60 First Graders, 4 Teachers, One Loud New Way to Learn

[XemaSab]

Sixty children in a first-grade class can get loud — sometimes too loud for a teacher to explain a lesson.

So while waiting for her teacher to come by, one little girl arranged the pennies she had been given to practice subtraction into a smiley face. Another shook her pennies in a plastic bag. A high-pitched argument broke out over someone’s missing quarter.

“We don’t know what we are supposed to be doing, but we are learning about math,” Thea Burnett, 6, said.

Across the room, a second teacher, Jennifer McSorley, successfully led the class’s weakest students in a counting rhyme. But when she leaned forward out of her chair to write a word on an easel, a 6-year-old boy moved it, and she fell when she tried to sit back down.



http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/education/11class.html

[Mass]

1. I have no clue whether it is better than what was there before, but I would not want my kids

in there for one minute. Anyway, my youngest, with attention problems and sensory issues, would have been driven mad in such an environment. And this makes me sick.

Lessons are a series of complex choreographies. In the 2,000-square-foot kindergarten, for example, each child is assigned a “university”— a grouping by skill level — and another group by color: blue, red or green.

Grouping by skills level? How long before the kids understand who are the best level and the lowest, and then feel frustrated.

[Journeyman]

2. Would you feel better in the world of Harrison Bergeron? . . .

http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html

[Mass]

3. Nothing to do with anything. Kids in general know who is better or does worse.

Our high school has gotten rid of class ranking, but kids knows who is in the top 10 % of the class and who is in the bottom 10%. No reason to emphasize that by grouping.

I dont see any major reason to label them and stigmatise them as early as KG or 1rst grade, particularly when you are teaching in such terrible conditions. What made me react first is the idea to put 60 1rst grader in a room. I feel sorry for the teachers and the kids.

[XemaSab]

4. I think we should bring back tracking in a big way

but I also think that we should pay HUGE amounts of attention to the kids on the bottom so that MAYBE they won't BE on the bottom any more. :P

[MattBaggins]

5. So he learned that an idea that works for mature already well

disciplined high school students doesn't work with little kids.

[spedtr90]

6. Revolutionary? In the 1970's!

1970's - "open classrooms" were the groovy new way to improve learning!
Teachers were using everything they could find to "build walls" and reduce distractions and noise.


If it saves money, it will be considered successful!! More profit when privatized!!