Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Drawing the wrong conclusions from Race to Nowhere













Melinda Salmon said...

Completely agree, Katie! Glad we got to see the movie together and discuss it afterwards. Hope to see you again soon!

FedUpMom said...

Katharine, I think people say they're in favor of "project-based" or whatever because they want to be progressive, but they don't necessarily know what the alternatives look like.

I think the winning argument is that you can teach kids more with fewer hours, less homework, and less stress using Singapore Math than fuzzy math. That's the argument that wins with me.

Anonymous said...

I agree! My 14 year old homeschooled son has one hour traditional algebra instruction per week from a math teacher with a very solid math/engineering background. The teacher says Mars learns more in that one hour than the students he tutors who have 5 hours of classroom instruction by other methods. Mars completes all his math--the lesson plus reinforcing homework in about 3 hours per week. He adores algebra, tackles homework with gusto and tests in the 97 percentile for his age--despite considerable learning disabilities which "should" impair progress.


Early Knowledge for Kids said...

You bring up a good point about "content-impoverished" coursework. According to cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham, only about 5-10% of the school day at the elementary level is devoted to knowledge building.

Kids don't learn enough in elementary school, so they experience information overload at the middle and high school level. They have to learn too much in too little time. The countries that are successful academically put a lot of emphasis on knowledge building, sometimes as early as preschool.