Reply to New Math Program - NO Differentiation until Grades 11-12?!?

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Reply to "New Math Program - NO Differentiation until Grades 11-12?!?"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Just because you don't understand how in-class differentiation works or how personalize learning can make tracking obsolete means that you need to keep up with the world of education. It's not the 80s any longer. Your genius child will be just fine.[/quote]

I fully understand how differentiation should work in theory, but I have yet to see it work well in practice.  The teachers are already overwhelmed by the sheer number of kids in their class and having to find their own materials.  Not even half of the teachers my children have had would be skilled and experienced enough to manage differentiation for the full range of abilities in one class.

This is also not a totally new educational idea.  They tried this crap when I was in school in the 90s.  Guess what?  It didn't work then, the teachers hated it, and it was abandoned.  I don't know why the educational world insists on recycling failed trends.  [b]What's next?  No more phonics?[/b]  (Oh, and I have an M.Ed and did plenty research/writing on pedagogy and educational theory, so I'm not relying on my childhood experiences here.)

Oh, and only one of my kids is a genius.  The other one is struggling and very aware of the fact that their peers get things faster than they do.  I'm less worried about the genius and more concerned that the one that needs more support will not get it and will have more self-esteem issues and feel uncomfortable asking "dumb" questions.  We can barely get this in current gen ed classrooms, and it's not going to get better when the accelerated kids are lumped back in.[/quote]

Haven't we already been doing the bolded in the form of blended literacy? Our ES is finally waking up and adding more phonics back in.[/quote]

My mom was an English teacher and reading specialist, and phonics was her hill to die on.  She taught all of us how to read before kindergarten because some non-phonic strategy was trendy at the time, and she wanted to make sure we didn't end up not being able to sound things out.  I know my older kid got phonics because that's the curriculum their private school used and they were reading early in K.  My other ones got a mix of phonics and sight words, and were still reading fluently by the end of K.

This is also why I love the "you uneducated parents just aren't up on MODERN educational theory and practice" people - ALL of this stuff is just recycled and repackaged for the next generation, who think that they've discovered something that will revolutionize school.  You haven't, it's been tried before, and there's a reason it was abandoned.  And too bad for the kids who got stuck in the middle of the failed experiment.[/quote]

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