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My mom was an elementary school teacher, and her general experience was that you can teach bright kids all sorts of ways, and it will mostly work out eventually.
On the other hand, there are a lot of slower kids who will struggle to learn but who can, eventually, pick things up via rote learning like phonics. It's slow and perhaps not fun, but they can do it eventually. But a lot of other methods of instruction (which are often supposed to avoid beating the joy of learning out of students the way rote learning theoretically does) often end up just failing complete with slower students, because the cognitive machinery simply isn't there. And while learning phonics might not be fun, being illiterate for the rest of your life is way, way less fun.
All of this is vexing if you happen to be a bright kid who struggled through boring methods of instruction, because you probably were ill-served by that kind of instruction. And you probably would have done better (and maybe we all would have benefited, for that matter!) with personal instruction that could lean into your natural capacities. School actually really does suck for lots of bright kids.
But there really is a serious problem with Ed schools producing all sorts of novel instructional methods based on blank slate ideology and theoretically serving the moral goal of equity and anti-racism that, in practice, just hurt the students they're supposed to help because their (highly ideological) diagnosis of the problem starts wrong and then stays wrong. And all the rest of us are externalities to that process.
When I first heard about this debate over teaching methods, I asked my parents how I learned to read, because I couldn't remember anything other than some frustration when I first went to school that some of my classmates didn't know the alphabet yet. Apparently they read to me but made no other effort to instruct me on the subject, and one day I just started reading the books back to them, having either figured it out on my own or having committed them to memory was simply miming the action of looking at and turning the pages. Which is to say, I still have no idea how I learned to read.
Same. My parents also recalled I had a fascination with signs, especially road signs and exit signs.
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I think we’re largely on the same page. I honestly think that most o& the trends end up hurting the below average kids. And when adding in the reduced instruction time to make room for The Narrative, those kids are toast. A smart kid can learn on his own so taking away class time for LGBTQ stuff or Black History or whatever isn’t a big deal. If you have a kid who’s falling behind, he needs every second of help he can get.
Although to be honest, I think most of the problem of education is that we don’t track kids as many other developed countries do. Every kid is put on the college bound track unless he specifically wants off, and the culture pushes college to an absurd degree meaning that unless they’re introduced to other tracks, the current will carry them to university and they won’t be able to keep up. If you track kids, not only can you tailor the methods o& instruction to what best serves that group of students, but you can make sure that they end up with skills they can use to support themselves.
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