Quote:
Originally Posted by roachboy
i dont really know why--i doubt it's a single factor or policy though. over the past 6 years or so, it's been a consequence of crap like nclb.
but there's a longer-term pattern that fits into, which you can see in the multiplication of basic writing courses in universities, the impetus of which is (no matter what the programs say) a remedial thing---teaching college-level writing is also necessarily teaching the skills associated with it, which include not only the form of a critical essay, but also the modes of reading and handling/organizing information, basic research, etc. these programs came up in response to problems that were already present for universities by the mid 1990s (i think that's when these "writing across the cirriculum" programs really took off, but i could be wrong about that)...
so don't really have a clear explanation for it.
maybe someone else does?
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I think it has to do with fear.
Teachers are afraid to teach difficult material, and philosophy is difficult material. They're afraid to look stupid in front of their students.
Teachers also don't want to teach things like philosophy or critical thinking because they don't want to teach children to question their authority.
Personally, I find it much more effective to stress to the students that I am a learner too, and that I have as much to learn from them as they do from me. If they see me make a mistake, it lets them know that mistakes are a part of the learning process.
I had some really great philosophical conversations with 8th graders over the last academic term, and it cemented my belief that teachers who really want to reach children teach the hard stuff regardless.
As for grammar and writing--again, I think it's a fear thing. Most teachers have little to no experience with grammar and have no idea how to go about teaching it. Teaching writing is a difficult proposition; I did a lot of thinking over the last many weeks about how to teach writing skills. One thing I noticed is that teachers tended to jump into writing. They expected that their students would be able to write, and while that's certainly true, the teachers didn't first give students the knowledge they needed to be able to talk about their writing constructively. It was frustrating to want to talk about mechanics with these kids, because they didn't have a clue. I think it's important to start with the tools first before expecting them to produce work. And I think that's another area where the education system goes wrong--they don't bother to teach kids the building blocks of skills or how to talk about those skills in order to improve them. They don't teach critical thought about developing skills. There's all this focus on developing skills, but they're going about it in an ass-backward fashion.