Thomas1138
Velociraptor
Joined: Apr 06, 2008
Age: 29
Posts: 478
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 Posted: Sun May 25, 2008 12:24 am Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | It may, or may not, surprise some people to learn that there are a growing number of professional educators, with far more impressive credentials than any that I may lay claim to, that not ony agree with my views on rote, but go even farther; they have begun to express a conviction that rote learning and homework are both counter-productive, and ill-suited to the intellectual needs of growing young minds. |
Actually, there's been a back-and-forth struggle between those two camps in pedagogy for decades. The pendulum might be swinging back towards the right-brain camp at the moment, but I'm sure things will eventually go too far and come back the other way.
Someone brought up New Math as an example of one idea that was tried and discredited. Another one that needs to be brought up is Whole Language. A lot of educators thought that learning how to read was becoming too "rote", so they ditched a lot of phonetic training and went to the whole language philosophy which focuses more on reading skills themselves and not "boring" subjects like how to spell or sound out a new word.
Trouble is, it didn't work. Students weren't becoming any more proficient at reading or writing. In fact, their vocabularies and spelling skills were atrophying while not showing any particular improvement in self-motivated reading.
About a decade ago schools started switching back to phonics as the backbone of early reading programs. Has that resulted in students forever learning to hate reading as the whole language advocates told us? Nope. Instead we've produced the Harry Potter generation and teenage novels are going through a golden age while the rest of the publishing industry is faltering.
The problem with whole language is that it basically asks kids to become master readers and writers without being taught the basics. Without a solid foundation, students falter.
Math is a lot the same way. You're asking kids to master math completely on the first pass. The result, as shown from the New Math experience, is that students master neither aspect. Once students get a solid grip on the application principles of mathematics, then they can go back and study some of the theoretical aspects behind them with the confidence that comes from already having a handle on the material and simply wishing to look for deeper meaning. |
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