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Dan Weston's avatar

Excellent, as usual, and completely accurate! "Grammar School," has been completely destroyed over the years. Rote learning is ESSENTIAL in the prepubescent years, and without it there is NO FOUNDATION to build on! Without a solid foundation (literacy), we have created a system (and world) where everyone is trying to build castles in quicksand pits. My grandmother never went beyond the 8th grade (it wasn't compulsory to do so until the 1950s), and yet, she could do arithmetic in her head (including division), knew exactly all of the basic facts of history and geography), and was an avid, life-long reader. She had perfect penmanship ans spelling too. She would have embarrassed 99 percent of today's high school graduates, and many college graduates as well. The thing is, she was no great intellectual either. By her standards she was normal. She was already exasperated at how far the schools had fallen in the 1970's based on what we weren't being taught back then. I can't imagine what she would have thought of what has happened since.

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Peter Shull's avatar

Agreed and agreed. There's always been a difference between teachers who organically create their own lessons and those who merely 'teach from the book,' use 'teachers pay teachers,' or scurry from classroom to classroom before school looking to 'borrow' lessons. Teachers who create their lessons know and understand them intimately, and are well-suited to conveying that knowledge. And the shifts to 'teaching to the test' and to 'skills-based curricula' have likewise been disastrous. The longer I teach, the more thoroughly I understand that there are no short cuts and the only way is the hard way.

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