Unpopular opinion: young children should be taught what to think

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Let me start by saying I am politically liberal to moderate. Truth be told I’m a kind of crunchy woo woo mom who bakes her own bran muffins and who doesn’t allow screen time at home except to watch movies like Sound of Music. No video games. No toy guns.

But public school is too liberal and lenient for me. My son is at an UMC public elementary and I think it’s absolute BS. They do whatever they want and FEEL. You disrupted class? Go take a walk and grab a snack with the resource person! Now that you kids have all clicked through this BS TPT worksheet on the iPad, you get FREE CHOICE and can either read a book OR play games on the iPad (Hmmm which one will a 6 year old pick?). Oh we did some HARD WORK. Let’s take a brain break and watch Mario and Luigi dance on the projector for 5 minutes.
Ok, now choose which book you want to read. We are goi mg to write! Wrote about anything that you think of while you read? What questions do you have? Let’s think about thinking and fill up this book with post its of random BS questions! Next let’s do some writing workshop - trade notebooks and see what you think! Don’t worry about spelling. We just want to encourage writing and be kind! (Note - this would be considered a highly productive day. I don’t even think they do this all one a day.)

I think there should be consequences and kids need to know it’s not ok to disrupt 20 other students. You don’t get a snack as a reward!You might have questions about a book, great, but why don’t we first talk about setting, plot, characters? Why doesn’t the teacher TELL the kids what to look for and read for and notice? And any written work should be read and marked up the teacher. The teacher should mark spelling without worrying about hurt feelings.

Am I alone here? Is home school all that is open to me? I can’t afford 60k for private school, and based on some posts I read here they may not even be any better. Please tell me it magically gets better later. 5th grade? 8th grade?

If you think about it, The Sound of Music is pretty bananas.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Education is run by progressive liberals who don't understand the consequences of their soft teaching.

We need to be focused on educating our kids with math and reading. And discipline, consequences. For all kids. We are too focused on feelings, making kids feel good.

As the saying goes, the worst preparation of adulthood is a stress free childhood.

How can we get back to actually educating our children as a society? I don’t mean a return to rapping kids with rulers, just telling kids they are WRONG when they say 2+2 =5 or spell “said” as “sed.” Right now they are complimented on their thinking and creativity and asked how they got there and to please show everyone else how they did it. No! Don’t teach 20 kids the wrong way! Tell the 1 kid that he is wrong and here is the correct answer.

If you volunteered in an actual classroom, you would see that teachers do that. But you want to invent a world in which schools somehow don't teach kids, when in reality, they very much do.

It's clear you have an agenda and are not basing your rants in reality.

Former teacher here. No, it really has become about feelings. And a lot of time is spent dealing with disruptive kids. Actually teaching is secondary.

+1. Because we aren't allowed to punish your kids any more. We can't make them go sit in the hallway for talking during the lesson repeatedly. We can't say no to the kids who use "the bathroom" as a work avoidance technique. We can't take away recess if they pi$$ away all the time they were supposed to be doing classwork. We don't grade homework any more. We have to give fluffy project grades in addition to tests for the kids who couldn't pass a test if their life depended on it. No one is held back or forced to repeat a grade for complete non-mastery of any of the material. And the lazy kids know it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So you’re a “liberal” but only allow you children to watch movies with white people in them! Got it.

Where is the list of movies with white people
I see one movie in the OP

[Anonymous]

If young children being taught what to think is unpopular in your circles, then you run in stupid circles.

[Anonymous]

OP you are a joke.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If young children being taught what to think is unpopular in your circles, then you run in stupid circles.

Agree. Children are taught what to think, one way or another. They are taught at home first, then at church of you go, then to a lesser degree at school. Or if you allow them unfiltered access to the internet, they are taught by social media, adds, and whatever else they access. But they are certainly being thought what to think.

[Anonymous]

I pulled my kid out of a private elementary school. At least 1/3 of the class had special needs. The class was at least a year behind in math. One of the kids grabbed my kid by the throat on the bus and he was not disciplined.

The administration responded to my complaints by explaining that they value whole-child learning, implying incorrectly that I do not care about the socioemotional aspect, while they neglected basic, core curriculum standards.

I now homeschool. From what I have heard, things are just getting worse at that school. I can imagine how bad things at public schools can get.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I pulled my kid out of a private elementary school. At least 1/3 of the class had special needs. The class was at least a year behind in math. One of the kids grabbed my kid by the throat on the bus and he was not disciplined.

The administration responded to my complaints by explaining that they value whole-child learning, implying incorrectly that I do not care about the socioemotional aspect, while they neglected basic, core curriculum standards.

I now homeschool. From what I have heard, things are just getting worse at that school. I can imagine how bad things at public schools can get.

I work at a public school. It’s nowhere near as bad as your former private school! Yikes!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Education is run by progressive liberals who don't understand the consequences of their soft teaching.

We need to be focused on educating our kids with math and reading. And discipline, consequences. For all kids. We are too focused on feelings, making kids feel good.

As the saying goes, the worst preparation of adulthood is a stress free childhood.

How can we get back to actually educating our children as a society? I don’t mean a return to rapping kids with rulers, just telling kids they are WRONG when they say 2+2 =5 or spell “said” as “sed.” Right now they are complimented on their thinking and creativity and asked how they got there and to please show everyone else how they did it. No! Don’t teach 20 kids the wrong way! Tell the 1 kid that he is wrong and here is the correct answer.

Please find me a teacher who lets a kid believe 2+2=5. The reason why a teacher might ask them to explain how they got there is to see where they are making a mistake so they can better correct them. Surely you can see why that's more beneficial than simply telling them "nope, wrong." I don't completely disagree that there are aspects of public education that have become too soft, however, I certainly don't think they need to be run like boot camps either.

I'm a grown adult who needs to take occasional breaks and walk around or grab a snack. I don't think it's unreasonable to recognize that most kids aren't being a distraction because they are trying to cause trouble. Sometimes they simply need a break. The goal is to eliminate the distraction. If a teacher can do that quickly by giving a kid a break instead of punishing them, I'm all for it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree there are certainly ways in which schooling has gotten too permissive, but THESE KIDS ARE 6. The teaching and behavioral approaches appropriate for 6 year olds are totally different than what's appropriate for older kids.

At 6, they need to play and be creative and learn to interact with the world and each other, not spend hours on spelling worksheets.

In Finland, one of the most successful educational systems, kids often aren't even taught to read until they are about 7.

https://taughtbyfinland.com/the-joyful-illiterate-kindergartners-of-finland/

When do you think kids should start learning spelling? I don’t think anybody should be spending hours on spelling worksheets, but by 3rd grade I would have expected some correction to be marked. I was helping in class the other day when the class was writing thank you notes by hand (They almost never write by hand at school) and kids were misspelling the word “thanks.” Just one example.

Top schools with the highest scores don’t have parents in the classroom unless it’s a special event. What could you have been helping with ? 3rd graders don’t need parents in the classroom helping with writing thank you cards no matter where they’re at with spelling.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Education is run by progressive liberals who don't understand the consequences of their soft teaching.

We need to be focused on educating our kids with math and reading. And discipline, consequences. For all kids. We are too focused on feelings, making kids feel good.

As the saying goes, the worst preparation of adulthood is a stress free childhood.

How can we get back to actually educating our children as a society? I don’t mean a return to rapping kids with rulers, just telling kids they are WRONG when they say 2+2 =5 or spell “said” as “sed.” Right now they are complimented on their thinking and creativity and asked how they got there and to please show everyone else how they did it. No! Don’t teach 20 kids the wrong way! Tell the 1 kid that he is wrong and here is the correct answer.

Spelling has been secondary to critical thinking and putting ideas on paper for decades now. This isn’t new and the students do get better at spelling every year. I don’t see any differences in reading skills during my school years, my older child’s school years, my middle and my younger child.

Some schools apparently aren’t having the young kids write as often as they should or they don’t read books as often as they should. The parents should be able to get behind that and insist that it change. It doesn’t cost any more money so why wouldn’t the schools agree?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:If young children being taught what to think is unpopular in your circles, then you run in stupid circles.

I agree but think it’s also a little scary.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Let me start by saying I am politically liberal to moderate. Truth be told I’m a kind of crunchy woo woo mom who bakes her own bran muffins and who doesn’t allow screen time at home except to watch movies like Sound of Music. No video games. No toy guns.

But public school is too liberal and lenient for me. My son is at an UMC public elementary and I think it’s absolute BS. They do whatever they want and FEEL. You disrupted class? Go take a walk and grab a snack with the resource person! Now that you kids have all clicked through this BS TPT worksheet on the iPad, you get FREE CHOICE and can either read a book OR play games on the iPad (Hmmm which one will a 6 year old pick?). Oh we did some HARD WORK. Let’s take a brain break and watch Mario and Luigi dance on the projector for 5 minutes.
Ok, now choose which book you want to read. We are goi mg to write! Wrote about anything that you think of while you read? What questions do you have? Let’s think about thinking and fill up this book with post its of random BS questions! Next let’s do some writing workshop - trade notebooks and see what you think! Don’t worry about spelling. We just want to encourage writing and be kind! (Note - this would be considered a highly productive day. I don’t even think they do this all one a day.)

I think there should be consequences and kids need to know it’s not ok to disrupt 20 other students. You don’t get a snack as a reward!You might have questions about a book, great, but why don’t we first talk about setting, plot, characters? Why doesn’t the teacher TELL the kids what to look for and read for and notice? And any written work should be read and marked up the teacher. The teacher should mark spelling without worrying about hurt feelings.

Am I alone here? Is home school all that is open to me? I can’t afford 60k for private school, and based on some posts I read here they may not even be any better. Please tell me it magically gets better later. 5th grade? 8th grade?

How old are your kids, OP? I have a kindergartener and a second grader in public school. Let me take a few of your points one at a time.

1. Prioritizing work based on a kid's feelings. Your characterization of this strikes me as a more Montessori approach that I'm not seeing in public school. My kids' teachers have set schedules every day where the kids are told what they are going to learn. When it's math time, the kid doesn't get to decide they feel like reading, because the class is doing math and reading time is after lunch. Within that schedule, there is time for centers (in kindergarten anyway) and time for independent work to allow kids to pursue topics they're more interested in (my oldest sometimes asks for extra math worksheets from the teacher and sometimes reads a book). That seems valuable to me.

2. Discipline. Different kids need different kinds of discipline. Some kids will escalate even further out of control if they are shut down with traditional discipline. The kid going for a walk with the resource teacher might need that to move him out of his disruptive episode. My oldest has a hard time recognizing when she's hungry and then she gets hangry, so giving her a snack isn't a "reward" for her bad behavior, it's the way to calm her down. All of this to say that I wouldn't discount an approach without knowing the specifics of when it is used. And particularly with young kids, talking about their feelings is an important way to help them learn how to process them. Kids can both lose privileges as a punishment for being disruptive AND talk to someone about their feelings to help them learn to handle their emotions better next time.

3. Technology in the classroom. I don't like how much technology there is in classrooms these days. I'm on board with "brain breaks" in theory, but it seems like it's often 5 minutes of Danny Go. There's an argument to be made that it gets them up and moving for a few minutes, but I wish we could find a way to get them more physical movement time throughout the day than sticking a screen in front of them. That said, my kids are not constantly on their iPads at school. They have scheduled/limited iPad time in the classroom to work on Lexia or ST Math or listen to audiobooks. My 2nd grader used her iPad last week to do research on the Boston Tea Party for a group presentation she's working on. I get a weekly report of their website usage and the sites/apps they're using are all educational. I do wish I knew more about the actual learning outcomes of these gamified learning apps, like Lexia. Is my kid actually retaining the learning or just getting the rush of passing the level and then losing the concept?

4. Reading analysis. Again, I'd love to know the ages of your kids, but you said they're young children, so I'm going to assume they're in the K-2nd grade range. In my experience, the goal of reading in kindergarten is to get the kids asking questions about the story. Any question. The goal is engaging with the story after the book is closed. In first grade, my oldest started learning the structure of a story (characters, setting, plot). Talking about the story was more teacher-led and less student-led, with questions like, "Who were the main characters? What was the problem and how did they solve it? What do you think might happen next and what clues in the story make you think that? Etc." In second grade, they started mapping out their own stories using the three-act structure (introduction - climax - resolution). So, if you have a kindergartener, the more structured learning you're looking for is probably coming next year and beyond, but kindergarten has to lay the groundwork for engaging with the reading.

5. Student-led writing. Again, if you have a kindergartener, practicing writing is the point. It's important for fine motor skills and recognizing the letters. It almost doesn't matter what they're writing about. Spelling is important, but in kindergarten, they're still working on learning the sounds of letters, so if they spell it "sed" instead of "said" at least they got the sound right, and we can correct the spelling later. That said, the word "said" was taught to my kids as a "heart word" with the appropriate spelling from the beginning of kindergarten. In first grade, my oldest started getting corrections to her spelling, and in second grade she has started having true spelling tests where correct spelling is the point. Is your school using phonics or still stuck on the whole word method? If your school isn't using phonics, that might be reason enough to pull your kid.

Overall, it seems like you aren't recognizing the value of some of the "softer" lessons you're complaining about (tailored discipline approaches, learning to navigate feelings, fine motor skills, and understanding reading as an active process) and might not have kids old enough yet to be seeing more of the structure you want out of public school.

I will echo this PP. I have a lot of objections to the level of screen time and the class sizes make a lot of things tough. So I'm not in the "it's all perfect" camp.

But I also have a 2nd and there is a lot of correcting by the teacher (graded classwork with call-outs ok spelling, etc). There's also a focus on the "right" answer more so now. Like "what's the main idea of the story" where it's not just putting down whatever they want. Their writing projects are also pretty guided with a planning worksheet and other steps to guide them to write something cohesive. We have spelling tests and math tests. So I feel like there has been a lot of change from K.

On OP's "2+2" example earlier, I take a similar approach with my kid. If their answer is wrong, I will say "show me how you got here" (the problems are harder now obviously) bc I want to know if it's a simple error vs not understanding something. Obviously I don't pretend it's right but I try to have DD correct it (especially if its an error from rushing or carelessness) or we do it together.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Education is run by progressive liberals who don't understand the consequences of their soft teaching.

We need to be focused on educating our kids with math and reading. And discipline, consequences. For all kids. We are too focused on feelings, making kids feel good.

As the saying goes, the worst preparation of adulthood is a stress free childhood.

How can we get back to actually educating our children as a society? I don’t mean a return to rapping kids with rulers, just telling kids they are WRONG when they say 2+2 =5 or spell “said” as “sed.” Right now they are complimented on their thinking and creativity and asked how they got there and to please show everyone else how they did it. No! Don’t teach 20 kids the wrong way! Tell the 1 kid that he is wrong and here is the correct answer.

If you volunteered in an actual classroom, you would see that teachers do that. But you want to invent a world in which schools somehow don't teach kids, when in reality, they very much do.

It's clear you have an agenda and are not basing your rants in reality.

Former teacher here. No, it really has become about feelings. And a lot of time is spent dealing with disruptive kids. Actually teaching is secondary.

People really undestimate how important feelings are. They are probably more important than math. I think every school in every grade should have a social skills class. It may even help prevent disruptive behavior.

[Anonymous]

Based on the long rambling post of OP, I wonder what kind of education OP had.