10

every attempt at this week is rubbish

It is my opinion that all of my attempts belong in my recycle bin.

EDIT:

I’m sitting in the teacher’s room watching the marker circling “mistake” after “mistake.” I want to scream. Horrified doesn‘t begin to explain how I feel right now. “What was she even thinking?!” the teacher remarks as she finds another error and continues sweeping the marker in large circles around all of the offending material. I want to know what the teacher is thinking. She’s correcting the papers of five and six year old children. No child left behind? No paper left unmarked. Gone is any sense of accomplishment these children would have had in their papers. There is no reward for effort. You are either right or wrong. It’s disgusting. Inventive spelling is mocked, not praised. Verbs tenses that are used wrong receive rolls of eyes, with no consideration that the children are learning to apply some of the rules of the English language to their writing. It may not be correct but it’s obvious that they have learned something about their language and are trying it out.

Kindergarten in America is completely wrong for children. Five and six year olds should be learning from their play, not from worksheets. Assessing children so much is ridiculous. The absurdity of what children are expected to learn is just beyond words. Whoever made the decision about what we should be doing with children in kindergarten is obviously not acquainted with any children. They are children! Not miniature adults. If curriculum gets pushed down anymore every child I know will fail kindergarten. Never mind what the real childhood experts say - test them! Test them now!

When I was in kindergarten I went for half a day. Kindergarten was for getting used to school. It was an introduction to socializing and spending time away from Mommy. Now we’re teaching them geometry concepts. The have to write. They have to read. If they cannot accomplish these tasks to the satisfaction of their teacher then we think there is something wrong with them. Never mind how subjective the grading of some of these naz- I mean teachers is! Information is forced on them. Instead of children’s interest dictating the information we can teach it is something all planned out before anyone knows anything about the individual children. I understand that the world has changed and schools need to teach more to make up for what parents are no longer doing but it is ridiculous. Small children do not learn in the same way that older children do. The people who understand how and what children need to learn to best set the stage for learning later on are being ignored. On what planet does this make sense? You cannot dictate that they are going to learn in the way that you specify. And just because some idiot somewhere thinks a child should learn something doesn’t mean that they even can. They’re five years old! Why can we not accept that maybe they aren’t ready? Some children just aren’t ready for the things we push upon them. But instead of helping them developing the fine motor skills that they need to hold a pencil through different motor building activities like play dough and simple game we force them to write.

We’re creating children that are going to hate school. Reading and writing aren’t viewed as a fun way of expression and learning. They are becoming chores for them. Non-threatening and enjoyable experiences when they are young help them learn better when they are older. Just because we might be able to teach them these concepts at this age doesn’t mean that it is the best foundation for the rest of their lives. We pay so much attention to assessing and the end product that we lose track of the process. And we certainly lose track of the most important part of teaching: the students.