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Kindergarteners Today Get Little Time To Play, and It's Stunting Their Development (qz.com)
Christopher Brown Associate professor, University of Texas at Austin, writes:Researchers have demonstrated that five-year-olds are spending more time engaged in teacher-led academic learning activities than play-based learning opportunities that facilitate child-initiated investigations and foster social development among peers.During his research and investigation, Brown found that a typical kindergarten classroom sees kids and one teacher with them almost the entire school day. During this period, they engage in about 15 different academic activities, which include "decoding word drills, practicing sight words, reading to themselves and then to a buddy, counting up to 100 by ones, fives and tens, practicing simple addition, counting money, completing science activities about living things, and writing in journals on multiple occasions." Recess did not occur until the last hour of the day, and only lasted for about 15 minutes. He adds:For children between the ages of five and six, this is a tremendous amount of work. Teachers too are under pressure to cover the material. When I asked the teacher, who I interviewed for the short film, why she covered so much material in a few hours, she stated, "There's pressure on me and the kids to perform at a higher level academically." So even though the teacher admitted that the workload on kindergartners was an awful lot, she also said she was unable to do anything about changing it.
It isn't just Kindergarten, is is throughout all of school, K-12.
They also neglect soft education like Music and Art (often replacing with Social Conformity Drills).
The problem is, we have people in far away cities, who don't have any real interest in the education of any student, making all sorts of Rules and Regulations (see Common Core) about not only how, but what kids ought to learn by when. All, often without any clue how long it takes to teach a room full of kids who just want to play.
We don't live in an industrial world, we shouldn't be treating our education system like a factory.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I didn't get glasses until I was 30. I was told that I should have had them as a child, but I didn't know any better. Sure you turned out fine, but what if things were different? Could you have been better, more creative if you had more time to play? Or maybe the schooling you did have made you more focused? We will never know.
We had only half-day kindergarten. We went outside at least twice a day. During the day, we sang songs, did water coloring, played with clay, construction paper and scissors, the sandbox, sock puppets. There was lots of arts and crafts. There was always story time, where our teacher would read aloud to us. The only academic work I can ever recall was studying the alphabet, learning how to count to ten, how to count money, and learning how to write our name.
I still work in a school, in Minnesota, and now kindergarten is full day. Kids are expected to learn how to read. They do lots of worksheets, spelling tests, spend time learning how to use computers, and learn basic adding and subtracting. There's also lots of social behavior practice (how to stand in lines, how to be quiet and raise your hand, how to take turns, not interrupt others, etc.) And writing...lots and lots of writing. Long story short, what I covered in 1st grade 30 years ago is now what is expected in Kindergarten. Play is a thing of the past.
At this rate, expect them to be bringing home Algebra textbooks by the turn of the century.
I see you don't recognize that they're talking about kindergartners.
None of this is good for 5 yr olds.
But you probably have no idea about that.
I feel a little bit better about the future of our great country today
Only because you're fucking ignorant of childhood development.
My wife is a kindergarten teacher, and over the last four years there's been a push to 'play based learning', presumably resulting from the same kind of research mentioned in the article.
By and large it seems fine, though it doesn't alleviate some of the problems they mention; specifically my wife still feels the pressure to move through the curriculum, but it's a little less clear how. Part of the 'learning through play' initiative also pushes heavily on 'self guided learning', and while all of this seems great, there's not a lot of guidance given on how to execute. I think most of us would agree that it's better if the student is interested & wants to learn the subject, but there's no real help about what to do if the student /isn't/ interested. Presumably the teacher just forces the kid to learn what has to be learned, but all the material provided leans heavily on instructing teachers not to do that.
At any rate, this is mostly just typical of governments adopting something and not thinking through how to implement fully. Still, the impression I get from my wife & her colleagues is that the ideas are good (play-based learning) but it'd have been nice if there was better instruction on how to follow through.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
If these other countries' education systems are so great, then why is everything invented in America? Because we (used to) take the time to allow people to think creatively. This includes recess, music, art and after-school playing around the neighborhood. As these things disappear from the education system, so will our lead in invention.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
What gave us the edge in the past was more than academics. It was the creativity and willingness to take risks. Those are things that are learned when kids are allowed to be kids. They need recess and play time to learn social skills, learn leadership, learn problem solving, learn independence and learn to take risks. Pushing academics too soon and regimenting their day too soon destroys the qualities that made this country a leader in innovation.
The US is 3400 different school system and not all yielding the same result. Upper middle class communities in the US are graduating globally competitive students ready for college and on the same level as any European graduates, but the US is very big and very socio-economically diverse and the poorer communities are graduating people not ready for college. We know how to graduate competitive students in the US. The problem is they have to be from households making $100k a year or over. Schools cant make up for broken or poor homes, sorry. Europe with flatter income distribution doesn't have this problem so when you talk about Norway there is really only 1 Norway to talk about and not 3400 different Norways the way you have with the US districting system.
My 5 year old was coming home from Kindergarten with an hour of homework more than three days a week.
http://www.edutopia.org/no-proven-benefits
"It may surprise you, as it did me, to learn that no study has ever demonstrated any academic benefit to assigning homework before children are in high school."
There have been many studies that prove that homework not only does not help the young, but can harm them.
Also, this lovely chestnut that happened to my normal 5 year old boy. No recess... AT ALL.
Why you may ask?
We asked the teacher. The twenty something childless lady told us that our 5 year old son had trouble sitting still and filling out his math and sight word work sheets. So to 'help' she decided that the best course to deal with a fidgety 5 year old boy was to keep him in class during recess every day and have him sit quietly at his desk.
Really, you remove all chance of physical activity and wonder why a small child can't sit still?
We asked if it helped.... She said his 'restlessness' was getting worse and wondered if we needed to enroll him in special education... Really?
We took him out of that nightmare and enrolled him in an 'IDEA' school. You can read up on it but basically, as far as we can tell, it is simply the same kind of school I went to in the 80's.. No more problems, good grades, and 3 recess times a day and gym every other. Minimal 10 min home work once a week and most is the same type I had; Name you family members, ask what grandpa did/does for work, read a simple book with a parent, etc.
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindergarten
"A kindergarten from German, which means literally "garden for the children"[1]) is a preschool educational approach traditionally based on playing, singing, practical activities such as drawing, and social interaction as part of the transition from home to school."
NOTE: "transition from home to school"
Kindergarten, when I went to school, was mostly about lining up for recess, sharing toys, and learning colors and the names of the letters.
Some counting perhaps. But mostly just how to get along, raise your hand if you need to ask something, and wash your own hands after using the bathroom.
That was the entire idea from the start.
My child came home with and hour of math worksheets and sight words (not phonics, but rote memorization). Children in his class had trouble sharing, playing nice, working in teams, and being good losers... Because they are no longer allowed to do what Kindergarten was intended for in the first place. To learn all the basic social norms needed to actually be ready to be a student. He was hating going to school... AT 5 YEARS OLD!
He is now doing great at the new school.
Is it such a wonder that letting small kids play helps them to behave and learn how to get along with others? Is it strange that a 5 year old will resist busy work?
We need to go back to proper early childhood teaching and allow our children to be children.
Ah, American public education: Where young minds go to die, and old mistakes live forever.
When I was a kid in the early 1990's, things were a lot different than they are now. We didn't have uniforms. If we lived close enough to the school, we were allowed to walk, and very few people thought that this was unusual at the time. Recess came twice a day, first in the morning, then in the afternoon after lunch, each session lasting about 15 to 20 minutes depending on the day's schedule. We went outside and played.
The curriculum wasn't terribly sophisticated but it did its job. Both phonetic and whole-word reading were taught. (The former was later dropped, and you can always tell if someone in my town came before or after the change. The folks that came later have difficulty with unfamiliar words to this day.) The math was basic, but appropriate for our age level. In kindergarten in particular we spent a lot of time with arts and crafts, but art class was still a part of our routine up until middle school. Reading, writing, arithmetic, art, music... All in a not-particularly well off school system.
I was a precocious reader and advanced through math quicker than other students as well. I was offered advanced material from the next grade up. Other students who moved along quicker had this opportunity as well. You weren't expected to know second grade material in first grade, but if you did, more power to you. It worked pretty well at the time.
The more I learn about how schools function now the more glad I am that I grew up before the new millennium. Less and less time outside, higher and higher requirements, and for what? I've been in this town my whole life. I work in a setting where I meet new graduates constantly. They aren't getting smarter, I can tell you that much. What they're getting is meeker, fatter, and shockingly less literate. I'll just say it - they're getting dumber by the year with no bottom in sight. Things have not gotten better, they've gotten worse.
In our zeal to close gaps with the educational systems in the rest of the developed world we adopted a surface level approach to correcting the deficiencies of our own system, without addressing the underlying problems which more than ever before set our young people up for failure in school and beyond. We fooled ourselves into believing that if our schools resemble our idea of what a Japanese, Korean, or Chinese school looks like, then the problems will solve themselves. (Surely, our students will become fine young Asians in no time!) We fooled ourselves into thinking that throwing more money, more man-hours, and millions of dollars of computer equipment into dysfunctional schools would cause them to magically transform into bastions learning. None of this ever happened, and I think it's fair to say that we have never known less how to run a school and administer education. Everything we do, everything we try in schools is based on fantasies and assumptions, nearly always flawed assumptions, not on evidence or any kind of actual understanding of the students, their families, and their needs. Delusions have won the day.
Now they're trying to take summer away, so our students can spend even more time indoors, spend even more time not exploring the world around them, spend even more time consuming educational resources that the taxpayers provide, all for less than no benefit. Traditions are dying. Play is dying. Childhood is dying. Families care less than ever before whether or not their children perform well in school and most people have grown to resent the education system. Too many kids don't know where they'll sleep next, when they'll eat next, whether or not they'll get new clothes. As for the teachers, they're almost universally overworked and underpaid, and the constant changes - driven by the delusions of an utterly useless administrative class - have left the entire teaching profession in chaos. School itself is dying. We've never spent more on it, we've never committed more time to it, and we've never had less t
Until you have something that absolutely, definitely works, let's just teach kids with teachers who are masters of their subject.
That sounds good, but in practice it's not good. Why? To be a master of your subject, you have to live and breathe your subject. To be a good teacher you need to be a bit of a generalist. You can't be so hyper-focused on one thing that everything else in life gets excluded.
I've got an education degree and some teaching experience, and I've also spent a fair bit of time working in and around grad-school STEM programs. The experts in those programs are the shittest teachers, for the most part. Why? They never learned about how kids learn, because they were busy becoming experts. They never learned the basics of assessing learning because they were becoming experts. They never learned motivational strategies because they were hyper-motivated on an exclusive topic, and it never occurred to them that some students need some motivation the way they would for any other topic.
What we need are not masters of their subjects, but communicators and collaborators who can give kids access to people who are masters of their subjects. I once filled that role, connecting NASA scientists to middle school science classrooms. The NASA scientists weren't teachers and didn't know the first thing about it, and the middle school science teachers weren't scientists and engineers. But when we set up the communication and collaboration between the kids and the experts, amazing stuff happened.
That's one thing we need. The other is equitable funding. I think that it's Germany that does the opposite of what the US does. They still have standardized tests, but the results are secret. The lowest performing schools get more money, and the highest performing schools get less. That makes all of the schools roughly the same, and parents don't know which ones are better, so the rich parents can't move their kids out, leaving behind the poor (minority) kids. The US does the opposite - we openly publish our assessment scores, and we threaten to withhold funds from poorly performing schools. Since we also have wacky local funding, parents create these "ghetto schools", as rich parents move their kids to the best performing schools, and work to ensure that they don't need to pay for the schools they left behind. Great for their kids, but terrible for all the other kids. But who cares when you can live in a gated community with a guard to keep the rabble out, right?
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