A bill that would require South Carolina students (click here) to learn how to read and write cursive and memorize multiplication tables comes up for a vote Tuesday at the Statehouse.
North Carolina passed a similar law last year.
Most states no longer mandate that schools teach cursive, and it's not required as part of the Common Core Standards that most states have adopted. With so much of work, and everyday life, being done on computers and smartphones, schools are now teaching keyboarding....
That is astounding. Wow. What the heck is going on? Where did the curriculum go? This is completely wrong. APPLICABLE knowledge to the real world starts at Kindergarten and is honed all the way to graduation. Please don't tell me the majority of students in the USA are extensions of computers. Please tell me a student can throw away a computer and function in the world. Computers are an enhancement and not a learning dialogue with a real teacher.
Look, I am not this stupid. I was in advanced classes at the university not long ago and we had professor at the front of the classroom and lecture hall. Computers were an enhancement, but, there was nothing I could not learn for success in that course from the textbook, lecture hall and office hours.
Is this what No Child Left Behind did to the USA? A decade later and our students have an umbilical to an electronic monster?
Can they spell? Because when using a mobile device the spelling of words is perverted. LOL? Laugh out loud takes to long and to many characters to type. Can they spell?
Does a dictionary still have a function? One of the gifts I'd give any high school graduates in our family was a set of dictionary, thesaurus and famous quotes by great people. Hard covers so they had longevity.
Now, I am scared for our country.
We were drilled on all this stuff as children. We had to learn cursive and hand in homework written in cursive and if the teacher could not read it that was just too bad. I mean it. That level of expertise didn't happen in Kindergarten, but, by the fifth and sixth grade a student had to write and write well.
There was a letter grade on the quarterly report card for handwriting in the early grades. My quarterly I mean a 'normal' school year where children had a summer vacation time. Extending the school year isn't going to do a thing if there is poor curriculum.
Gosh, in Kindergarten there was adding and subtracting we had to learn and hand in homework. No lie. Kindergarten. We were tested on that, graded and received a letter grade on the report card to parents. Parents had to sign the report card and the student had to return the signed report card to the teacher. The teacher could comment on the report card to the parents. Do they still have parent-teacher conferences? That was nearly mandatory of parents.
If the classroom is this dysfunctional with substitution of computers for real learning and parent-teacher face to face interaction, then the USA is in sincere trouble for the next decade until this gets turned around. Seriously.
In the fourth grade we had learn multiplication and division. The class of 30 plus children with one teacher had daily quizzes. If I remember right, there were 50 multiplication OR division problems that had to be completed in 4 minutes. Everyday. I am fairly sure it was 50, I don't think it was 100 problems. Maybe by the end of the year it was 100 problems of both multiplication and division in 4 minutes. It was memorization. The daily rehearsal was enforcement of what we were told to memorize at home. That daily input amounted to honed math skills that served in higher math in Junior and Senior High School. It became engrained in our memories. It wasn't a burden or an obsession at all. It became a matter of function after a time.
The teaching of that learning was an art. There is nothing like a student realizing 2+2=4 and so does 2X2=4. It went like this. Two apples and two apples made four apples, but, two apples and two oranges made four fruits. So the idea was to have two different types of fruit was 2X2 whereby four of the same fruit was simple addition. The statement was if you had two oranges and two apples how many pieces of fruit did you have. 2X2=4. That demonstration in the classroom exposed the students to abstraction to create the idea of multiplication. Then that abstracted thinking turned into competency in higher learning later in school. The memorizing was realized as important because it would be impossible to count 500 fruits in two different delivery trucks while 'the math' made it easy to realize 2 trucks with 500 fruit in each was 1000 pieces of fruit. Who wanted to spend their entire free time counting fruit on trucks?
And then to realize the grocer buying the fruit wanted to know exactly the kind of fruit on the truck now carrying 25 boxes of different fruit. And after that, of course the delivery driver had to collect the cost of the fruit from the grocer. Right?
Yes, all that was with pencil and paper. The teacher was very good at operating the mimeograph machine in the room next to the teacher lounge.
Come on, people, where is the real teaching in the classroom?
