Son One turned five this summer, which means that this fall he began attending... kindergarten! It has been an adjustment; there has been a lot of complaining from him about how little playing he gets to do.
That said, his most consistent complaint is that he has to raise his hand to talk. Torture!
A couple weeks ago (I'm writing this back in September, but stockpiling it for the far future), I attended the "curriculum night" for his school, where his kindergarten teacher and the one from the room next door teamed up to explain what the kids were doing and what the expectations were.
Well I personally have not thought about kindergarten since I was last in it—that is to say, thirty-two years ago. If you are in a similar boat, let me tell you: kindergarten has gotten intense. The other teacher kept saying, "I've been teaching thirty years. Back then, kindergarten was naps and playing with blocks." They do not nap anymore. Indeed, their time seems to be strictly regimented. Reading, math, social studies, science. I think she said 60 minutes of math per day!? They are of course taking standardized tests. The teachers showed off some of the things they would be expected to read by year's end, which seemed fairly ambitious. Then they said the kids should be doing twenty minutes of homework per night!
While one parent raised his hand and asked when he would be told if his child wasn't reaching their benchmarks(!), I was furiously googling "has kindergarten gone too far" on my phone. The answer seems to be "yes," according to many experts, anyway. The drilling of worksheets diminishes the play-based learning that is actually beneficial to kids at that age. The teachers themselves pointed out that kids can often end the day tired, and especially during the first couple weeks, Son One was often complaining about how tired he was. There are studies showing that homework in elementary school has little actual effect on learning.
The thing is, though, that I mostly approach this as the kind of teacher that I am. I teach college-level writing, and writing is mostly dependent on reading. And have my students become better readers in my fifteen years of teaching? No—as any college instructor will tell you they have, if anything, gotten worse. In fact, by the time students get to high school they seem to be doing much less reading than was the norm when I was in school; here in Tampa we recently had a brouhaha about teaching Shakespeare, and the superintendent sent out a message to parents to reassure them, "many of our high school students may read one full novel" each year. One full novel!? Wow!
So what is all this in aid of? Hitting reading so hard in kindergarten isn't paying off thirteen years later.
I think like many things in education, it may be trying to solve curricularly what is really a cultural problem. But that seems like a post for another time.
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