Recently the mother of a second grader shared with me that after becoming increasingly frustarted by "ABC order" spelling homework, she taught her daughter to type the words into a spread sheet and sort. I was taken aback at first and many readers may argue that this mom is teaching her child to cheat. But, hasn't she actually taught her child a more useful, real world skill?
Alphabetizing words manually warrants weekly practice in the second grade. The only application for the skill is "to look stuff up". Student curriculum writers seem not have recognized that a child who is eight years old today will likely never, ever browse through alphabetized keywords to find information. Today's eight year old already knows how to use the "search" field.
My own second grader came home last week with the much anticipated instructions for her big "STATE RESEARCH PROJECT", which included a full page of questions that must be answered about the assigned state. I looked at it with dread. She fired up her ipod and had the questions completed in no time, not once having touched a book.
In the world of the Millenials, a generation that now outnumbers Baby Boomers as the largest section of the population, phone books exist only for the purpose of recycling. Encyclopedias are collectibles. They've never seen or heard of a "card catalog". Hard copy filing systems stand alone as the holdout application for "ABC order". Most of these are being replaced by electronic systems and, for the ones that remain, a review course of the alphabet song for workers as needed would be more efficient than weekly training for all students.
What other traditionally important assignments need to be eliminated or altered to reflect the world our children will grow up in?
Totally agree!
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I am finding out that there is great variety in what teachers emphasize comparitively in their classroom, and this varies even more from school to school. While I still think learning the concept of ABC order is important much like learning to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, I think more of what you are experiencing is homework overload. When I think back to how much homework I was assigned in the second grade... The answer is none. My daughter has no more than 30 min of homework per day and projects are 100% acheiveable without my input. Not that she is any smarter than any other kid, she just attends a school with (in my opinion) a more balanced approach to learning in the younger years.
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