<p>I think we have gone from the sublime to the ridiculous.</p>
<p>Rush, Little Baby
How the push for infant academics may actually be a waste of time - or worse.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/10/28/rush_little_baby/[/url]”>http://www.boston.com/news/globe/magazine/articles/2007/10/28/rush_little_baby/</a></p>
<p>Fascinating! I wish our board of Ed would read it! High stakes testing at all grade levels makes it really hard for them to approve dropping the reading requirements for kindergarten :(</p>
<p>I was shocked to learn that they are now teaching math in Kindergarten. I think that before long they’ll be expected to do fractions as well.</p>
<p>It makes me so incredibly sad that we’re not allowing our children to be children anymore. Oh, for the good old days when boys had cooties and a simple “I’m sorry” would fix anything.</p>
<p>Oh my… That is shocking. I remember in my Kindergarten we didn’t do math. We learned our letters and numbers, how to spell our name, many art projects, read a little, and learned parts of the body. While, I was never challenged in Kindergarten (except with spelling my middle name… Cheyenne is not an easy thing to spell! It just doesn’t work haha), most of the kids were. I couldn’t imagine having my teacher try to teach the majority of kids who struggled anything more complex… Wow… </p>
<p>It’s awful when some articles talk about how kids and teens are already struggling and they’re trying to strip away the foundations of our education before we even know what it is.</p>
<p>Seriously. And how they push the kids that don’t understand right on through to higher level stuff.</p>
<p>My math teacher was talking to us last year about how it’s not that we’re not smart, it’s that most of us who struggle, struggle because we don’t know the basics.</p>
<p>As my 9th grade English teacher would say, “We’re expecting you to be on the 2nd story of a house without building a single stair.”</p>
<p>Exactly! Perhaps if instead of rushing younger kids in elementary school to be little Einsteins at age 5 they should teach them the basics. Teach them that 2+2=4 and leave Pi, and Quadratic Equations, and Exponents until they understand the basics. TEACH them the basics in elementary school so they can LEARN in High School and be PREPARED for college. Don’t worry about having them take the SATs in 7th grade. Make sure they can read, write, and do arithmetic. The rest will come if our educational system would slow down first. </p>
<p>If we would slow down and teach the basics then it would slowly evolve to where they could learn things faster. But if we continue to bury them alive with stuff the don’t understand some unlucky teacher is going to have to unwork 9 or 10 years of confusion just to get them adequate. Forget being considered “smart” or “advanced”.</p>
<p>What we need to do is surround them with rich language and literature - especially my babies, who come to me with the lowest level of language
My kiddies have the 32 million word deficit, and instead of reading them long books and playacting, etc, I’m teaching them to “decode” unfamiliar words… and some of them are just not ready for it.</p>
<p>I don’t really see the problem. It’s all in HOW you teach math. My son, at age 3, was fascinating with the names for shapes, and could easily explain the difference between a rectangle and a square. We told him not to discuss the difference between a parallelogram and a rhomboid at pre-school, though. Too embarrassing for the teachers. The language of math is a rich language as well, and one all too few people are comfortable with, sadly.</p>
<p>We played Bach to our little baby when we discovered it would calm her down and with some luck even put her to sleep. It was great to read news stories later that listening to Bach helps with math later in school.</p>
<p>The problem I have with this article, and this particular approach, is the forced nature. No baby needs to be shown flashcards, since an interested two year old will learn to read without a whit of instruction. Similarly, there are five year olds who are ready for fractions, because they have been doing ordinal counting and partitioning and so forth for years already.</p>
<p>Why not leave the toddler to play with the drawer full of Tupperware or pots and pans? He/she will have much more fun, and probably learn more than by looking at dopey flashcards anyway.</p>
<p>Allmusic, you’re so right! Unfortunately, I suspect that we’ll have to wait a decade or two until the experts catch up with what you already know … After all, there’s a lot of money tied up in pushing flash cards for babies these days (whereas Tupperware is cheap, and primarily inherited from our mothers).</p>
<p>The part that got me was the idea of teaching pre-schoolers the names of famous composers by showing them flash cards. What happened to the music part. My d. knew her favorite piece of music was Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik when she was 3 because that is what she listened to. She shifted to being an Elvis fan somewhere around at 4 or 5… but I didn’t care – we had radios & cd players and it didn’t matter to me whether the kids preferred Sharon, Lois & Bram or Beethoven – but the certainly heard enough music in toddlerhood to draw some basic distinctions as to genre. </p>
<p>What would the point be of teaching the names or biographical data of famous composers without exposure to the music?</p>
<p>(I still smile remembering the time I first heard my little boy talking excitedly about Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello & Rafael … I was very impressed and proud of his knowledge of Italian Renaissance masters until I questioned him and discovered he was talking about Ninja Turtles.). Teaching words (or names) without the concepts or ideas behind them is meaningless.</p>
<p><a href=“I%20still%20smile%20remembering%20the%20time%20I%20first%20heard%20my%20little%20boy%20talking%20excitedly%20about%20Leonardo,%20Michelangelo,%20Donatello%20&%20Rafael%20…%20I%20was%20very%20impressed%20and%20proud%20of%20his%20knowledge%20of%20Italian%20Renaissance%20masters%20until%20I%20questioned%20him%20and%20discovered%20he%20was%20talking%20about%20Ninja%20Turtles.”>quote</a>.
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<p>Calmom – I experienced the very same thing!</p>
<p>I really feel sorry for the little kids who get pushed this way. What little children need is lots of experiences–“hooks to hang their learning on” is what I once heard it called. They need to see, hear, touch, taste, and experience the world. They need to be read to and held, talked to as intelligent beings, and have questions answered. They don’t need flashcards. They don’t need to be pushed into something they aren’t ready for.</p>
<p>My older son learned to read on his own and was reading adult books by the time he was 6–not because we pushed, but because he wanted to. My younger son didn’t really figure out how to read until he was 9. (We homeschooled, so he was free to learn at his own speed.) Within a year he was reading above grade level. Both boys are intelligent kids; their brains are just wired differently. If my younger son had been in one of these early academic programs, I dread to think of what might have happened to his self-image and how that might have made him turn out. As it was, he could spend his early elementary years doing science experiments, taking nature walks, being read to, and learning so much–learning things that would make reading meaningful to him when he was ready to read.</p>
<p>Just because a kid CAN memorize flash cards doesn’t mean it is a good thing or that he is actually learning anything meaninful from it.</p>
<p>Grrr. If he’d said “patty-cake” one more time I think I would have had to go inside the video and punch his lights out.</p>
<p>So much evidence shows that by eliminating play time we rob kids of the chance to learn creative thinking and problem solving. Learning by rote, which is what flash cards teach, is not the same as allowing a mind to encounter the world and interact with it, which is what play is.</p>
<p>Kids in all cultures play.</p>
<p>Sure, if a kid likes to talk about parallelograms and romboids, go to it. And play counting games. Why not?</p>
<p>It’s the anxiety and forced performance that is odious. Discussing shapes is interesting; memorizing times table isn’t. Important? Yes, but not for a four year old.</p>
<p>My S could distinguish pink, orange, peach and coral at eighteen months old. Pediatrician said this was impossible until S actually did it in front of him. This wasn’t forced; these were his sister’s favorite crayons and he was able to distinguish between them and learn their names.</p>
<p>PS He is not in the least artistic. Haha. Makes me laugh just thinking about it.</p>
<p>Calmom: No wonder our D’s ended up at the same school. D’s favorite piece at three was Voi Che Sapete from Marriage of Figaro. Mozart all the way. (As a flutist, still her favorite. S is a Bach man.)</p>
<p>Susanm: That sounds wonderful for both of them.</p>
<p>I read half the article-pg7, but refused to give all sorts of info to join to be able to continue. I recall some points in the well written part of the article I read- there are the gifted kids who fall outside the norms for what “should” be done at various ages, the bit about computer work - have read that kids need active, not passive learning. </p>
<p>I recall how my gifted son learned to read at an early age -4- in daycare/preschool- he refused to do the idiotic books beyond the primer, but his super teacher worked with him in other ways (during his mandatory naptime when he wouldn’t sleep and apparently would talk and disturb the others)- some students made it to book 17 while he was still on book one; yet he was reading at the 5th grade level in his public half day kindergarten the following year and continued his accelerated reading progress whereas the others did not. They also had wrote memorization/copying of arithmetic operations- addition/subtraction, don’t recall son advanced to the other operations. We pulled him out of that program when we no longer needed daycare and he could go to the public kindergarten- early (the district had a nice evaluation procedure, btw)- none of that arithmetic stuck (by now he’s a possible Honors math major…). Kudos to son and the girl he made castles with using the “brown staircase” and “pink tower” blocks instead of lining them up according to size (reported by his teacher, she did what was best, not just what the director’s purported Montessori curriculum called for).</p>
<p>Sounds like the parents are well meaning but off base. Drilling- son does much better with math theory than he ever did with those elementary school flash cards… There were clues in the child’s reported behavior that makes me feel she wasn’t gifted and will not reap the benefits her parents hope for (get a life, mom!). So happy we let son play age appropriately/ freely/creatively (my big sin apparently was taking apart his duplos/legos creations at the end of the day when he was 3- I found this out from him when he was in HS, I never knew it mattered to him at the time).</p>
<p>My children grew up on a diet of PBS and videos of little traditional educational value. We practically had The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai in continuous loop in my son’s nursery. (We joke to this day that early exposure to the film is why he wants to be a particle physicist/psychoanalyst/poet.) What he had going for him was loquacious parents, I guess. <em>grin</em> </p>
<p>I remember the first time I realized he had been “soaking up” learning. He was a little more than 3 years old. We were in the parking lot at a shopping center getting into the car. He was sitting in the front of a shopping car and pointed past and behind me and said, “TARGET! T-A-R-G-E-T. TARGET.” My husband and I just sort of stood there ogling the giant red logo, because we didn’t realize he’d advanced that far. </p>
<p>After another two years of not pressuring him to read or anything like that, he went off to kindergarten and began reading immediately and several grade levels above his classmates. His teacher told us he was a “natural reader” and that he had just picked up books and “gotten it” immediately. He continued at that rate; in second grade he got in trouble for reading Crichton’s <em>The Lost World</em> during free reading time in class. His teacher said that he had to read “grade appropriate” books only in school, because he was demoralizing the other students. Eventually after I complained to the principal she backed off, though insisted that he not “lord it over the other kids.” And that was pretty much the beginning of the rest of his academic life. :-)</p>
<p>Ditto on the annoying “pattycake” comparison. Who keeps a 3 year old in a playpen, anyway? I don’t think he knows any real children.</p>
<p>I recall using all sorts of finger plays as learning devices and as fun. And they were dandy time passers while waiting in line.</p>
<p>The researchers who discovered the importance of vocab development & the differences among social groups have hit the nail on the head. You can’t read fluently if you’re trying to “sound out” the words in a foreign language, which is what English is to kids who haven’t been exposed to very many words.</p>
<p>But who uses flash cards to teach words like hammer, screwdriver, & paint brush??? Let the kid hold the tool and show them what it’s used for. Sheesh.</p>
<p>My kids all learned to read by about 4 or 4 1/2. But by then they had been exposed to hundreds of books, containing thousands and thousands of words, mostly read to them by yours truly. With the aid of magnetic letters on the refrigerator, and a few clues in phonics from me, they cracked the reading code. And they were eager to do it on their own so they wouldn’t have to wait for Mom to be available to do it.</p>
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<p>Okay, I’m going to dissent somewhat here. I agree that kids learn at different rates and there’s no sense in pushing kids into stuff for which they are clearly not ready. But I would have been thrilled to be learning fractions, or multiplication, or what have you, in kindergarten! I would have been thrilled to read real chapter books for class, as I did outside of school, instead of practicing reciting the damn alphabet. I was so sick of and bored by the babyish material at that age, and sometimes got in trouble for “not paying attention” when I was doing things like reading books under my desk. I spent large portions of my primary-grades school days daydreaming about the sort of curriculum that I would implement if I ruled the schools, and how much harder and more interesting it would be than the stuff we were doing. :)</p>
<p>There are many kids who are actually ready for this stuff at that age, and I don’t see a good reason to hold them back, as long as you also provide for the kids who aren’t ready. And as long as you keep balance in a kid’s life. There’s a difference between intellectual stimulation and robbing somebody of their childhood.</p>