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cimoreneLast night's lecture (course for classroom assistants), the second from a Special Education teacher, was mostly about the national guidelines for building local and school-level curricula/course of study.
The teacher talked about leveling and how it was abolished entirely in Finland in the mid-1980s, all the way from elementary school up to high school (where the Finnish system splits into entirely voluntary technical schools and academic high schools). Even reading and maths are integrated for the whole class and Finland also has no what she called "elite" (or inherently leveled) schools. There isn't money to truly provide special needs children with THEIR education all the way throughout the country, which has many rural areas dotted with tiny rural schools with as few as 2-3 teachers and 15-50 students. Imagine, then, how little provision is possible for children of above-average intelligence. The lecturer admitted to me that these children are frequently not provided for; the ideal is that the teachers are meant to look at each individual pupil's level and provide them with more to do (or less to do, and more help), but the only REQUIREMENT is that the basic curriculum be taught in a certain way to everyone (except for special-needs students for whom a formal process provides exceptions).
God, I mean, just imagine how boring (I suspect, though, given that Finland has some of the best education in the world going by tests and so on, that it's actually still less boring than my childhood was). I was bored, and many many people are bored even in advanced classes (even primary school classmates who IQ-tested into the special weekly "Gifted and Talented" additions, as they were called in Alabama, but then didn't make the performance-based cuts to the top advanced levels of English, History, and math in middle school at grade 6).
There is no question that a child of above-average intelligence is in less need of help than a child with learning difficulty. Of course, the resources of society should be aimed at the latter, because the former is just bored, and the odds are, has the intellectual resources to find something else to do, and keep themselves occupied. But that's not to say that the deeply-ingrained habit of utter boredom and superiority imprinted on these children by inadequate primary school doesn't harm them! I actually didn't realize until the last several years how much it harmed me, but I am starting to think now that it was a lot worse for me than I suspected.
I am so accustomed to boredom, so used to it from the first day I transferred from a private Montessori school in New York to the Alabama public schools at age 6, that it didn't even occur to me until last night's lecture that the AIM of schooling is actually not only to "challenge" every pupil (a platitude I've often heard and which, let's face it, is problematic and in many cases not actually meant) - but to keep them occupied. The infinite variety of ways to occupy yourself "After you finish your work" was so familiar to me that I sat dazed and confused for several minutes while the lecturer talked about the ways classroom teachers can and do try to provide extra material and assignments for the above-average so they don't just sit twiddling their thumbs! "Isn't thumb-twiddling an essential, indeed, the MAIN point of school?", I thought at first.
I estimate that from age six when I started reading my own novels in class (first with Babysitter's Little Sister, quickly on to Babysitter's Club and Nancy Drew and thence to YA and adult fantasy from my parents' library), I was never without several personal books brought to read per day in my extra time, and I typically finished at least one per day all the way up through 7th grade, which was the first time I encountered classes I couldn't get through even if I kept reading the entire time the teacher was talking. I still remember the staggering force of my epiphany, in 7th grade "social studies" (really world history) that not only could I be engaged if I listened to the teacher only instead of reading while listening with one ear, what she was saying was actually complex enough to require more than one ear's attention to understand! Through high school, I was still able to finish a novel in a day to a week reading only in the time after I finished my work; but in primary school, I probably spent a good 50%-70% of my school hours reading.
And, hey, I have just fully realized the magnitude of that. Because... that is wrong. That is FUCKED-UP. And that should be obvious - should have been obvious to a long string of teachers who kind of weren't doing their jobs, not that it was really their fault with the utterly inadequate resources given to public education in Alabama.
The teacher talked about leveling and how it was abolished entirely in Finland in the mid-1980s, all the way from elementary school up to high school (where the Finnish system splits into entirely voluntary technical schools and academic high schools). Even reading and maths are integrated for the whole class and Finland also has no what she called "elite" (or inherently leveled) schools. There isn't money to truly provide special needs children with THEIR education all the way throughout the country, which has many rural areas dotted with tiny rural schools with as few as 2-3 teachers and 15-50 students. Imagine, then, how little provision is possible for children of above-average intelligence. The lecturer admitted to me that these children are frequently not provided for; the ideal is that the teachers are meant to look at each individual pupil's level and provide them with more to do (or less to do, and more help), but the only REQUIREMENT is that the basic curriculum be taught in a certain way to everyone (except for special-needs students for whom a formal process provides exceptions).
God, I mean, just imagine how boring (I suspect, though, given that Finland has some of the best education in the world going by tests and so on, that it's actually still less boring than my childhood was). I was bored, and many many people are bored even in advanced classes (even primary school classmates who IQ-tested into the special weekly "Gifted and Talented" additions, as they were called in Alabama, but then didn't make the performance-based cuts to the top advanced levels of English, History, and math in middle school at grade 6).
There is no question that a child of above-average intelligence is in less need of help than a child with learning difficulty. Of course, the resources of society should be aimed at the latter, because the former is just bored, and the odds are, has the intellectual resources to find something else to do, and keep themselves occupied. But that's not to say that the deeply-ingrained habit of utter boredom and superiority imprinted on these children by inadequate primary school doesn't harm them! I actually didn't realize until the last several years how much it harmed me, but I am starting to think now that it was a lot worse for me than I suspected.
I am so accustomed to boredom, so used to it from the first day I transferred from a private Montessori school in New York to the Alabama public schools at age 6, that it didn't even occur to me until last night's lecture that the AIM of schooling is actually not only to "challenge" every pupil (a platitude I've often heard and which, let's face it, is problematic and in many cases not actually meant) - but to keep them occupied. The infinite variety of ways to occupy yourself "After you finish your work" was so familiar to me that I sat dazed and confused for several minutes while the lecturer talked about the ways classroom teachers can and do try to provide extra material and assignments for the above-average so they don't just sit twiddling their thumbs! "Isn't thumb-twiddling an essential, indeed, the MAIN point of school?", I thought at first.
I estimate that from age six when I started reading my own novels in class (first with Babysitter's Little Sister, quickly on to Babysitter's Club and Nancy Drew and thence to YA and adult fantasy from my parents' library), I was never without several personal books brought to read per day in my extra time, and I typically finished at least one per day all the way up through 7th grade, which was the first time I encountered classes I couldn't get through even if I kept reading the entire time the teacher was talking. I still remember the staggering force of my epiphany, in 7th grade "social studies" (really world history) that not only could I be engaged if I listened to the teacher only instead of reading while listening with one ear, what she was saying was actually complex enough to require more than one ear's attention to understand! Through high school, I was still able to finish a novel in a day to a week reading only in the time after I finished my work; but in primary school, I probably spent a good 50%-70% of my school hours reading.
And, hey, I have just fully realized the magnitude of that. Because... that is wrong. That is FUCKED-UP. And that should be obvious - should have been obvious to a long string of teachers who kind of weren't doing their jobs, not that it was really their fault with the utterly inadequate resources given to public education in Alabama.
(no subject)
Date: 2 Dec 2009 11:13 pm (UTC)In third grade, I got in trouble for sneaking the books that were for later in the year off the shelf instead of doing math review. We spent half of each year reviewing the math we'd learned the year before, including the review from the year before. You can bet that got boring and uninteresting fast, especially when I was already reading Zelazny and Katherine Kurtz and Andre Norton's adult novels... at speed-reader speeds.
I guess I got a reputation for having my nose buried in a book even when I wasn't supposed to: in fifth grade they gave me an "avid reader" award. I think they meant well. It just reminds me of all the times I got into trouble for avoiding boredom by sneaking in some reading time.
The annoying part? They figured out I was a gifted reader when I was in first grade: I got sent to the advanced second-grade reading group in the second half of first grade. One of the other girls in my class got skipped a grade ahead partway through first grade because of her math ability.
Did they notice my math skills? No. *is bitter*
And yet my father-the-mathematician says that he taught me the beginnings of calculus in fifth grade. (I'd mostly forgotten that, but now I have to wonder if that's part of why parts of first year calculus were so easy for me in high school, *even with an unconsciously misogynistic teacher*. Seriously, she wouldn't even call on her own daughter very often. I really don't think she knew she was doing it.)
I will admit that they did work it out eventually: in middle school, I took seventh grade math in sixth grade.
In junior high, all my classes were gifted classes, but I don't recall working very hard, even so.
High school was small and for gifted kids. It actually was a really good thing for me, because I learned that I couldn't coast *before* I got to college. And we learned how to use an academic library for serious research in senior English.
Calc II in high school didn't exactly have grades and was really free form, but the teacher of the class told me at the end of the year that I was the best student in the class. I hadn't noticed (largely because we spent most of our time discussing math as a group, sort of like a seminar).
I didn't believe him.
Now I wonder what would have happened if I had?
Dang. This struck a nerve.
I started to write some of this up a while ago, but never finished, largely because I realized for the first time how bitter I was about the math thing.
(no subject)
Date: 2 Dec 2009 11:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2 Dec 2009 11:57 pm (UTC)I am really grateful to my parents that they never gave me false praise. (And that they did tell me when I had actually been doing good work.) I can only imagine how much worse things would have been for me.
I do remember a certain amount of just playing with math with my father even if I don't remember the calc. (For instance, I remember graphing exponential growth of a penguin population with him.) And one winter when the schools were closed a lot during the energy crisis and the Blizzard of '78, my mother did some ad hoc homeschooling.
I also remember being sent to a math tutor in junior high. Some of the kids were there because they had trouble in school. I was there because my mother wanted to make sure I had fun with math (and also to make sure I got my homework done, because I had a tendency to ignore it in favor of reading). I have this really great memory of having an excellent time proving the Binomial Theorem.
It is somehow really strange, looking back at what were my parents' clear efforts to make sure I didn't have my math ability ignored, to think about my inability to see my own abilities.
(no subject)
Date: 2 Dec 2009 11:26 pm (UTC)I liked reading your story. Now I remember math stuff too, heh. Although for me, the reading was always the focus--whether because it was my first love and my only escape for some time, or because other people focused on it for me (so to speak), I'm not sure. The high school you went to sounds really neat, like they really did want you all to learn and grow and (I think this is important) experience joy doing that. Because all schools, in theory, want us to learn and grow, but we don't get much joy in the process.
Despite some of the uncomplimentary things I've said about my parents, they did, at least when I was young, try to get me interested in things that would challenge me and help me learn. I remember finding a fossil with my dad and asking him how it got that way, and rather than come up with a BS answer he said, "Well, let's find out." That was awesome and brave of him. So we went to read all about fossils and for a while I wanted to be a paleontologist. :-D I was maybe five, six at the time.
Math classes...something really crappy happened in middle to high school, I dunno. It's like I became a little mouse or something. In mid-elementary school I was taking math classes (as were many in my class) at the middle school, but the teacher I had was so spiteful I just hated it. She really resented the younger kids' coming to her class. Not to be a drama queen, but after that I was convinced I was stupid at math and I hated it.
(no subject)
Date: 2 Dec 2009 11:30 pm (UTC)Paging Philip Larkin
Date: 2 Dec 2009 11:35 pm (UTC)Re: Paging Philip Larkin
Date: 2 Dec 2009 11:43 pm (UTC)It was really shocking yesterday! It almost DID feel like going to a therapist!
Re: Paging Philip Larkin
Date: 2 Dec 2009 11:49 pm (UTC)Re: Paging Philip Larkin
Date: 2 Dec 2009 11:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 3 Dec 2009 12:23 am (UTC)I was an obsessive reader until I had T. For some reason, when I was pregnant, and for a year or so after, all I could read was fanfic. Now I can read other things too, and in fact rarely read fanfic. (Not sure what happened, there.) But I don't read as avidly as I used to. I don't know why, and it makes me kind of sad sometimes.
High school was great, mostly. I was surrounded by geeks and nerds and dorks and (mostly) good teachers. It was like a preview of college, except smaller. A good thing for an introvert.
S was really fortunate in his elementary school; he went to an Open Plan school where kids did self-directed learning and didn't get graded. He didn't get graded on anything until he hit high school, and by then he'd already acquired self-confidence and a love of learning. I'm really envious of that sometimes. (Not that I don't have a love of learning; it's the self-confidence that's lacking.)