Back To School (Part Three)

Continuing with Mastiff's points.

Schools group by age, when they should be grouping by ability and maturity. This is especially so given the Lord-of-the-Flies aspect of school, in which those students who excel are persecuted for it. More generally, for all that schools see their task as teaching character, they forget that children in school learn most of all from each other. Usually, the tone of a class is set by the worst among them.

Grouping can be tricky. I once observed a class that grouped by ability. The higher level readers were called "The Speader Readers" and the lower level group were called "The Wild Things." Clearly, this was poor pedagogy. Yet this same school (as does my children's school) engages in constant pull outs and shifts according to ability and maturity which allows the students that excel to be in the same group as others who do as well.

This comment also touches on the subject of bullying which has gotten worse over the years. Picking on kids that are smarter happens all the time. This usually has an element of anti-gay bias to it which makes bad situations far worse. Somewhere along the line we decided that children should be allowed more leeway regarding discipline. I run a pretty tight ship with my kids and my students. If they want to fuck around, they are going to have a 400 pound gorilla on their head in less than a second. While I am believer in student centered learning, when it comes to being respectful of others, I run a dictatorship not a democracy.

This also leads to wasted resources and talent. Teachers are forced to aim for around the second-lowest quintile among their students. This leaves the most desperate cases to struggle anyway, and the exceptional students to languish. If you don't think this has a measurable cost, just go to Slashdot and read the comments the next time an article dealing with education shows up.

This comment relates to one of the biggest challenges in education today. We pay a lot of attention to the challenged learners but not enough to the gifted ones. As a result, the gifted kids get bored and do just as poorly as the challenged ones more often than not. My answer for this is varying instructional strategies and more parent volunteers to help with the challenged kids. This is sorely needed at the grade school level. Of course, when parents are working two jobs, it's hard to find volunteers.

And this would be why I have no problem with home school. Resources of the human and financial variety are stretched thin. The more the parents want to be involved, the better. In the final analysis, the real solutions all come from more human involvement. And that means more time (not money) invested.