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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Was just talking to another professor today about how the students barely have enough attention span to read a paragraph. Excerpted readings are getting shorter and shorter. They claim they don't understand all the words and don't bother to look them up in the dictionary. It's bad.[/quote]

I was on a curriculum committee for elementary reading.  The curriculum experts from the school system explained to us that there were many ways to learn vocabulary, but that the one way that didn’t work was to look up words in a dictionary.  They thought the best way for kids to learn words was to act them out.  This included abstract concepts like contemplation.

The next day I taught my kids how to use a dictionary because I knew they weren’t going to learn at school. [/quote]

My elementary schooler uses her Apple Watch to ask Siri word definitions when she comes across something in a book that she doesn’t know. Seems to work for her.  Sad that college students can’t figure this out. [/quote]

Yes, it is.  Many of today’s college students were taught by the philosophies espoused by the curriculum department mentioned above (MCPS) because they were the prevailing pedagogies of the time.

In addition to thinking that looking up a word was useless, the experts also taught that you should guess at unknown words and only sound them out as a last resort, that formal, systematic grammar instruction stifled the writing process and that marking everything that was wrong on a student’s paper was bad for their self-esteem.  Instead of formal grammar instruction and thorough grading/correction of papers, teachers were supposed to pick one or two grammar areas to focus on in each paper and let that real life-usage provide meaningful instruction.  For example, maybe on one paper they’d correct all the capitalization errors, but only those errors.  Then on the next paper, they might correct punctuation errors, but not comment on other types of errors (including capitalization).

That being said, when I specifically asked my child’s teachers if they taught grammar, they usually looked furtively around, hemmed and hawed, and reluctantly admitted that they did.  One teacher used the curriculum from her child’s private school to teach grammar to her class.

Fortunately, after an independent review of the MCPS curriculum concluded that it was terrible, the county is replacing it with an outside curriculum that I hope will be better.

Moreover, the nation seems to be rediscovering phonics. Hopefully, common sense will return the pedagogical pendulum back to focusing on content and skills.  Maybe the next generation of college kids will know that words have actual definitions and that knowing the definition is more useful than just guessing. [/quote]

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