories: Restoration of the Monarchy

First up, Charles II, the "King of Bling".

 Next, a wife swap between a Puritan family and a Restoration family.

Erasing a Line in the Sand

Over at kitchen table math, the Race to Nowhere has been labeled "the opposition".

Well, the Race to Nowhere doesn't look like the opposition to me. I agree with the main point it makes: kids in affluent school districts are under way too much pressure.

I also agree with the main point made by kitchen table math: constructivist math curricula are a disaster, and have failed utterly to teach our kids math.

For me, a dream education would contain real intellectual content without destroying our kids' childhoods. I would like to see an end to homework in the early grades, with minimal homework in later grades. If we make a child do something, we must be sure that the thing is worth doing for itself (and no, I won't accept excuses like "it teaches good study habits.")

The affluent district where I live shows the truth of Parkinson's Law. Work expands to fill the time allotted to it. Schools have come to believe that all of a child's waking time is allotted to schoolwork, so they multiply work to fill the hours.

If schools were careful to teach real content in the most enjoyable, effective, and concise way possible, and to respect the time of their students and families, it would be a whole new world.