Dougall Public School student Kyle O'Keefe, 6, works on a task Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in Windsor, Ont. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)
Brian Cross
May 10, 2013 - 11:59 PM EDT
Last Updated: May 12, 2013 - 11:19 PM EDT
http://blogs.windsorstar.com/2013/05/10/are-kids-still-learning-the-basics/
When parent Nikki Pilutti walked into her daughter Jill’s Grade 3 class and saw “Lerning” misspelled prominently on the board, it drove home what she’s long believed.
Like many parents raised on weekly spelling tests, grammar work sheets and multiplication times tables, she contends the basics aren’t getting the attention they deserve.
“They don’t focus as much on the phonics and the repetition of doing your addition and subtraction over and over and over again,” said Pillutti, a LaSalle mom who takes her two kids to a Kumon tutoring program to supplement their regular school with old-time, back-to-basics education.
“They drill them,” she said, “for days and days and weeks, we’re doing the same work over and over again, until I can look at my five-year-old son and ask: ‘What’s eight plus four?’ And he says ’12.’”
He’s not counting on his fingers, he just knows, says Pilutti.
“They don’t get that at school.”
It’s a sentiment felt by an army of parents who are complaining their kids can’t spell, have terrible grammar and don’t know their times table. In response, tutoring centres have sprouted up across the city. Scott Sylvestre started with one Kumon and 20 students in 1996. Today he has two locations and 300 kids.
Parents cite the lack of emphasis on spelling, cursive writing, phonics, times tables, basic adding and subtracting. “That’s what we do,” he says of his program. He thinks the basics are “glazed over” at schools because they have so much to get through. “Believe it or not, we have teachers bring their children to us, so something’s missing.”
The biggest comment that Oxford Learning Centre franchise owner Andrea Esteves hears from parents is what happened to the basics?
“It used to be we’d have to memorize the times tables and that doesn’t necessarily happen anymore, so a lot of times I have parents come to me, they have kids in Grade 6 or 7 and they can’t say off the top of their heads what five times seven is.”
When Amanda Coughlin was supply teaching a Grade 7-8 class few years ago, about 75 per cent of the students did not know the times table. When it comes to one of the basics, teachers teach it and move on, and the kids who haven’t grasped it are “kind of left hanging,” said Coughlin, whose tutoring service is called There and Back Again, a reference to her back-to-basics approach.
“I’m finding that drilling, as old fashioned as it is, if you drill and practise, practise, practise, it starts coming easily.”
But Ontario’s Education Minister Liz Sandals insists that “absolutely,” kids are still being taught these basics, just in different ways. They’re still learning phonics and spelling. And when it comes to math, what they’re doing in high school is work that used to be done in university, she told The Star.
The average student who graduates high school now has vastly more knowledge than someone who graduated decades ago, she said. “The amount we expect our kids to know is actually quite astounding,” said Sandals, citing studies that show Ontario’s education system is one of the best in the world, and standardized test results that show a continuing improvement year after year.
Nowadays there’s a greater emphasis on students figuring things out, the minister said. “It’s not just parroting back, and ultimately that is what allows you to go forward in any subject.”
When asked about parents mourning the absence of the basics, Clara Howitt, a superintendent at the Greater Essex public school board, said “I think we get caught up in what we know, what we experienced.
Dougall Public School student Arlind Avdo, 6, works on a task Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in Windsor, Ont. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)
“But we don’t do spelling like we used to, writing out the word 25 times, because I don’t think that necessarily makes people better spellers.”
And there are tools to help us we didn’t have before, including spell check, she said.
Howitt said when she was in school it was largely about memorization and regurgitating. “Well, for your kids and for my kids, I don’t want them to regurgitate, I want them to think, I want them to be creative, I want them to challenge and just not accept an idea.”
J. Richard Gentry, the U.S.-based author of a new generation of spelling textbooks, believes that spelling has been put on the back burner and as a result kids these days are lousy at it. What’s taken over is the discovery approach to spelling, where kids explore words. And what’s disappeared is the old fashioned memorization method. “In my own view, what’s more appropriate is a kind of balanced between these two,” said Gentry, whose books, he said, are very different from traditional spellers.
Dougall Public School student Mason Lapansee, 7, centre, watches a video Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in Windsor, Ont. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)
There’s a preponderance of research that says the old way of memorizing and drills is not the best way to educate our kids, said Susan Holloway, an associate professor at the University of Windsor’s education faculty who studies literacy. Perhaps kids aren’t as good at spelling as they once were, but that’s largely due to the fact they’re reading less in this computer-game-crazy era, said Holloway, who likes the way schools are heading when it comes to teaching kids to write.
“I’m not in any way saying it’s not important to teach grammatical skills … but those skills are better learned when they’re tied directly to students writing.”
For example, she said, learning the correct use of a semicolon might be started by a short 10- or 20-minute lesson on a Monday, followed on Wednesday with students being asked to write a short story which includes at least one sentence in which a semicolon is properly used.
Dougall Public School teacher Kathy Freeman teaches her grade 1-2 class Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in Windsor, Ont. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)
Having students use the grammar they’re taught in their own writing, said Holloway, “is really key to their actually taking it in.”
Students at Dougall elementary don’t use the old spellers with weekly word lists, but that doesn’t mean they’re not learning to spell, says principal Diane Beck. Indeed, you should see the vocabulary list in Kathy Freeman’s Grade 1-2 class. Environment, garbage, carbon and pollution were among the dozen or so words these six- and seven-year-olds were learning to spell and write.
The words all come from their study of polar bears, a subject the kids themselves chose, but which incorporates all kinds of curriculum requirements for their grades. After learning throughout the week about polar bears and how their survival is threatened by climate change, they each wrote letters – edited and corrected – to Prime Minister Stephen Harper asking him to help. Last week, they focused on space, studying reports from Canadian Commander Chris Hadfield aboard the International Space Station. The inquiry included forays into math, science, writing and reading.
Dougall Public School students Simran Parker, 7, left, and Brooklyn Dell, 8, discuss a video they watched Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in Windsor, Ont. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)
“They’re doing (spelling) for a real purpose,” said Freeman, who calls her room an inquiry classroom, which has a word wall filled with hundreds of commonly used words, which the students put up themselves and then reference when they’re writing.
“Instead of just memorizing a word as part of a list and it’s gone next week, we learn with the words, play with the words,” she said.
This week, they were working on their KWL pages, where they write what they know, want to know and learn about space.
Fernando Garcia, 7, proudly says “I’m writing about space,” as he carefully writes in his KWL: “When you sleep in space you are on the flor,” a minor misspelling that probably won’t get pointed out immediately. That will wait until he makes the final draft of his report and he edits his work.
Dougall Public School student Fernando Garcia, 7, watches a video Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in Windsor, Ont. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star
“They’re still doing spelling, it’s just not in the traditional sense where every week there’s a random list that may or may not have a connection to what they’re doing,” said Emelda Byrne, a superintendent with the Windsor-Essex Catholic board.
She believes that moving away from memorizing and towards a discovery-based approach better prepares students for the modern world. Instead of concentrating on memorizing the times table, students learn how multiplication is the repeated addition of the same number. She recently witnessed a classroom where students were broken into groups and asked to figure out how to put 475 students going to a field trip onto school buses that seated 50. Some did addition, some estimated, some did division, and then they had to figure out what to do with the remainder – the 25 students left over after nine buses arrive. They then decided to take the 10 buses they’d ultimately need and calculated how many students each should have.
“It was a great operational question,” Byrne said, “And it led them to problem solve, which was what was expected of the assignment.”
Dougall Public School teacher Kathy Freeman teaches her grade 1-2 class Wednesday, May 8, 2013, in Windsor, Ont. (DAN JANISSE/The Windsor Star)
Brian Cross
May 10, 2013 - 11:59 PM EDT
Last Updated: May 12, 2013 - 11:19 PM EDT
http://blogs.windsorstar.com/2013/05/10/are-kids-still-learning-the-basics/
