New educational standards in Georgia and Arkansas - hope you’re paying attention, FCPS

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Man oh Man! What a strange thing to care this much about. Ok Ok.. you did it in the 70's - great. I would rather my kids learn a foreign language or a programming language or some life skill (mechanics, shop, cooking). Something truly useful in life. Next you are gong to want them to have mandatory typing.

The typing class I took in 7th grade was one of the most practical classes I took in school. As was the speech class I took in 8th grade.

Nowadays, kids use laptops but don't learn how to touch type. So strange.

+1
Bring back actual typing instruction!!!

YES - my kids have started doing dance mat typing. It's their goal to learn how to type properly over the summer.

While we're at it, can we please bring back cursive writing? I'm an AP teacher. It takes them forever to write any notes. We could cover twice as much material if I didn't have to wait so long for them to write things down.

(Research shows that the brain processes information better when writing by hand than when typing, so while chromebooks in class have their uses, it's not a substitute for handwritten lecture notes.)

They should be typing notes, that's what they'll do in undergraduate and graduate school.

I type very well. My cursive is terrible and I hate to write thank you notes because of my penmanship. However, when I really want to remember something, I make handwritten notes to myself. It helps me remember much better than typing. Maybe, it is a throw back to taking notes in school.

When I really want to remember something, I pull up the notes that I typed. Typing notes is a skill, and kids a probably better off learning to be efficient in high school than in a 400 student 101 class in a giant lecture hall

I am PP who takes notes in cursive. There is a difference between taking notes to remember and taking notes to review later. I was talking about jotting things down so I could remember without notes. If I am making a record of something, I would type it. Some people underline what they read, it helps me to have scratch paper to jot it down.

There is research that indicates that you can remember better if you take notes by hand.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Here are some reasons why memorization is important:

Proven benefits of memorization
Despite the existing backlash against memorization, rote learning has proven benefits. Here’s why it still plays a critical role in education:

1. Memorization Fosters Critical Thinking
Just like working out in the gym, challenging and consistent exercises are vital to the brain staying fit. Thus, a challenge like memorization is a great way to exercise your brain for better mental fitness.

2. Memorization Teaches Your Brain to Remember
It’s crucial to train your brain to remember. Memorizing gives your brain the strength to recall information. Therefore, memorizing any information over time rather than cramming makes your brain more receptive to remembering.

3. Improves Neural Plasticity
Through extended exercises in memorization, learners can retain more information. Accordingly, with repeated activation of the memory structures, you promote neuronal plasticity in the brain. According to MedicineNet, neuroplasticity allows neurons to respond to environmental changes by adjusting their activity.

4. Nursery School Rhymes Demonstrate Rhythmic Patterns
The repetition of nursery school rhymes teaches children memorization, a critical tool for children.

5. Memorization Benefits Through Mental Gymnastics
Neurobiologists believe that people who obsess over sports statistics make their brains agile and fast.

6. Knowing Frees Up Your Brain Capacity
Students who’ve memorized definitions, functions, equations, and other information can free up more brain capacity to use in other areas. If one has grasped all foundational concepts, one can move on to bigger concepts.

7. Memorization Improves Critical Thinking
Memorization lays an excellent foundation for cognitive development in the early stages. For instance, our early learning occurs through nursery school rhymes. Although these children don’t understand the structure, they learn through rhyme schemes.

8. Memory Training Starves Off Cognitive Decline
Adults who go through short periods of memory training are better off maintaining everyday skills and higher cognitive functions. Moreover, memorization allows adults to delay cognitive decline by 14 years.

9. Memorization Creates a Working Memory Necessary for Creativity
Working memory is necessary for creativity. Students who have mastered how to focus and develop their working memory through memorizing are more creative.

10. Memory Skills Help You Focus
When students memorize, they learn to focus. That said, students who practice memorizing at an early stage learn how to focus better on learning activities at high school and college levels.

A nursery rhyme is a lot easier to memorize than the Gettysburg Address. Please.

I know you are trolling at this point.

[Anonymous]

A nursery rhyme is a lot easier to memorize than the Gettysburg Address. Please

DP.
And, nursery rhymes also have great value. Sadly, they are not used so much anymore. Rhyming words can play a big part in teaching phonics.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

And some kids have trouble with math, but are still required to take it. So many excuses, no wonder FCPS is what it is nowadays.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Yes--what is the point of learning the words of one of our greatest Presidents? What is the point of learning how and where he wrote it? What is the point of knowing why he wrote it? What is the point of learning the history of what happened at Gettysburg?

Exactly. Some of these posters, presumably parents, make me so sad for their kids.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I feel like you guys are just looking for reasons to be against this. There’s no good reason to oppose it 🙄

+1

Yes there is. How much class time will be used to memorize a 3 stanza poem? Way more than you think. It is a waste of time.

What do you want to bet that Georgia and Arkansas have *gasp* homework? Do you really think students are memorizing their poems during class time?

Of course Fairfax students cannot possibly memorize anything. They cannot spare the time...

They won’t memorize poetry as homework. They barely do their existing homework.

Speak for yourself. Sorry you can't get your kid to do their homework.
DP

Not a kid, a teacher…about 50% wouldn’t do it.

Then they would fail the assignment. Oh well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

And some kids have trouble with math, but are still required to take it. So many excuses, no wonder FCPS is what it is nowadays.

How many classes do you think it is appropriate to waste listening to students receipt the same speech for the teacher to grade?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

And some kids have trouble with math, but are still required to take it. So many excuses, no wonder FCPS is what it is nowadays.

+1000 kids are coddled way too much today. If kids can’t memorize facts or equations how will they function later in life. They won’t. They will be led by their iPhone. A scary future.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

And some kids have trouble with math, but are still required to take it. So many excuses, no wonder FCPS is what it is nowadays.

How many classes do you think it is appropriate to waste listening to students receipt the same speech for the teacher to grade?

NP. Why do you think it would be the same speech? When I had to memorize a Shakespeare soliloquy in high school we had lots to choose from. You're inventing reasons to oppose this that aren't based in reality

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

Yes--what is the point of learning the words of one of our greatest Presidents? What is the point of learning how and where he wrote it? What is the point of knowing why he wrote it? What is the point of learning the history of what happened at Gettysburg?

Exactly. Some of these posters, presumably parents, make me so sad for their kids.

Can you recite the gettysburg address from memory? If not, do you know what it was about?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

And some kids have trouble with math, but are still required to take it. So many excuses, no wonder FCPS is what it is nowadays.

+1000 kids are coddled way too much today. If kids can’t memorize facts or equations how will they function later in life. They won’t. They will be led by their iPhone. A scary future.

Kids will utilize math and lots of facts in everyday life, true. Will they use their rote memorization of the Gettysburg address? They won't, admit it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Imagine, being required to memorize a recite passages from famous works of literature! Such a novel idea. /s Is this happening in FCPS?

New ed­u­ca­tional stan­dards in Geor­gia and Ar­kansas in­clude mod­est-sound­ing re­quire­ments that are in fact rev­o­lu­tion­ary.

In Geor­gia stu­dents will be re­quired to build “back­ground knowl­edge” by recit­ing all or part of sig­nif­i­cant po­ems and speeches. The Ar­kansas plan calls for stu­dents to re­cite a pas­sage from a well-known poem, play or speech. That’s it: an old-fash­ioned de­mand that stu­dents mem­o­rize the Get­tys­burg Ad­dress or Ham­let’s “To be or not to be” or Gwen­dolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” and re­cite it to an au­di­ence.

Most par­ents would prob­a­bly call this a wor­thy ex­er­cise, fos­ter­ing the courage to speak in pub­lic and fir­ing the ado­les­cent imag­i­na­tion. Who could ob­ject to lodg­ing mem­o­rable words in teenage heads oth­er­wise packed with Tik­Tok videos?

Eng­lish teach­ers, that’s who. Mod­ern ed­u­ca­tors view mem­o­riza-tion as empty rep­e­ti­tion, me­chan­i-cal and pre­scrip­tive rather than cre­ative or thought­ful. Recit­ing texts from mem­ory, they say, merely drops in­for­ma­tion into stu­dents’ minds. It’s rote learn­ing in­stead of crit­i­cal analy­sis.

That’s wrong. Recita­tion al­lows stu­dents to ex­pe­ri­ence a text as a liv­ing thing, ready to be taken up by a new gen­er­a­tion. Com­mit­ting a poem or speech to mem­ory means step­ping into the au­thor’s shoes and pon­der­ing what he meant. De­cid­ing which words to stress when recit­ing means think­ing about what those words mean. This is why pub­lic speak­ing was once a re­quire­ment at many col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.

In our age of so­cial me­dia and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, the prac­tice of recita­tion has never been more needed. Mem­o­riz­ing clas­sic words re­minds us that they are alive.

Ar­kansas and Geor­gia have some­thing even stronger than ped­a­gog­i­cal the­ory to jus­tify the new—or, rather, old—stan­dards. Watch the faces of par­ents as they lis­ten to their chil­dren urg­ing us all to­ward what Mar­tin Luther King Jr. called “a dream deeply rooted in the Amer­i­can dream,” or say­ing with Robert Frost, “I have been one ac­quainted with the night,” or with Shake­speare, “To­mor­row and to­mor­row and to­mor­row . . .”

When young re­citers re­turn to their seats, they know they have made age­less words their own. What par­ents and stu­dents feel at that mo­ment tran­scends a good grade. For a few min­utes, striv­ing teens be­come King, Frost or Shake­speare.

“Every man is an or­a­tor,” Ralph Waldo Emer­son wrote. “The elo­quence of one stim­u­lates all the rest . . . to a de­gree that makes them good re­ceivers and con­duc­tors.” Recit­ing clas­sic lines brings past elo­quence into the present, turn­ing us into re­ceivers and con­duc­tors. When we weigh the words of in­flu­en­tial men and women and re­al­ize they are still use­ful, we all ben­e­fit. Geor­gia and Ar­kansas un­der­stand this. Let’s hope many more states fol­low their lead.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kids-and-the-power-of-the-spoken-word-georgia-arkansas-memory-classics-c55366e4

Note to self: do not move to Georgia or Arkansas.

Note to self, start saving for grandkids private school tuition. So glad my kids got through FCPS before it got so bad.

+1,000

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I wouldn’t want my kids wasting time memorizing something like the Gettysburg address. Very pointless. In addition, some kids have issues with memorization. And can you imagine the teacher and students having to listen to 28 kids recite the Gettysburg address?!

FCPS teachers could just drop one of the many class movie days or play games on the laptop days.

There is plenty of time in the schedule to spend one class period on recitation.

Oh, absolutely. The amount of wasted time in FCPS is staggering. Ridiculous busy work, videos, guidance "lessons"... they could easily swap some of that out for something actually meaningful.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Working on memory is valuable but this is not the only way to do it.

No one said it was? This isn't just "memorization," it's learning and understanding what the author was trying to say, and then saying it with conviction and confidence. Amazing that some of you just think it's an exercise in memorization.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Imagine, being required to memorize a recite passages from famous works of literature! Such a novel idea. /s Is this happening in FCPS?

New ed­u­ca­tional stan­dards in Geor­gia and Ar­kansas in­clude mod­est-sound­ing re­quire­ments that are in fact rev­o­lu­tion­ary.

In Geor­gia stu­dents will be re­quired to build “back­ground knowl­edge” by recit­ing all or part of sig­nif­i­cant po­ems and speeches. The Ar­kansas plan calls for stu­dents to re­cite a pas­sage from a well-known poem, play or speech. That’s it: an old-fash­ioned de­mand that stu­dents mem­o­rize the Get­tys­burg Ad­dress or Ham­let’s “To be or not to be” or Gwen­dolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool” and re­cite it to an au­di­ence.

Most par­ents would prob­a­bly call this a wor­thy ex­er­cise, fos­ter­ing the courage to speak in pub­lic and fir­ing the ado­les­cent imag­i­na­tion. Who could ob­ject to lodg­ing mem­o­rable words in teenage heads oth­er­wise packed with Tik­Tok videos?

Eng­lish teach­ers, that’s who. Mod­ern ed­u­ca­tors view mem­o­riza-tion as empty rep­e­ti­tion, me­chan­i-cal and pre­scrip­tive rather than cre­ative or thought­ful. Recit­ing texts from mem­ory, they say, merely drops in­for­ma­tion into stu­dents’ minds. It’s rote learn­ing in­stead of crit­i­cal analy­sis.

That’s wrong. Recita­tion al­lows stu­dents to ex­pe­ri­ence a text as a liv­ing thing, ready to be taken up by a new gen­er­a­tion. Com­mit­ting a poem or speech to mem­ory means step­ping into the au­thor’s shoes and pon­der­ing what he meant. De­cid­ing which words to stress when recit­ing means think­ing about what those words mean. This is why pub­lic speak­ing was once a re­quire­ment at many col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties.

In our age of so­cial me­dia and ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence, the prac­tice of recita­tion has never been more needed. Mem­o­riz­ing clas­sic words re­minds us that they are alive.

Ar­kansas and Geor­gia have some­thing even stronger than ped­a­gog­i­cal the­ory to jus­tify the new—or, rather, old—stan­dards. Watch the faces of par­ents as they lis­ten to their chil­dren urg­ing us all to­ward what Mar­tin Luther King Jr. called “a dream deeply rooted in the Amer­i­can dream,” or say­ing with Robert Frost, “I have been one ac­quainted with the night,” or with Shake­speare, “To­mor­row and to­mor­row and to­mor­row . . .”

When young re­citers re­turn to their seats, they know they have made age­less words their own. What par­ents and stu­dents feel at that mo­ment tran­scends a good grade. For a few min­utes, striv­ing teens be­come King, Frost or Shake­speare.

“Every man is an or­a­tor,” Ralph Waldo Emer­son wrote. “The elo­quence of one stim­u­lates all the rest . . . to a de­gree that makes them good re­ceivers and con­duc­tors.” Recit­ing clas­sic lines brings past elo­quence into the present, turn­ing us into re­ceivers and con­duc­tors. When we weigh the words of in­flu­en­tial men and women and re­al­ize they are still use­ful, we all ben­e­fit. Geor­gia and Ar­kansas un­der­stand this. Let’s hope many more states fol­low their lead.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kids-and-the-power-of-the-spoken-word-georgia-arkansas-memory-classics-c55366e4

This is the dumbest thing I've ever read. I have a PhD in literature and can't imagine any reason at all why one would need to memorize the words of any particular piece of literature. What a waste of time. Memorizing words of some random poem but not having any idea why that poem is significant sounds like just the kind of thing a person who doesn't really understand literature would think was an important thing to do.

Tell us you don't really have a PhD in literature without actually telling us. How incredibly shallow and sad.