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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Kids shouldn’t be spending more time learning how to gather information, most of the time should be spent learning the material. [/quote]

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

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.

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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.[/quote]

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.

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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. [/quote]

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[/quote]

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