<p>amandakayak: I could definitely see our middle school teachers loving that texting assignment. Already they are encouraging too much informality in writing, in my opinion. When they assign a chapter or article summary, the students are supposed to begin with the pharse “So basically…” I forbade my child to do that, however. D needs to employ precise vocabulary and educated speech, not slang.</p>
<p>Mission statements for schools. The mission statement equivalent of liking candlelit dinners and walks on the beach is “creating a community of life-long learners”. </p>
<p>Curriculum standards/points/goals in textbooks, written in stilted turgid educationese. Who on earth really thinks that students are reading these? It’s so some textbook manufacturer can check off a box and say that they’ve noted the standards.</p>
<p>I’m also not a fan of video or group projects, though I object to them not very much if they’re done in school or if the group assembles at our house. 
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<p>amandak, the texting assignment at first sounded horrifying, but I’m guessing that the teacher is using it as a clever way to engage the students. 2b or not 2b, that is the ? </p>
<p>I’ll also speak up to support poems about non-poemy subjects. One of my sibs taught science courses at a CC, and found that students responded really well when given the opportunity to present material in a non-traditional format. Instead of an essay, they could submit a poem, a dance, a sculpture or artwork, whatever they chose. It gave an opportunity for students whose strength wasn’t in essay writing to convey their understanding of the material. </p>
<p>I like both phonics and whole language. My mother taught K-2 for eons, and taught all of us kids to read by the time we were 3 or 4. Both whole language and phonics were in her toolkit. </p>
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<p>TheGFG, so basically I think you should be Secretary of Education. 
Could you please go and tell all the posters who start out their posts or titles “So basically” to cut it out?</p>
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<p>The Your Baby Can Read ads must annoy you greatly.</p>
<p>JHS – I see a big difference between doing a video project (which is all my D ever had to do) and understanding how to effectively design and use video as a means of communication. No different than PowerPoint. Everybody and their brother “does” PowerPoint, but it does not mean that they do it at all effectively. Of the eight or ten videos my D had to do in high school, I can’t point to one that actually gave her any substantive skill in video writing, production, or editing. </p>
<p>I sit through way too many really bad PowerPoint presentations to think that simply doing something gives you some level of skill. It doesn’t. If you aren’t taught about effective use, you’re most unlikely to stumble upon it on your own. I would not have minded if she took a class or a seminar in effective presentation development or video development, but that was not what was on offer. Unfortunately.</p>
<p>The original idea of whole language was not to get rid of phonics, but to incorporate real reading material into the curriculum. My oldest taught himself to read completely with sight words long before he ever attended school - if he learned phonics it was through learning a large number of words first. Studies have shown some kids learn best through phonics others with sight words and that it’s best to use both.</p>
<p>I loathe group projects and power points. I think kids would learn a lot more from writing more real papers. </p>
<p>I’ve always thought mission statements were a dumb fad. I was on some school committee when they were coming up with a mission point. Yep we created “life long learners” whoop-dee- doo!</p>
<p>My older son once had to write a valentine poem about a part of the body. The assignment reduced him to tears, I finally pointed him to Shakespeare’s “How do I love thee” and suggest he adapt the format to a body part. It was pretty good.</p>
<p>Power point presentations. Boring in the boardroom, boring in the classroom.</p>
<p>Anything adopted since 1965. From new math to extensive use of computers in classes.</p>
<p>I’ve never seen a group project (for D in elementary, high school, and now college) that is run properly. There needs to be guidance on roles, objectives and the like for them to have any merit. Most teachers do not have a clue how to get students to work together properly and learn from each other.</p>
<p>A local issue that has bothered me lately, although I no longer have a dog in the fight, is that at least one school district allows teachers not to return classroom tests to the students…maybe for a look, but not to keep. The rationale is that the tests are so hard to make up to prepare students to take the state standards tests that the school and teachers do not want to make them available. I understand the rationale, but the practice seems antiproductive to me.</p>
<p>I hate “projects”…I hate them, I hate them.</p>
<p>I once asked a World History teacher what the academic value was of a really stupid project she assigned…instead of answering, she looked like she just sucked a lemon.</p>
<p>smdur: I don’t think I got to keep a test at all after middle school, including in college. They think it keeps students from telling others what’s on the test before they take it, but it doesn’t, it just keeps students from studying their mistakes.</p>
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<p>Amen. And that fact is what makes them irrelevant to preparation for adult on-the-job projects.</p>
<p>You’ve all assembled a fine list. I’ll add ‘peer editing’, which provided about 90 percent of the essay feedback my kid got until Sr. year of HS. I really lost a lot of respect for the teachers when they utilized this - do they really think that the average kid in their class can effectively edit??</p>
<p>And I’ll also add what I saw as a real reluctance to shift kids from their assigned ‘track’. I went through a real ordeal to get my kid into honors math and science (and by the way, she’s done just fine in those subjects at college!). I could never figure out if this was just teacher group-think or laziness or a lack of leadership at the principal level.</p>
<p>My D’s school uses a group project based curriculum and I could not agree more with detractors of this practice. They defend the hetergenous groups but it is, in most respects, an exercise in slackers coasting on the work of those that care. New Tech Foundation has convinced some schools that this is the new educational model. God help us all.</p>
<p>Yea, my kiddo in 4th grade had exclusively “peer editting,” but none of them had ever been taught even what a sentence was!?!?!? It was so annoying! I also hated the slackers & kids with other issues that the teachers always assigned to the “good” and “smart” kids, so they could coast along, expecting that this experience would somehow “help” both. My S got this from K and it continued through much of HS. D got it as well.</p>
<p>* I’ll add ‘peer editing’, which provided about 90 percent of the essay feedback my kid got until Sr. year of HS. I really lost a lot of respect for the teachers when they utilized this - do they really think that the average kid in their class can effectively edit??</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>OMG…I know. My kids would hate having to hand their papers over to some kid in class who didn’t have a clue and have that kid make “suggestions” or (LOL) “corrections”. </p>
<p>*I’ve never seen a group project (for D in elementary, high school, and now college) that is run properly. *</p>
<p>so true. </p>
<p>And, never is the work fairly shared…never. The “smart kids” in the group are expected to do most/all of the work…they’re the workhorses…while the others are relaxing and/or texting.</p>
<p>I could list many, but I reaally hate Kagan. Any of you/your kids stuck with this?</p>
<p>*Get this, my 8th grader had to rewrite a passage of some book in texting lingo - like gtg lol lmao?? Can’t imagine the teacher will be able to read it, and who exactly is this educating? *</p>
<p>OMG…that teacher should be suspended or fired. Seriously.</p>
<p>Honesty…if teachers cannot come up with an academic justification for most of this nonsense, then they need to be told to knock it OFF.</p>
<p>Personally, I’ve found that the BEST teachers have already had kids go thru high school because these teachers KNOW how stupid the projects were when THEIR kids came home with them.</p>
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I have. Once. In fact I was so impressed I thanked the teacher and ended up writing a letter of recommendation for her on a grant so she could keep doing it. </p>
<p>This was an 8th grade classroom. She had groups of students put together magazine. They had to have a theme, advertisements, and art work and editing. Step one was for students to write resumes and cover letters for what job they wanted at the magazine. Then the students got together and decided on a magazine theme together. Everyone was expected to write at least one article. Editors and art director had final say in the layout, but it was a group effort. While some articles were written as homework, everything else was done IN CLASS with the teacher making sure that every one was on task. If you slacked off, you were fired and she gave you a boring project instead. I think two students in the entire class ended up being fired. The end projects were quite professional looking and with absolutely no pain on my end. No trying to meet up with kids with incompatible schedules, no complaints about my kid doing all the work. It was heaven.</p>
<p>One project that worked well for S & his class was the school yearbook when he was in 6th grade. The teacher put in him charge of all the photos, including scanning, teaching the entire school how to shoot photos & certain folks how to scan. They also did all the interviews & put together a very professional yearbook, which was pretty impressive for 6th grade with pretty loose supervision. S was rather tired of teaching & started trying to have others teach but that created more work so he ended up doing most of it instead.</p>
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<p>Correct me if I am wrong, but wasn’t new math developed and adopted in the mid '50s and well on its way out by 1965?</p>
<p>Seems like you’re going to have to reach even farther back into the pre-war days.</p>
<p>I’m a teacher. I detest the P-word in all its forms - PEDAGOGY, PEDAGOGICAL, and (shudder) PEDAGOGICALLY. Tops my list for eye-rolling educationese.</p>
<p>I was on a committee last year to revise the evaluation instruments for teachers in my district. I took the P-word out of all checklists and descriptors for my teaching specialty. </p>
<p>My boss put them all back in. And then some.</p>
<p>(No offense intended to the OP, who…you know…might be my boss.)</p>