I glanced at the Tot Drop teacher nearby, and she smiled and said, "No, remember it's. . . ."
Blank look from Hugmonkey.
"You see I made grass and a tree and the sun? I did details," he said, totally avoiding the subject of whose house it was.
"I really like how you added details to your log cabin," I replied, finally figuring out what the point of the project was.
With much more prompting from the teacher, Hugmonkey finally acknowledged that he'd made Abraham Lincoln's birthplace. Which, despite my history nerd tendencies, I didn't really care about. It pains me when I hear about preschoolers who can recite the presidents in order or kids who've been forced to memorize Shakespearean sonnets.
Whats the point of knowing the presidents if you can't describe their role in government? Why memorize Shakespeare if you can't understand what it means? Why does it matter if my five year old knows that Abraham Lincoln grew up in a log cabin?
Don't get me wrong, I liked the project. For his fine motor skills, not his presidential history skills. My kid is five; to him my entire childhood is ancient history. Abraham Lincoln is about as real to him as Cinderella and probably a lot less real than Santa Claus.
"What's your objective here?" I remember my mentor asking as she pointed to an activity in my lesson plans. I had just started to take over the class and my cooperating teacher was always like, "Looks great, see ya!" as she ran out the door. I can't even remember the activity, but I do remember asking, "I have to be able to articulate an objective for everything I do in the classroom?"
Now, I happen to be really good at bull-shitting, so it's not like I couldn't come up with an objective for everything I was doing. But I hadn't thought of it that way before; I hadn't realized that I should come up with the objective before the activity. But it's informed everything I did as a teacher and everything I do as a parent; everything thing we do has an objective.
Even if that objective is getting them to be quite for five minutes straight and that activity involves turning on the television.
My issue, which seems to be with the Common Core, the Tot Drop teachers and way too many moms on pinterest, is that so many objectives are completely inappropriate. I read one blog post about an activity for preschoolers, except the mom recommended parents doing steps 1, 3, 4 and 5 of the 5 step process. The objective appeared to be making an attractive centerpiece, which means preschoolers probably should not have been involved at all.
I'm toying around with coming up with learning objectives for the kids, not just academic ones but life skills ones as well, because I need frameworks. And I don't trust any school - no matter how great on paper - to cover everything I want them to know.
If you were coming up with objectives for your kids, or kids in general, what would you list?
3 comments:
With my girls, my goal always has been to stimulate interest, curiosity, and critical thinking. Therefore, when they have a question, we looked up answers together, and often fell down the Google hole. Now I encourage them to look things up for themselves...and we have amazing conversations.
I am with you on life skills. I try to include life skills in every activity we do. For example after I tough my little girl a lesson on fire safety, to out some eggs. She then had to scrabble them and add what ever she wanted (she chose olives). After that we went to the kitchen and I showed her how the hit fire cooked the eggs. She not only learned hands on how to make eggs, but she learned a lot of about fire safety in the kitchen.
I think all kids need to know life skills. Have you ever met kids that were so smart when it comes to book work, but so dumb when it comes to life?
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