Posted on 01/28/2013 9:55:18 AM PST by chessplayer
Kindergarten has come a long way, baby — too far, some say.
Way beyond the ABCs, crayons and building blocks, the city Department of Education now wants 4- and 5-year-olds to write “informative/explanatory reports” and demonstrate “algebraic thinking.”
Children who barely know how to write the alphabet or add 2 and 2 are expected to write topic sentences and use diagrams to illustrate math equations.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Why wait until kindergarten? Since they obviously think there’s no such thing as a natural maturation in ability, just insist that all the 1-year-olds write 5-paragraph themes. After all, they might need to do it in high school!
Of course, baby-nursery should also include other activities, such as “diaper changes,” “nap,” “milk,” and “chewing on things.”
“Department of Education” is indeed the mother of all oxymorons.
Fire ‘em.
Kick them out.
Sink them into the ocean.
Burn the buildings.
Get rid of any “writings” produced by these ill-educated bottom O’the SAT barrel morons.
Any collection of retired college professors/military trainers/mothers can provide a far better education to our children.
Again, fire/eliminate/exterminate/obliterate/incinerate anyone in that department.
Do it.
NOW!
It’s ridiculous how much boring busywork they give to five year olds. Kids are not buckets to be filled up with this crap. Let them develop their little souls while they dabble with R, R, and R. Kindergarten should be about play. Games, stories, self expression. Let them become true selves, not rote followers.
Deval Patrick wants early education for children 0-5 years old. ZERO!!!!!!!!!!!
This pushdown of the curriculum is definitely stressing out children (and their parents). I am watching a friend go thru this with her son, who is very bright, but was not all that interested in “academic” stuff at 5 years old. She held her son back upon the teachers’ recommendation because he wasn’t reading at the level the teachers thought he should be mastering IN KINDERGARTEN. Meanwhile they advanced a little Japanese girl who didn’t speak a lick of English. I taught Montessori for a few years, and from what I know of child development and my own children’s development, what is going on is WRONG on many levels.
Arne Duncan & Bill Ayers are having a field day bringing ruin to local school systems across the land. Get your kids out of Govt. schools and you will have done your child a real favor.
I find it amusing that 40-100 years ago a generation of kids who didn’t have highly competitive preschool and Kindergarten, not taught any PC pretend academic topics, and no access to any high-tech gadgets were able to send men to the moon, split the atom, build the likes of the Panama Canal and Hoover Dam, and create the basis for the modern computer.
Today we make sharing pictures of our dogs, our inane musings, and everything you need to know about Hollyweird instantaneous for all to see. We’ve come along way.
Do I need a sarcasm tag?
You want pressure on little children?
Go to Singapore, where the kids take do-or-die tests at age 7, tests which will dictate whether they go on to university and upper mobility as adults, or to the cattle stall factory assembling iphone keypads or Barbie doll bodies for the rest of their lives.
The pressure to succeed in these tests is massive.
For years, the educational establishment has been trying to micro manage the classroom and lower the age at which children learn things. And the end result is always the same, children learn less. Twenty years ago when my children were in the lower grades, things were not any better, and I live in Texas. I remember a first grader whose mother told me how she was sobbing because she was so stressed out by her first grade final exams. Nuts! At the time, they were constantly talking about raising the bar with respect to what they students learned. And as they keep pressing the students to do more, they learned less.
These kids have a lifetime of debt to pay and millions upon millions of bureaucrats to support.
Uh, my son could do all this after pre-school. In kindergarten he was bored. He could read any Dr. Seuss book. I was always amazed at the other children in his class who couldn’t.
Have you ever seen the books used by elementary schoolers in the 1800's? Eight graders could write circles around most people today.
The bureaucrats are compensating for their own lack of knowledge and intelligence.
McGuffy Reader!
DOE spokeswoman Erin Hughes said, “These are the types of activities and exercises that students need to work on to acquire the skills they need to be ready for middle school, high school, college and careers.”
But kindergarten, she added, should include a “wide range of activities, including free play.”
Well, it’s nice that she thinks that kids should have a wide range of activities and free play, unfortunately, for many of these kids and their parents, school is going to be a real horror. Public schools are famous for using curricula that they know doesn’t work year after year, and this common core curriculum is one of them from what I can gather from this article.
Life is supposed to be fun. Liberals hate life.
Three of my sons were instant readers at age 3. Three of them weren’t. The ones who weren’t grew into competent students, eventually. (Well, one is 3 now, and can’t read, but you know what I mean.)
The younger a “class” of children is, the wider will be the range of their academic ability at that age. Only people who never spend any time with young children, including their own, would plan a curriculum based on the idea that anything a student can do at age 10, he can also do at age 5, if pushed hard enough.
you forgot that they did it all in ONE ROOM school houses with ONE teacher teaching all grades simultaniously.
And the books were about as think at the cover on a new book.
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