News 4: Since when was it the school's responsibility to teach kids how to tie their shoes?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s because the parents are lazy.

So lazy they take 2 years to reply to a post.

[Anonymous]

Holy shit

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Why does a 1st grader really need to know how to tie a shoe in the age of velcro and boas (those spin wheels that my kids prefer even as teens)? Mine would never have chosen tie shows at that age. Eventually, third grade or so, they get cleats or hiking boots for camp or some other specialty shoes, and they need to tie them. At that age, you show them once or twice and they have it learned. It’s like the people who spend months potty training an 18 month old vs the people who spend three days potty training a 3 year old. It’s your choice, but it’s not really necessary to teach things before the kid is interested.

I agree. My (young) 3rd grader DD was never interested, but then one day in 3rd grade, she decided she wanted tie shoes and I said she could only have them if she could tie them herself. She learned in 15 minutes.

[Anonymous]

Now it’s the school’s responsibility to: provide breakfast and lunch, weekend bags of food, school supplies, mental and behavioral health treatment, childcare, potty training….schools are pretty much expected to raise kids now

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents are pretty lazy these days in general. Anyone who works in a school knows this. Flame away. But nothing is ever their fault or responsibility, or their kids. This is our education crisis.

Interesting perspective. I think that what the school expects of me as a parent and what the school expected from my parents are completely different. My parents were responsible for getting me on the bus.

As a parent, I'm responsible for homework, charging chrome books, spirit days, snacks, other dress up days, and a never-ending parade of extras. I do it and I support the teachers 100% but, seriously, my parents just had to get me on the bus.

Right. My parents made sure we got to school and not much else. They've massively escalated the parents' required involvement in schools while simultaneously being irritated that parents try to get "too" involved. They also are not teaching some things in school anymore that I learned in elementary school 40 years ago ... they taught kids to tie shoes in kindergarten. I had already taught myself in daycare because I didn't want to nap and had to lay their quietly. But you know who didn't teach any person my age I know to tie their shoes? Their parents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents are pretty lazy these days in general. Anyone who works in a school knows this. Flame away. But nothing is ever their fault or responsibility, or their kids. This is our education crisis.

Interesting perspective. I think that what the school expects of me as a parent and what the school expected from my parents are completely different. My parents were responsible for getting me on the bus.

As a parent, I'm responsible for homework, charging chrome books, spirit days, snacks, other dress up days, and a never-ending parade of extras. I do it and I support the teachers 100% but, seriously, my parents just had to get me on the bus.

Right. My parents made sure we got to school and not much else. They've massively escalated the parents' required involvement in schools while simultaneously being irritated that parents try to get "too" involved. They also are not teaching some things in school anymore that I learned in elementary school 40 years ago ... they taught kids to tie shoes in kindergarten. I had already taught myself in daycare because I didn't want to nap and had to lay there quietly. But you know who didn't teach any person my age I know to tie their shoes? Their parents.

Agree with this, and what is baffling is that SAHMs were more common back then. My mom was a SAHM and the expectations for her involvement in my K-12 education were so low compared to what I am expected to do now as a working parent. And sometimes my mom would not even meet those expectations and people would say "it's okay, she has four kids," where as now a mom with four kids AND a job would be criticized more, not less. Just a very different world.

[Anonymous]

I thought we learned these things in either preschool or kindergarten. Telling time. Tying a shoe. Buttoning buttons. But I did Montessori for part of early childhood, so maybe it’s different.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents are pretty lazy these days in general. Anyone who works in a school knows this. Flame away. But nothing is ever their fault or responsibility, or their kids. This is our education crisis.

Interesting perspective. I think that what the school expects of me as a parent and what the school expected from my parents are completely different. My parents were responsible for getting me on the bus.

As a parent, I'm responsible for homework, charging chrome books, spirit days, snacks, other dress up days, and a never-ending parade of extras. I do it and I support the teachers 100% but, seriously, my parents just had to get me on the bus.

Right. My parents made sure we got to school and not much else. They've massively escalated the parents' required involvement in schools while simultaneously being irritated that parents try to get "too" involved. They also are not teaching some things in school anymore that I learned in elementary school 40 years ago ... they taught kids to tie shoes in kindergarten. I had already taught myself in daycare because I didn't want to nap and had to lay there quietly. But you know who didn't teach any person my age I know to tie their shoes? Their parents.

Agree with this, and what is baffling is that SAHMs were more common back then. My mom was a SAHM and the expectations for her involvement in my K-12 education were so low compared to what I am expected to do now as a working parent. And sometimes my mom would not even meet those expectations and people would say "it's okay, she has four kids," where as now a mom with four kids AND a job would be criticized more, not less. Just a very different world.

Involvement at school nowadays is just dumb unnecessary stuff though, often driven by PTA. Come do a training and then volunteer the entire day to run this completely extraneous event! Volunteer to staff a table that will be assigned to you by committee, date TBA! Help kids train for a completely unnecessary 5k run that’s actually geared toward older kids but we are pushing our kindergarteners to do it!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I thought we learned these things in either preschool or kindergarten. Telling time. Tying a shoe. Buttoning buttons. But I did Montessori for part of early childhood, so maybe it’s different.

Yes, Montessori is now basically the only place you will learn this actually at school (well, maybe Waldorf, though Waldorf has a stronger "just let them explore" ethos than Montessori, though they do emphasize stuff like handwriting that other schools have totally dropped).

But I went to a non-Montessori preschool and a regular public (half day!) kindergarten, and learned all of this in ECE. I'm sure my mom supported it at home too, but I distinctly remember getting lessons in and time to practice these skills in preschool/kindergarten. Now, kindergarten especially is very academic. And of course rather than looking at whether this shift is serving us as a society, we're just going to yell at working parents for not teaching their kids to tie their shoes.

The American education system (public and private) is so ridiculously reactive. It's like we don't have real cultural values around childhood or education to guide us, so we just constantly swing the pendulum to respond to external factors. Like the emphasis on academics in earlier grades is absolutely caused, in part, by all the fear mongering that the US is losing its edge to Asia (and before that to Russia). The whole mess with reading education was based on a theory (that has turned out to be false) about how kids acquire reading skills, so we bounced from everyone doing Lucy Caulkins to now everyone hammering phonics to death. It's all just very reactionary and watching it unfold you realize the degree to which basically no one in charge of education in this country has any idea what they are doing.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Parents are pretty lazy these days in general. Anyone who works in a school knows this. Flame away. But nothing is ever their fault or responsibility, or their kids. This is our education crisis.

Interesting perspective. I think that what the school expects of me as a parent and what the school expected from my parents are completely different. My parents were responsible for getting me on the bus.

As a parent, I'm responsible for homework, charging chrome books, spirit days, snacks, other dress up days, and a never-ending parade of extras. I do it and I support the teachers 100% but, seriously, my parents just had to get me on the bus.

Right. My parents made sure we got to school and not much else. They've massively escalated the parents' required involvement in schools while simultaneously being irritated that parents try to get "too" involved. They also are not teaching some things in school anymore that I learned in elementary school 40 years ago ... they taught kids to tie shoes in kindergarten. I had already taught myself in daycare because I didn't want to nap and had to lay there quietly. But you know who didn't teach any person my age I know to tie their shoes? Their parents.

Agree with this, and what is baffling is that SAHMs were more common back then. My mom was a SAHM and the expectations for her involvement in my K-12 education were so low compared to what I am expected to do now as a working parent. And sometimes my mom would not even meet those expectations and people would say "it's okay, she has four kids," where as now a mom with four kids AND a job would be criticized more, not less. Just a very different world.

Involvement at school nowadays is just dumb unnecessary stuff though, often driven by PTA. Come do a training and then volunteer the entire day to run this completely extraneous event! Volunteer to staff a table that will be assigned to you by committee, date TBA! Help kids train for a completely unnecessary 5k run that’s actually geared toward older kids but we are pushing our kindergarteners to do it!

A million times this. We make everything so much harder than it needs to be. Life got a lot simpler when I realized that 90% of what the PTA does is pointless make-work (including the fundraising, much of which gets spent on poorly run activities and events that don't actually benefit the kids in any real way and only produce MORE demands for volunteers and contributions -- it's a weird Ponzi scheme). Also I realized a lot of the point of the PTA is to provide a social outlet for parents and is only tangentially related to the school or the kids. But it's like the least efficient, most unnecessarily labor intensive social club ever.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I thought we learned these things in either preschool or kindergarten. Telling time. Tying a shoe. Buttoning buttons. But I did Montessori for part of early childhood, so maybe it’s different.

Yes, Montessori is now basically the only place you will learn this actually at school (well, maybe Waldorf, though Waldorf has a stronger "just let them explore" ethos than Montessori, though they do emphasize stuff like handwriting that other schools have totally dropped).

But I went to a non-Montessori preschool and a regular public (half day!) kindergarten, and learned all of this in ECE. I'm sure my mom supported it at home too, but I distinctly remember getting lessons in and time to practice these skills in preschool/kindergarten. Now, kindergarten especially is very academic. And of course rather than looking at whether this shift is serving us as a society, we're just going to yell at working parents for not teaching their kids to tie their shoes.

The American education system (public and private) is so ridiculously reactive. It's like we don't have real cultural values around childhood or education to guide us, so we just constantly swing the pendulum to respond to external factors. Like the emphasis on academics in earlier grades is absolutely caused, in part, by all the fear mongering that the US is losing its edge to Asia (and before that to Russia). The whole mess with reading education was based on a theory (that has turned out to be false) about how kids acquire reading skills, so we bounced from everyone doing Lucy Caulkins to now everyone hammering phonics to death. It's all just very reactionary and watching it unfold you realize the degree to which basically no one in charge of education in this country has any idea what they are doing.

Wow, all of what you wrote is spot on. I do mix Montessori inspired stuff into home life (chores, wooden/simple toys, traditional legos and math manipulatives over electronics, gardening) and supplement math and music education at home. But the list of things I feel I need to teach is growing. DS’s handwriting and spelling are pretty bad and I’m not even sure cursive and keyboard typing taught in our district. We spent lots of money to make sure our kindergarteners have iPads, though.

Ugh Lucy Caulkins. I taught DS how to read after reading about Balanced Literacy here (thanks DCUM!) but was only working part time and don’t have other kids. I really feel for parents working full time out of the home and trying to teach their kids, especially those with multiple kids. I don’t know how you do it. I also know teachers have their hands tied. I don’t know what the solution is, but we need a sea change.

[Anonymous]

Sure, parents are responsible for spirit days, dress up days, snacks, water bottle. But if you don’t want to do it, don’t. I asked DS and plenty of kids don’t bring a water bottle, so I stopped sending it daily. I just don’t need to pack and clean a water bottle daily when they have fountains and provide milk at lunch.

If spirit day and dress up days are important to DC, they should take some responsibility for them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I thought we learned these things in either preschool or kindergarten. Telling time. Tying a shoe. Buttoning buttons. But I did Montessori for part of early childhood, so maybe it’s different.

I’m an older Millennial and we definitely did learn those things in K. And the teachers also drilled us on our parents phone number and our address! It’s like a PP said, K used to be for teaching those skills and classroom skills like cutting with scissors, forming a line, transitioning between activities, sharing/taking turns, etc. Now K is all “learn to read and do math” and parents are expected to 100% pick up the slack on everything else.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Sure, parents are responsible for spirit days, dress up days, snacks, water bottle. But if you don’t want to do it, don’t. I asked DS and plenty of kids don’t bring a water bottle, so I stopped sending it daily. I just don’t need to pack and clean a water bottle daily when they have fountains and provide milk at lunch.

If spirit day and dress up days are important to DC, they should take some responsibility for them.

I'm guessing your DC is not in kindergarten. Once your kid is 8 or 9, this stuff does get easier because you can just say to your kid "if this is important to you, you can handle it." Whether that's bringing a water bottle or participating in spirt days or whatever.

But this thread is about the shift in early childhood education, not elementary grades. It's about what we expect of preschool and kindergarten students, and what we offer them. We started treating 3/4/5 year olds like older kids, and the upshot is that now parents have a much heavier burden with kids this age because they are totally unprepared to behave like upper elementary kids. They need to be practicing tying shoes and button holes and learning the difference between "morning" and "afternoon," but instead they are doing academics that used to start in 1st grade, playing on competitive sports teams, doing after school tutoring, competing in spelling bees, etc. And then they get to 2nd or 3rd and people are like "wait, these kids don't know how to tie their own shoes? they don't know how to tell time?" and everyone points fingers, but it's a collective failure -- schools, parents, the culture at large. We are failing these kids by asking them to run before they can walk.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

On News 4 this morning, one of the anchors pretty much blamed teachers and schools for the fact that some first graders didn't know how to tie their shoes this year after the pandemic. It showed a school in Alexandria that was helping students to tie their shoes.

Since when was it the schools' responsibility to teach this? Teaching kids how to tie their shoes is a parent's job. Kids were home at that time and parents didn't teach their kids how to do this? This shouldn't be blamed on the schools.

when did schools quit teaching how to tie shoes? They taught this in the 70s.