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Thank You, Peggy Orenstein
3/5/09 10:53This morning's Times Magazine had a brief piece by Peggy Orenstein on testing and homework in kindergarten.
My friends have all heard me rant on this, I think. I believe the early-elementary school insistence on homework as a tool to develop future study habits (and to reinforce the day's learning) is wrong-headed at best and punitive at worst. For some kids who are developmentally ready to spend even more time "at school" doing homework, maybe it's not so bad. But at least with Sarcasm Girl, every night was a nightmare--it often took her an hour to get through the ten minutes of homework she had to do, because she resisted it so hard. Rather than learning to buckle down, get it done, and go on to something else, she learned to put homework of to the last possible minute, to duck it when possible, to refuse to turn it in. I don't need to argue for my daughter's smarts--you're probably all tired of hearing about her. The fact that she's still an avid reader, a curious, creative, engaged learner, has more to do with her and (I say with pardonable pride) her home environment than with the homework and tests that she dealt with over the years.
Why, I wonder, is there such a war on kid-hood? While I get a little icked out by people who want to keep their children unspoiled and "precious" (honest to God) and will not let their children watch TV or use a computer or listen to anything newer than Gershwin, and while my kids have gone through lots of camps and classes and team sports, I've always tried to factor in "nothing" time for them: time to play, or stare off into the middle distance, or watch TV or ride their bikes or what have you. "There's nothing to do!" leads, in my memory, to coming up with something to do. But our work-driven society seems to be profoundly uncomfortable with seeing kids "idle," doing anything that isn't overtly useful.
Sometimes staring into space is the best thing you can do. I swear.
When I was a child, in the increasingly olden days, kindergarten was a place to play. We danced the hokeypokey, swooned in suspense over Duck, Duck, Gray Duck (that’s what Minnesotans stubbornly call Duck, Duck, Goose) and napped on our mats until the Wake-Up Fairy set us free.
No more. Instead of digging in sandboxes, today’s kindergartners prepare for a life of multiple-choice boxes by plowing through standardized tests with cuddly names like Dibels (pronounced “dibbles”), a series of early-literacy measures administered to millions of kids; or toiling over reading curricula like Open Court — which features assessments every six weeks.
According to “Crisis in the Kindergarten,” a report recently released by the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit research and advocacy group, all that testing is wasted: it neither predicts nor improves young children’s educational outcomes. More disturbing, along with other academic demands, like assigning homework to 5-year-olds, it is crowding out the one thing that truly is vital to their future success: play.
My friends have all heard me rant on this, I think. I believe the early-elementary school insistence on homework as a tool to develop future study habits (and to reinforce the day's learning) is wrong-headed at best and punitive at worst. For some kids who are developmentally ready to spend even more time "at school" doing homework, maybe it's not so bad. But at least with Sarcasm Girl, every night was a nightmare--it often took her an hour to get through the ten minutes of homework she had to do, because she resisted it so hard. Rather than learning to buckle down, get it done, and go on to something else, she learned to put homework of to the last possible minute, to duck it when possible, to refuse to turn it in. I don't need to argue for my daughter's smarts--you're probably all tired of hearing about her. The fact that she's still an avid reader, a curious, creative, engaged learner, has more to do with her and (I say with pardonable pride) her home environment than with the homework and tests that she dealt with over the years.
Why, I wonder, is there such a war on kid-hood? While I get a little icked out by people who want to keep their children unspoiled and "precious" (honest to God) and will not let their children watch TV or use a computer or listen to anything newer than Gershwin, and while my kids have gone through lots of camps and classes and team sports, I've always tried to factor in "nothing" time for them: time to play, or stare off into the middle distance, or watch TV or ride their bikes or what have you. "There's nothing to do!" leads, in my memory, to coming up with something to do. But our work-driven society seems to be profoundly uncomfortable with seeing kids "idle," doing anything that isn't overtly useful.
Sometimes staring into space is the best thing you can do. I swear.
