My kids never know what to study, information in too many differnt places

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:A few years ago, all the complaints were about teachers being overly dependent on textbooks and the resulting lack of creativity in the classroom. Teachers just can't win!

A lot of parents like textbooks so they can teach their kids one chapter ahead of the class. That way, little Larla/o looks sooo smart because he understands the lesson in class so quickly.

In the long run, it is better for kids to learn with their peers so that the teacher can get a better sense of when the class needs a little more time on an area and when they can move forward. It throws off the true rhythm of the class when a few kids have been working separately at home with parents or tutors.

This is exactly what is wrong with the education system in America. Instead of praising individual responsibility taken by a kid/family to take ownership of a student's own education, you want to disapprove of taking initiative to work harder in order to do better. Since when is it a bad thing to be prepared or to do one's very best? And we wonder why people are starting to complain about catering to the lowest common denominator in school and how kids don't feel any responsibility for their own educational attainment. Wow, PP. It's sad that so many people think like you.

Sorry, it is not simply "working hard" and "taking initiative" to try to set up child up to look smarter than s/he actually is. Being prepared is doing the homework as it is assigned, not being taught a lesson ahead of the class so as to look smarter than the other kids. If some kids are being taught ahead of the class, the teacher might think the class needs less time on an area, when that is not actually true. When the class learns together, the teacher can help all the students to understand the lesson using the available resources.

Doing what's assigned and doing it well is good, but I think of it as a bare minimum. You really never strive to go above and beyond, nor support your kids in doing the same?

NP. No, students aren't supposed to work ahead of the teacher. Why should that be "above and beyond" instead of just ridiculous? Above and beyond would be going deeper into a subject, not ahead.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. It all seems to be about balance. Maybe a little searching around for a 7th grader? Then more as they get older. That should satisfy the people who like the research. Then for people like me, what about say guaranteed at least two classes per grade with a textbook. Maybe languages and math? Both of those subjects are static enough that you don’t need a new version more than ever 5-10 years.

OP, this is a classic "teach a man to fish" situation. If you teach your child how to organize their schoolwork and the habit of finding and saving needed materials right away, you won't need to worry about all of this. They will be able to take responsibility for spending 10 minutes after school locating and downloading/printing any new material assigned in their classes that day, and then will have it prepared when it's time to study. It's a lot of aggravation for you on an ongoing basis because you're not making the upfront investment in teaching your child.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Kids shouldn’t be spending more time learning how to gather information, most of the time should be spent learning the material.

This is completely wrong. How to gather and organize information is a key skill that kids need to learn to succeed later.

When it's done in a deliberate and thoughtful way at a point where children can handle it, absolutely. Not in middle school, and not because teachers are clearly lazy and ignorant and just can't be bothered to regroup and organize their sources.

The teacher is pointing them to the sources, it is up to them to organize the sources as best suits them because how to organize study materials will vary with each child's learning style. How to organize their school papers is a skill kids should be learning long before 7th/9th grade; if they haven't, that's a failing of their past teachers (and, frankly, their parents), not the current teachers.

This is partly the reason why more and more students are diagnosed with executive function disorders and ADHD, which are all linked to difficulties in organization and time management. Previously, such young children were not asked to become organized like this, since everyone had textbooks. I am NOT saying ADHD is purely created by environmental conditions, obviously. Just that more weaknesses are revealed if you put people in certain demanding conditions.

The same goes for dyslexia. The global method of teaching to read, used in recent years, has correlated with a higher incidence of dyslexia. This is because the global method assumes that learning to read is intuitive and children merely need to be exposed to texts and they will pick it up. Well, not all children. Previously, when a more rigorous phonetic approach was used, there were fewer dyslexia diagnoses.

Of course, all this is made murkier by the fact that learning disabilities and mental health were more taboo before than they are now, and therefore were less diagnosed. This is a confounding factor. However, other countries have made the same type of observations at different periods of time, so the mass of information available clearly points to the fact that when educational methods presume too much on the part of the student at a developmentally inappropriate time, there are more children with "issues" than before who need expensive remedial help and who develop low self-esteem, at a cost to the country. We should change the methods, instead of castigating the students or their families.

PP here, I have ADHD (diagnosed as an adult) as does my child, so I can relate to what you're saying. Where I differ from you, though, is in what I think we should take from the dynamic. I grew up with having everything organized and spoon-fed to me as a child (much as people are advocating for here), so I didn't learn how to do it myself when I was younger and then fell on my face in college when I was expected to already know how to do it and there was no one to help me. If anything, I think kids having to take responsibility for themselves at younger ages makes it easier to identify the kids who really struggle with that before they fail in a more consequential way, and may lead to earlier diagnosis and treatment/skill-building.

And if you have a child with ADHD, it's that much more important to take the opportunity now to teach your child how to organize themselves when they're young and it's simpler rather than leaving them to figure it out when they're on their own and everything is more complex. I've been teaching my kids how to organize their own school papers, plan projects, etc., since first grade. There's almost no effort in it at that age, but it's made it so much easier to add new elements or complexity later because they already had the foundation.

The problem I have with the schools is that what we see of the teacher is that there are less directions on projects and less teaching of executive functioning. At least with a textbook you could see how information was organized, writing required an outline, kids were given checklists for completing projects, rubrics, rules to follow, etc. None of my children's teachers give out this information saying the project would be too constrained or that they don't have these items available for the assignment being taught. So unless I take charge to find out what is going on in the classroom and come up with possible materials with him for the projects, they just aren't done or checked. My child can barely even read the instructions on a sheet because of lack of practice following instructions.

Here's an example of an issue we've had year after year. There are some basic rules of putting together an interactive notebook. 7 years into school, my child has gotten these every year, and no instruction given for filling them out any year. It would be a great opportunity to teach notetaking, but this is never taught and yet this blank notebook (which some years comes back almost completely blank) is the main workbook for the class.
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/interactive-notebooks-no-special-hardware-christina-lovdal-gil

[Anonymous]

Basically the organization we got as students has been removed, but nothing taught in its place.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here. It all seems to be about balance. Maybe a little searching around for a 7th grader? Then more as they get older. That should satisfy the people who like the research. Then for people like me, what about say guaranteed at least two classes per grade with a textbook. Maybe languages and math? Both of those subjects are static enough that you don’t need a new version more than ever 5-10 years.

OP, this is a classic "teach a man to fish" situation. If you teach your child how to organize their schoolwork and the habit of finding and saving needed materials right away, you won't need to worry about all of this. They will be able to take responsibility for spending 10 minutes after school locating and downloading/printing any new material assigned in their classes that day, and then will have it prepared when it's time to study. It's a lot of aggravation for you on an ongoing basis because you're not making the upfront investment in teaching your child.

But what is wrong with didactic teaching at times. A friend of mine was in the military and he learned Arabic there. He went to class and they gave him material and he learned it very well. He was not asked to explore or research anything. For 40 hours a week, he learned Arabic. The same is true of professional schools like dental and medical school. Anatomy class is simply learn this whole book then spit it back out on the test. After you learn the basics, or in another class, you can then start the more esoteric discussions about social issues associated with tooth decay.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It's all because of the death of the textbook.

When I was in middle and high school, we had a couple of textbooks to study from for each subject, and we knew what chapters to work on.

Now because schools can't afford textbooks and want to look cool with online tech, teachers assign various sources under the guise of "it's good for the kids to do their own research". When multiple teachers start multiplying sources, it gets messy at the middle school level because some children are not developmentally ready for that level of multitasking.

I'm a scientific researcher. Research is my life. This is not how you teach organizational and research skills to students. They need the basics down before they can do it.

Schools can afford textbooks, but they choose to spend the money on other things.

[Anonymous]

If this is MCPS, ask the teacher for a textbook. Chances are, there is an approved textbook for the subject. Even if the teacher isn't using it, the textbook will help the student organize all of the information that is being presented in a piecemeal fashion. MCPS has also paid for system-wide licenses to use online versions of certain textbooks.

If your teacher doesn't have a textbook, or the department head doesn't have a clue, then call MCPS central office's Office of Curriculum and Instructional Programs. They have specialists in each subject area.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here. It all seems to be about balance. Maybe a little searching around for a 7th grader? Then more as they get older. That should satisfy the people who like the research. Then for people like me, what about say guaranteed at least two classes per grade with a textbook. Maybe languages and math? Both of those subjects are static enough that you don’t need a new version more than ever 5-10 years.

OP, this is a classic "teach a man to fish" situation. If you teach your child how to organize their schoolwork and the habit of finding and saving needed materials right away, you won't need to worry about all of this. They will be able to take responsibility for spending 10 minutes after school locating and downloading/printing any new material assigned in their classes that day, and then will have it prepared when it's time to study. It's a lot of aggravation for you on an ongoing basis because you're not making the upfront investment in teaching your child.

But what is wrong with didactic teaching at times. A friend of mine was in the military and he learned Arabic there. He went to class and they gave him material and he learned it very well. He was not asked to explore or research anything. For 40 hours a week, he learned Arabic. The same is true of professional schools like dental and medical school. Anatomy class is simply learn this whole book then spit it back out on the test. After you learn the basics, or in another class, you can then start the more esoteric discussions about social issues associated with tooth decay.

You're talking about two entirely different situations. Adults going to school for a specific subject are there exclusively to learn that subject. Kids in K-12 aren't just there to learn the substance, they're also there to learn how to learn, so that they have those skills later when they need to research and educate the,selves without someone to spoon feed them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here. It all seems to be about balance. Maybe a little searching around for a 7th grader? Then more as they get older. That should satisfy the people who like the research. Then for people like me, what about say guaranteed at least two classes per grade with a textbook. Maybe languages and math? Both of those subjects are static enough that you don’t need a new version more than ever 5-10 years.

OP, this is a classic "teach a man to fish" situation. If you teach your child how to organize their schoolwork and the habit of finding and saving needed materials right away, you won't need to worry about all of this. They will be able to take responsibility for spending 10 minutes after school locating and downloading/printing any new material assigned in their classes that day, and then will have it prepared when it's time to study. It's a lot of aggravation for you on an ongoing basis because you're not making the upfront investment in teaching your child.

But what is wrong with didactic teaching at times. A friend of mine was in the military and he learned Arabic there. He went to class and they gave him material and he learned it very well. He was not asked to explore or research anything. For 40 hours a week, he learned Arabic. The same is true of professional schools like dental and medical school. Anatomy class is simply learn this whole book then spit it back out on the test. After you learn the basics, or in another class, you can then start the more esoteric discussions about social issues associated with tooth decay.

You're talking about two entirely different situations. Adults going to school for a specific subject are there exclusively to learn that subject. Kids in K-12 aren't just there to learn the substance, they're also there to learn how to learn, so that they have those skills later when they need to research and educate the,selves without someone to spoon feed them.

OK< but some of it has to be learning right? I'm not sending my dd to school to learn to research Spanish.
And how is she supposed to handle professional schools when they are there to shut up and learn? Will they be out of place? How long will it take them to understand to just study the book (only).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Went to college here in US and that how it was the whole 4 years. The stuff I was expected to know was all over the place - handouts, notes, online somewhere, maybe some in a textbook if you are lucky. Studying for a test was like a treasure hunt. sometime you found it, sometime you didn't. Luckily there was the multiple choice, so my chances of picking the right answer was pretty good. I learned nothing though.
In Europe we had textbooks in all subject. We were tested only on the chapter or chapters, but never multiple choice. You were expected to write essay style answers usually.
Here every class is one big research - mostly looking for the lose leaf handouts. Why not just add a research class if it's so important.

No comment on whether this is developmentally appropriate for a middle schooler, but for a college aged kid (or even high school) this seems like far better preparation for life than having everything be in an obvious spot in a textbook. In reality with the internet, information is at our fingertips, but we have to figure out how to find it and synthesize it for any white collar job these days.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Went to college here in US and that how it was the whole 4 years. The stuff I was expected to know was all over the place - handouts, notes, online somewhere, maybe some in a textbook if you are lucky. Studying for a test was like a treasure hunt. sometime you found it, sometime you didn't. Luckily there was the multiple choice, so my chances of picking the right answer was pretty good. I learned nothing though.
In Europe we had textbooks in all subject. We were tested only on the chapter or chapters, but never multiple choice. You were expected to write essay style answers usually.
Here every class is one big research - mostly looking for the lose leaf handouts. Why not just add a research class if it's so important.

No comment on whether this is developmentally appropriate for a middle schooler, but for a college aged kid (or even high school) this seems like far better preparation for life than having everything be in an obvious spot in a textbook. In reality with the internet, information is at our fingertips, but we have to figure out how to find it and synthesize it for any white collar job these days.

I went to school the old fashioned way (with textbooks) and I have a white collar job and did tons of research as a grad student with no problems. DH also went to school in textbook days and has a job that is only research.

[Anonymous]

I tore my hair out with my kids through public high school (Fairfax County). No textbooks. Every time there was an exam, the study material was a bunch of PDFs, some power points, some links to videos, etc, etc etc....it was really trying.

Interestingly, as my kids went through school (and it was like this starting early, in middle school)-they got used to it.

And now 2 of them are in college, and doing just fine. (Strangely, college is back to textbooks--which at $180 a pop is kind of depressing lol).

One is a junior in high school still, and he is doing just fine too.

Looking back, I think that it is much more stresssful for the parents than the kid. (One of my kids has ADD, which made it much tougher on her than the other two, but she worked it out).

My suggestion is that parents are probably the worst people to try to help with this problem. We get very anxious without textbooks and a clear "list" of "learn X, Y, Z".

If your kids are struggling, have them reach out to friends or their teachers to help them organize. Honestly, it works much better!

[Anonymous]

OP here. We have been reaching out. To me the whole thing is inefficient. They could spent less time on busy “research “ and more time on fun things.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:OP here. We have been reaching out. To me the whole thing is inefficient. They could spent less time on busy “research “ and more time on fun things.

I was with you, OP, until you said that. What entitled nonsense.

[Anonymous]

I agree with OP. I tried to help my son strategize studying and it was tough to follow. There's a real book, an e book, online homework, online PowerPoint, message board, etc. Then they advise kids to use khan, etc. to supplement. Just seems like overkill to me.

I love the access we have with everything online but if the teacher isn't clear or doesn't 100% follow along their own schedule, it's difficult.