School of the Now

Another example of how schools are lending a hand to functional illiteracy is the inconsistency of teaching. How is it that one kindergarten teacher can have spelling test, more reading assignments and more homework than another? Where is the consistency in each grade’s curriculum? I have personal experience with this situation as well. My daughter had a teacher last year for kindergarten who had spelling test early on in the year, worked on grammar and phonics in the classroom, and sent home a lot of homework and reading assignments. Whereas, my son has a teacher in kindergarten this year that’s had very few spelling test, hardly any reading assignments or homework sent home and is behind the other teacher’s learning plan this year. Which student is more prepared for first grade?

If this is how our elementary schools work then it is no wonder that high school graduates go to college and are not able to write or read on a college level. I have sat in a Freshman Composition II class reading papers that easily could have been written by fifth graders. Many claim they were not taught grammar past elementary school. I could honestly believe it. Everything is moving toward computers, but some things can not be taught by a computer. Case in point, Microsoft Word has a couple of interesting features that college students love to use. One is the spelling and grammar checker and the other is the reference section. Downside: spelling and grammar checker only catches maybe 50-60 percent of grammatical errors and does not catch when someone uses a word that is not correct for that sentence but is spelled correctly. The reference section can be used to basically cheat you out of the pleasure of citing and doing a works cited page. Downside: the reference section does not do in-text citations correctly if the individual does not know how to insert the information into the text box.

As a society, should we not move backward one step and pick up a book every now and then? Why not take computers out of the classroom and leave them in the computer lab where they belong? This may be a fast paced world but we are rapidly becoming dumber by the day. More and more people only know basic skills in reading and writing, but they can fly over those keys to send a text message. I urge you to take the time to look at a book with your kids. Open their eyes to the world that awaits them. Put down the game controller and flip through an adventure that you can go back to even if the entire world’s electricity disappeared. Reading is the ultimate ticket to freedom of thought, expression, and self. Let’s get it back in schools where it belongs.