On the point that “play” is how kids learn: that may be true, but that’s recess, and teachers, and later, bosses, care ALOT less about how well people get along, than how they ACTUALLY DO THEIR JOBS! I’d have much more more sympathy for the position that kids should have “fun” (though I concede 9 years old is young) if places like India, China and Japan weren’t eating our lunch.
sven, given that you’re asserting your authority as a teacher, please remind me - are you a teacher in the United States, or are you drawing on your authority as an English teacher in China? If you teach in the US, what age group do you teach?
Actually, I think its a valid point here. Sven is saying “parents have a responsibility to be involved, and this is a reasonable level of involvement.” But Sven really - as a teacher in China - has no idea how involved MANY U.S. parents are already in their kid’s educations. Nor, as a teacher in China, is she probably aware of how much effort a parent put in a week just getting ordinary homework done without special projects. Nor is she aware of how many different responsibilities parents are juggling.
You probably have a better idea, you’ve probably had a lot of conversations with your debate team parents. But still, until you have kids - until you have a schedule that gets you home from work at 6, prep dinner until 6:30, feed the kids dinner, clean up from dinner - its now 7. Homework from 7-8 or 9 (and if your kid struggles or you helicopter, you may not be able to get much done yourself while they do homework), bedtime at 9…then get the adult tasks done (pay bills, read mail) (and all of this is without adding sports or activities), its hard to understand how time constrained parents often are.
My Girl Scout coleader works. She volunteers. She raises two kids. She has an elderly mother and a father who recently passed on that she needs to care for (her father was in a nursing home). And, in the past few years, she’s added an elderly uncle - who has no family of his own. So she is running the lives of two elderly adults, her own kids, and herself. Somehow she fits in a social life as well. She doesn’t have TIME to build an adobe house on the weekend - not unless she doesn’t visit her mother, or deal with her uncle’s end of life legal issues, or her father’s estate, or she skips church, or doesn’t clean her house. This is a VERY involved mother. But our girls’ recent “project” nearly sent her family over the edge, they just didn’t have time.
This is the sort of thing that when you are single, and fairly young, very few people can wrap their heads around. You have young kids, you have elderly parents, you have your own life. Time - for many parents and for several years - becomes something you don’t have extra. It had better be one hell of an educational adobe house - and give my kid a hell of a lot of benefit - because we might have to pass on that family bonding experience of visiting grandma in the nursing home who probably won’t be around much longer in favor of the teacher required family bonding experience of building an adobe house.
I’m not sure that those places really are, though. Especially China and India, where students often are good at rote memorization but don’t really excel in creative or original thinking.
ETA: Dangerosa, I think this does bear repeating. A few people in my graduate program have kids, and it seems so stressful to have to do all the things we do normally for school/graduate work and then on top of that deal with your kids and their education. Sure, you can probably pull aside two hours to do that stuff but on top of the mountain of other things you have to do, it’s just one more irritating thing to worry about.
Freudian Silt you don’t concede that the U.S. has been hemmorhaging jobs for decades, and many of these jobs are heading to China and India; and that Japan has blown past the U.S. in term of economic strength? :dubious:
Yes, that’s very true. However, the teacher needs to have a sense of reality and proportion.
Schools exist to support the parents/family/child in their mission to grow a competent kid who can deal with the world, not the other way around. A school needs to keep in mind that it is not the only thing in a child’s life, and maybe not even the best or most crucial thing. (One hopes that slot is filled with the child’s family.)
A parent should support a child’s learning and homework. A parent should not DO a child’s homework. And that homework had dang well better be worth the time outside of school, because there are lots of other wonderful things to do with a child’s time that may well be more important. Time with family, time getting exercise or learning other skills or playing in freedom or reading something by choice or doing something that is actually creative (that is, created by the kid, not assigned by someone else)–those are all things that are going to be better than yet another worksheet.
I guess it would depend on the field. I don’t think it’s necessarily true that those countries produce workers that are better across the board. When it comes to outsourcing jobs, it may not necessarily be that workers there are better, just that they’re cheaper.
It doesn’t matter about their quality or cost, it only matters that these jobs aren’t being filled by Americans anymore.
Is that why the adobe houses are so important? Are they going to be sold, and the teacher wants to avoid running afoul of child labor laws?
Yes, this is definitely one of the more hilarious examples of thread drift I’ve seen here on the SDMB.
If parents do not construct adobe huts for their children’s third-grade projects, all of our jobs are going to be filled by the Japanese!!! Don’t you people care about anything!?
You’re (intentionally IMO) distorting my point. As I’ve already said in this thread, school’s main mission is to prepare children for the WORK world, and how to delay gratification/learn how to prioritize tasks in life. Kids need to realize that you have to do unpleasant thing BEFORE you can do pleasant things.
Kids have to realize EVENTUALLY that they are in competition with kids from all over the world in the preparation for the job market. The earlier this lesson is taught/taken seriously the less of a shock to the system it’ll be to the kid’s system when he realizes just how fierce the competition in the world is.
Well, yes, I am making fun of your apparent hysteria. I didn’t think that needed to be pointed out, but hey.
If cost is the main issue then it’s not a problem with education and children being told to work harder (or smarter or whatever) isn’t going to make a difference.
In any event, I’m not seeing an example of how the children aren’t delaying gratification. The parents are the ones being assigned this particular task.
Seriously? You really think that’s the main reason for school? Should children of the very wealthy be exempt from truancy laws, then, since they never have to work anyway?
I’m sort of curious about how having Mommy and Daddy do their homework for them prepares kids for the real cut-throat world of industry anyway. Unless they’re Donald Trump’s kids or something.
If THAT isn’t school’s mission than what EXACTLY is their mission? :dubious: And the reality is, most of the richest people in the world are self made, and therefore, were educated.
Ms. Whatsit…
I have some action items at work that I don’t have resources for. I’m putting down “Dangerosa’s Mom” on my project plan and I’ll have HER do the work.
Actually, a lot of the richest people in the world educated themselves outside of school, and a good lot of them never finished their ‘formal’ education, especially those who were becoming rich early in the industrial age.
So really, your point here is that we should encourage kids to drop out of school in 8th grade and get to bloody work so that their job doesn’t get stolen by some upstart Indian kid?
That doesn’t really seem to help your stated position of the importance of school.
And actually, school was created as a holding-place for children of recently immigrated working parents, as a place for them to learn to be “American” and to be governed by the rules of a factory where they would eventually be working - bells, timed lunches, assigned places to be, and lots of rote learning.
Two points on that particular role of schools:
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America isn’t really a factory-type country any more, for better or worse, so learning to play by those specific rules isn’t going to really help out a kid who will be interviewing with Zappos or Apple or a tech startup in 12-15 years or so.
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As a species, we’re figuring out that industrial age factory designs aren’t really best for human development and creativity, and honestly, if you sent out a poll, I bet most parents would rather have a happy creative child than a child with a guaranteed job in a Chinese-style factory.
Lasciel-I agree we’ve moved past an industrial economy, but that doesn’t mean work ethic has died. And the problem with American parents: they want it both ways: a creative kid with a job. (they aren’t mutually exclusive, but don’t argue they go together)
Of course they need to realize this. Teaching this is one of the most exhausting parts of my job: today at recess I sat by a boy who insisted he couldn’t do problems like 63+10+20-10, but who would do each problem in his head as I walked him through the steps. Really what he meant was, “I can’t believe you’re making me sit out of recess just because I whined about the math game earlier and ruined it for my partner, and then when you gave me work to do at my seat I scribbled all over my desk instead of doing the work! Who cares if you told me this would be the result of my choosing not to do the work?”
He spent about 15 minutes sulking, about 10 minutes working as slowly as possible, and about 5 minutes playing at the end of recess. And this is something he does pretty often.
It’d be much easier to let him go play. But he’s got to learn the delay of gratification and the self-discipline it takes to plow through the work before you get to the play. So I walk that road with him any day he needs it. My hope is that the lesson is slowly accreting, like a pearl around the sand of his irritating teacher.
What I disagree with is teaching this lesson apart from other lessons. I had him do this math work because it was valuable to him, because even though he can do these problems on his own, he’s not great at them and would benefit from practice. When teachers assign lessons with very little pedagogical value apart from teaching that unpleasantness is necessary, I find that highly objectionable.