<p>Back a when Saintkid #1 was in kindergarten (a young June birthday) our district was piloting a new math curriculum that involved lots of writing and drawing pictures. The kids just wanted to claw their eyes out being asked to write about WHY 2 + 2 = 4 but D had another problem. As a perfectionist and sub-par artist she never finished her work. Her 1st grade teacher pulled me aside and asked me to help encourage her to speed up. When she was asked to do a story problem involving sets of turtles she would spend so much time meticulously drawing these turtles that she never actually got to the point. Little brother’s first grade teacher explained at parent night that she forbade the drawing of items in math and told the kids just to use tally marks to work around that problem. One of D’s best friends was quite good at math (dad was EE) but struggles with dyslexia and dysgraphia. So in a subject where he should have been able to excel for a change he still got poor marks because of the writing and drawing component. A kid can be developmentally ready for the math concepts but not ready to display that understanding in the prescribed way according to the latest curriculum fad based on less developed fine motor skills.</p>
<p>Thankfully, her inability to draw anatomically correct turtles at 6 seemed to have no bearing on her ability to do calculus at 16. #:-S </p>
<p>Wow! Your poor daughter, saintfan. She and her friend must have suffered tremendously. </p>
<p>“Fads” is right. I’ve lived through several wholesale math curriculum changes. I remember that one of them was advertised to parents as “teacher-proof”! How contemptuous of teachers, especially in a district with (mostly) good teachers! This particular curriculum was abandoned a few years later when kids were coming into MS without essential math concepts. </p>
<p>Years ago we shocked our friends in an affluent suburb by choosing the artsy-craftsy pre-school over the “academic” preschool. So our kids had lots of playtime, art, music, dressing-up, and nature walks. No daily ditto sheets of letters and number work. One devoured reading in kindergarten on her own, the next child in first grade, right on that old-fashioned schedule. Thank goodness this was before yearly testing and state mandates.</p>
<p>The finger-painting pro landed in Princeton engineering, the dress-up devotee at Harvard, at their own pace, in their own styles. </p>
<p>our area has 5s programs that are pretty popular as I believe testing for gifted programs is by grade level not age.
My oldest was in a 5’s program, primarily because she had some prematurity related delay alongside her highly gifted behavior and the local K teacher suggested it.
however, we used the '5s program as kindergarten, unlike a few other kids who were “red-shirted”, presumably to then qualify for the districts gifted programs.
Both their schools had loads of arts related courses and their ECs/summers were spent on either physical or creative activities, never academic. (except for math tutoring in middle school, as the district curriculum was bonkers)
I chalk that up to me being clueless about the competition for colleges.
I would have perhaps pushed them more if I had lived in a different area.
But Im glad I didn’t.</p>
<p>On the fine motor skills topic–I saw many bright boys stymied in 2nd and 3rd grades when workbooks and sheets needed to be completed. Their printing skills slowed the ability to finish tasks even though they had plenty of intellectual skill.</p>
<p>I’m not an artistic person. I was the kid that DREADED having the artistic component to a homework assignment. I would rather write a 20 page paper than add a creative component to an assignment, even to this day. </p>
<p>With that said, I learned more being a techie for my high school’s plays for 3 years than I did in half of my high school classes. This is absolutely ridiculous. Kids need to be kids. The best things kindergartners can do, IMO, is develop healthy social skills and learn how to think creatively. This is going to help them much more in the long run than an extra day of reading drills. </p>
<p>Are the school administrators deliberately doing outrageous things to rile up the parents and then point to some policies they want changed? I remember at our school when the issue of fiscal responsibility was brought up, they would start pointing at the most popular programs where the cuts would start.</p>
<p>@saintfan we had a similar experience when D was in public elementary (when No Child Left Behind was really Not My School Left Behind) concerning math and saying WHY 2x3 was 6. After a year and half of dealing with public school administrators who only cared about numbers and not children at all, we bit the financial bullet and put D back into Montessori private school. We haven’t even considered public elementary school for our son. </p>
<p>Montessori isn’t perfect but our school focuses on teaching the child how to learn, not teaching the child how to take the “Test.”</p>
<p>There has got to be more going on than we know.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Participation in a kindergarten show is precisely the kind of activity that fosters the very things that this collection of educators states they wish to foster. I’m not sure what is going on, but I cannot believe that the administration of this school district is that stupid. The Gradgrind method of education didn’t work in the 19th century and it doesn’t work now. Test-driven curricula are terrible. Not everything worth learning can be measured by a standardized test. Every teacher knows this in his/her bones. I can’t believe there isn’t more going on here.</p>
<p>I am all for high standards, but “teaching to the test” dumbs everyone down. Even the high GPAs and SAT scores of today’s elite students does not mean they are more intellectually curious, flexible, or knowledgeable than students of past generations. In the really good elementary, middle and high schools, we will see a revolt against this new Gradgrindism.</p>