Some of Jordan's homework is not a good use of his time, if you ask me. (Aaron has very little homework so it's not yet an issue with him.) For example, in social studies right now they are doing civics kind of stuff, especially about the state of Washington. This could be great stuff, but instead it is: On what date did Washington become a state? What is the state bird? State flower, tree, marine mammal, endemic mammal, motto, song? Ugh. There is so much worth learning about government and governance, and this is not it.A friend of ours is a professor of political science, so I asked him what he thought fourth graders should be learning about politics. His answer: "Fourth graders should be playing a lot of competitive and non-competitive games. How to share. How to care. How to lose. How to win. Who to play with. Who to avoid. When to drop out of a game. How to get back in the game. If they are advanced, they can think about the nature and variety of the rules that structure a game. Play within the rules. Play outside of the rules. Solitaire. Games with two people. Games with lots of people. Games with two sides. Games with more than two sides. Games as a leader. Games as a follower. Games as a judge. Games where subterfuge is important. Short games. Long games. It's not a bad idea to watch others do those things, too, impartially, as it were. Maybe betting sometimes, too. And then: they should be able to explain which games are better for what and why." What a great answer. How awesome would it be if this was how kids learned about political systems? And instead, they learn the name of the state song. Seriously.
Math, which has historically been an area of fun success for Jordan, is also not impressing me lately in its homework form. There is a lot of drilling algorithms, like long division, greatest common factor, least common multiple, etc. I don't know whether this is just what this year of math is about, or whether it's attributable to Washington's adoption of the Common Core (a set of standards for math and reading), or whether it's because Washington adopted the Common Core without adopting a curriculum that complies with it so teachers have to fly by the seat of their pants. All I know is that I miss the old curriculum, Everyday Math, which seemed to me to be about the logic of quantity and number and shape, instead of arithmetic procedures.
Last night's math homework should have been an exception, because it was about word problems. Word problems should be a good thing, a tool to bridge abstract math problems to real-life situations. Too often, however, they just falsely couch abstract problems in contrived scenarios, making the whole thing silly and pointless. This assignment annoyed me even more than a page of silly word problems would have because it was trying to teach how to analyze silly word problems, so that what ought to be a bridge to real life became instead a weird little world of its own. For example: "The cook at the diner scrambled 1/2 of the eggs served. One-fourth of the eggs were fried, and 1/8 were boiled. How many eggs were left?" You are supposed to say that you don't have enough information to answer; you need to know the total number of eggs. But come on. What cook at a diner says to himself, "I'm going to scramble half the eggs that are served, and then we'll see how many are left"? It's incomprehensible. Another problem said, "The park has 10 swings, of which 2/5 are broken. Half the swings have metal seats and 1/10 of the swings have wooden seats. How many more swings have metal seats than wooden seats?" Huh? I think the answer is that there are 5 metal seats, 1 wood seat, and 4 broken ones; but don't broken swings still have seats made of something? And why would anyone possibly bother to express any of these numbers as a fraction, much less care how many more metal than wooden seats there are? The whole question is very distracting. There are too many great real-life opportunities to apply math skills for me to feel like I can support him putting his precious kid time into this dumb stuff.
2 comments:
Yes. Though I was quite tickled with Evalyn's math homework the other night that involved tiling a kitchen and calculating square footage and boxes of tile used, etc. This was very much a real life situation since we've been remodeling our bathroom, which involved lots of tile.
Playing all sorts of games for political science/civics/social studies is brilliant. I think learning to get along with others is one of the key components of public schooling. But if these kinds of games were played with a purpose and kids evaluated them, so to speak, how much more enlightening would it be. Esp if roles were rotated so kids with different inclinations were put in different situations. Food for thought....
That being said, I don't think anything is wrong with learning the basic facts of how your state works, but like you say, there is so much more to governance than just rote facts. How about some demographics? Maps? :)
I just quizzed Eva on CA state facts and she eagerly rattled off a bunch of them, stating that her teacher has a poster of them on the wall and obviously E likes this sort of thing. I would wager that half of the games suggested would freak her out and push her out of her comfort zone, which would probably be a good thing, since 4th grade girls have a lot of social games in their own right! lol.
What would happen if Jordan's principal could read this post? Is there the possibility of a productive conversation?
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