The local school system does it again
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I heard this from my eighth-grade daughter yesterday and today and I’m still not quite able to believe it.
As a little background information, once a year the schools in Arkansas give their students the Benchmark tests. This is a government-mandated test that is part of the wonder that is “No Child Left Behind”. In theory, the results of this test will prove to the government that the teachers are actually teaching kids what they need to be taught. Schools who don’t perform well on the Benchmark exams will lose funding. In reality, what happens, at least at this end of the internet, is that a few weeks before the tests, the teachers start teaching the kids how to take the test. Last year this involved teaching math in civics class (AND math class) three days a week.
Okay, so it’s obvious the schools want the kids to do well on the Benchmarks, right? Do they hit the books hard and heavy all year long? Of course not! My daughter’s eighth grade math class started the year with a project that had the kids building KITES! The teacher gave us a song and dance about how they were learning about angles and triangles and other geometry-sounding stuff. My daughter assured me, “Nope. We made kites and they hung them on the walls and that was it.”
Yesterday the eighth grade science teacher devoted an entire class period to explaining that people with longer thumbs are better at “thumb wars” and then measuring each and every thumb in the class. Today was the scientific “research” on the subject. You guessed it… an entire class period pairing off the kids so that each pair can lock grips and see who can pin the other’s thumb.
I didn’t go to any sort of specialized high school, like Daughter Number Two did, but any school I did attend would have devoted all of maybe 10 minutes to this discussion, if they felt it was necessary to cover it at all (which they did not, for the record). These people have been hammering on this “subject” for two class periods already and they’re scheduled to finish their “research” on Monday.
GIVE ME A BREAK!
That’s not a lesson plan. That’s a teacher who didn’t have anything planned at all. Kites and thumb wars in math and science classes. And I just know that in a few months someone’s going to wake up and go, “Oh, crap! Benchmarks are coming up! We need to start teaching again. How do you do that? I don’t remember.”
Technorati Tags: gripes, school, no+child+left+behind, games
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Working with kites (which are actually a geometric shape, by the way) can be a great way to teach with triangles and teach some measurement. Students are always begging for things that are not “boring” and it sounds like the teachers are trying to find a way to keep things interesting.
Yes, I am a teacher as well.
Yes, kites are a geometric shape. So are picture frames, basketballs, baseballs, math books, sheets of paper, and hair curlers. Many other things are made of combinations of geometric shapes, like chairs, tables, pencils, flashlights, and ANYTHING ELSE ON THE PLANET THAT ISN’T A SIMPLE GEOMETRIC SHAPE.
I’m willing to go so far as to say that, yes, kite building can be used to teach geometry in a way that kids will find entertaining. My point is, however, that it wasn’t. It was used simply as something to do to keep the kids busy. There was no attempted teaching going on.
I notice you completely avoided the other example… letting the kids play “thumb wars” for three days is NOT research. It’s babysitting… poor babysitting.
Yeah, kites are a geometric shape but in the schools I went to lessons like that wouldn’t have happened at all, never mind waste two and three days of class time on it.
And then there’s the “thumb wars”. That’s absolute crap. It’s nothing more than teachers taking a lazy way out and calling it class participation or some such nonsense instead of just plain cracking books.
Is it any wonder that this country is falling behind in so many things? We’re not teaching kids how to do anything but waste time learning how to take a benchmark test, build kites and comprehend the science of “thumb wars”. All being SUCH important tasks that the learning of higher maths and hard science must be set aside to accomplish them.
I used to wonder how other countries could get ahead of ours. If these sorts of things are going on all over the country, it is no wonder. It also explains all of the poor grammar and spelling I’ve seen in other blogs, not yours Thank God.
[…] is a veritable cornucopia of geometric shapes, don’t you think? (I hope my daughter’s math teacher doesn’t realize that! […]