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Free Articles by Judy Frost
Feel free to use them. Please acknowledge the author.
1. Children are Failing with Learning
2. If Only I had a Brain
3. Instant Gratification
4.Labels
5.Teaching
6.Teaching the Basics
7.Silent Teaching
8. Parenting
9. Discipline and Self-discipline
10. Kids Who Rule, Fail at School
CHILDREN ARE FAILING WITH LEARNING
Children in today’s society are faced with many more challenges as learners and diversions away from learning than we had. Life for children seems much more complicated nowadays. Society and its expectations of children have changed and, arguably, not for the better. We went to school. It was illegal not to. We obeyed our teachers and showed them respect. We met their expectations and those of our parents. If we didn’t, we were disciplined at school and again at home because our parents always found out. By the end of our last year of primary school, we could read and write.
Nowadays, sadly, many children spend twelve years at school and leave illiterate. They may be able to churn out assignments, talk to the world on any subject, be in the top eleven at cricket, be able to use any technological device like an expert, but, within themselves, they know they have failed in the most important learning of all. They carry the burden around with them. Many of these people are not, as some of the more able in the community imagine, unintelligent. The majority of them have average or above average abilities. They are bright, creative human beings whom we have failed rather than the other way around.
IF ONLY I HAD A BRAIN!
While this sounds like something out of the “Wizard of Oz” it’s a growing misconception of today’s children that their brains are faulty and they are dumb! I hear this lament from children as young as six years of age. The trouble with most of them is they have never been given the opportunity to become confident learners. Being a confident learner is to know you have the ability to think and to remember. And what do we use to think and remember with? Our brains of course.
The difference between older brains on this earth and some younger ones is that older ones are full of facts their owners learned as children. These facts have been added to over the years but, not far from the surface, are the basic bits of knowledge needed to read and write, add up and take away. They were learned in childhood and, in most cases, retained for a lifetime. These older learners knew they had brains and were taught how to get their brains working.
Unfortunately, many young children and those people who have been educated within the past two or three decades have been taught, instead of using their brains, to reach for a device external to their bodies in order to do even the most simple thinking tasks. I saw a twenty-two-year-old reach for his phone to check that a sentence was grammatically correct. Students rely heavily on their spell-checkers to spell words for them. And we tend to reach for a calculator to add up rather than use our brains. If we don’t use them we’ll lose them. It’s that simple. And the time to teach children about just what their brains are capable of is while they’re young.
INSTANT GRATIFICATION
We are all affected by living in a throw-away society. We have developed a throw-away mentality. If it doesn’t work, throw it away. Young children are told that when they go to school, they will learn how to read and write. Some of them expect this to happen on the first day. If it doesn’t, they experience feelings of failure and disappointment. Some teachers, thankfully not all, suffer from the same delusions. If children in their care don’t learn to read easily and well within their first year at school, they are put in the too-hard basket. I have taught many five-year-olds who believe they are failures. They have told me so. Their anxious parents have been told, sometimes as early as three months into the first year at school, their children can’t read! What some teachers and education systems fail to realise is that it takes many of their charges years and years to master the art of reading. And often longer to master writing. The final test of being a good reader is to be able to look at any bookshelf and know you can read and understand any book it contains. Not many five and six-year-olds can do this, even the best of them. It takes practice! It takes good thorough teaching! It takes patience and persistence!
LABELS
Many children who don’t learn instantly and well nowadays are tested, diagnosed and given labels. Dyslexia, which had just begun to be the “in” terminology to describe extreme difficulty with reading and writing when I first began teaching, now encompasses a much broader population of learners. Mild Autism or Asperger’s Disorder have been used to describe the condition of children who are struggling with learning. We are well into the era of ADD and ADHD, with diagnosis and the use of Ritalin and other amphetamine drugs which claim to turn children into better learners. We are just beginning to see the results of years of use and misuse of these commonly prescribed drugs. While the more traditional causes of learning difficulties and disabilities still exist, they are often overlooked in favour of those with labels.
Learning problems with labels attract funding in schools. Some parents have told me they like labels because they provide reasons for their children’s failure to learn. What labels can do for all parties concerned: teachers, parents and children, are to lower their expectations. The labels become excuses. In far too many cases, these children have been effectively written-off as learners unless they can rise above the labels and that is a very hard thing to do. Poor kids. Their already complicated lives are made even more complicated by labels.
Many of our greatest achievers in the past have had an early struggle with learning. This early struggle can be a great advantage if the obstacle is overcome. Then the sky is the limit as to what the person can achieve. Look, for example, at the obstacles that were placed in the path of Helen Keller, and at the contribution she made to society once she had learned to communicate. And how did she learn to communicate? She had a dedicated teacher.
TEACHING
I listened to an interview before he passed away with best-selling author, Bryce Courtenay. He was speaking about his first novel, “The Power of One”. He said he had written the novel to show the power of the “one” in his own life, a certain teacher whom he encountered when he was young who recognised who he was, encouraged him and set him on the road to becoming who he is today.
How the power of teachers is seriously overlooked in the scheme of things today, especially those who teach young, impressionable minds. It is at this level that children begin to form opinions about who they are and how they rate as learners.
There’s a saying I often hear; “Those who can’t, teach”. I believe it should be, “Those who can’t teach, shouldn’t”. Most of us teach in some form. What we teach can be good and bad and we can also teach well or badly. Teaching information so that what we teach is learned by others is a highly specialised art. Teachers, at all levels of schooling should be the best, most highly-trained and respected people (not machines). In their hands rest the hopes of us all.
TEACHING THE BASICS
I read an article recently in the National Geographic which described the work done by Prince Charles in his Duchy of Cornwall. The Prince was quoted as saying, “What I was trying to do, was to remind people about the pointlessness of throwing away all knowledge and experience and wisdom of what had gone before.” While the Prince was referring to methods of farming, the same could be said of education. People of my generation were taught how to read and write, add up and take away, using tried and true methods that worked. Nowdays, to the detriment of many children, the expectation is they can learn without being taught how to learn. They can read without being taught how to read.
Teachers are being expected to teach without being taught how to teach. The tried and true methods are disappearing. Teachers have told me they don’t have time to teach the basics thoroughly because the curriculum is loaded with all sorts of other diversions. Information is being taught in isolated pockets with no relation to anything else that is being taught, and therefore children are confused.
Rapid advances in technology have given us all a false sense of how well children learn. Just because children can access the internet, for example, doesn’t mean they can read what it says or put what it says into their own words in order to complete an assignment. While education systems struggle to keep up with these rapid advances so that children will be equipped to live in and be employed in the modern world, the basics of learning: reading, writing, spelling and maths have been sacrificed. These basics are still the foundation of modern learning and of modern employment, and whether we like it or not, they have to be taught thoroughly to the majority of children. Only the lucky few can do it by osmosis. The foundation is shaky! And when the foundation is shaky, the building eventually falls.
SILENT TEACHING
When I first began teaching, we used to call our method of instruction, “chalk and talk”. We used to teach our lessons from the blackboard which we would prepare each morning. Blackboard writing used to be a subject taught during our teacher training. We didn’t ever expect children to do something we hadn’t already taught them from the blackboard or from a chart. Let’s say, for example, we wanted the children to write a story. We would show them how we would write a story ourselves by composing a story, with their help, either on the blackboard or on a chart. We would let the children hear how we were thinking as we composed the story. We listened to their thinking as they helped us. We showed them how we composed sentences and how we spelled the words correctly. We put in the full stops, commas and capital letters as we went along. It was only when we had finished modelling our story that we would expect the children to write one for themselves. Teaching by talking and modelling was a way of teaching new information at all levels in the primary school.
While teacher “chalk and talk” has become more silent, other vital classroom activities have been silenced too. I often ask children who are struggling with reading to tell me how their reading compares with that of the rest of the children in the class. They say they don’t know because they never hear anyone else read. These children are often in their first or second year at school. Silent reading, that used to be practised once you had mastered the art of oral reading, is now “in” for everyone.
I told one of my students about my theory that children don’t really read when they are asked to do silent reading in the classroom. The child paused for a second and then looked at me with a conspiratorial smile on his face. He told me he usually plays footsie with the kid who sits in front of him in class. He said that every so often he finds a good book to read by a favourite author and then he reads, but otherwise, no!
Nowdays, sadly, the only people in a child’s life who hear them read on a regular basis are their parents, if they have time. On many occasions it’s their grandparents or their nannies who know just how well these beginners are handling their first big adventure into learning. Some less fortunate children go on reading to themselves knowing they can’t do it. They hope someone will take the time to listen to them read so they can get some help. Often, nobody does.
PARENTING
Parents are being expected to be all things to all people. They are their children’s first teachers and they are, in some cases, becoming the ones who teach the lessons at home that aren’t being taught at school. Some lessons that should be taught at home, on the other hand, are being left to schools to teach. Schools would like parents to teach their children about the basics; discipline and respect. Parents would like schools to teach their children the basics; to read and write, add up and take away.
Parents want their children to be able to read, above all things, because they realise it is the basis of all other learning. They are disappointed when school systems fail to teach their children how to read and to learn. They try to help their children at home and many of them succeed. Some children don’t learn well from their parents and some children’s parents don’t take the time or have the skills to help them at home. Some families have very fragmented lives and children, nowadays, often live between two homes and two or more sets of parents. What resilient beings they are!
Homework is becoming a real issue in family life. It often takes many more hours than it should and, in some cases, it reflects the ability of the children’s parents rather than of the children themselves.
DISCIPLINE AND SELF-DISCIPLINE
Learning requires discipline and self-discipline. Discipline is imposed from outside ourselves by others and self-discipline comes from within ourselves. Self-discipline is a derivative of discipline in more ways than one. Without discipline, self-discipline is very hard, almost impossible, to achieve. Without self-discipline, many children will fail to learn or to achieve their full potential. Children who lack discipline are crying out for someone to come along who will put some structure into their lives and their learning.
Schools used to be able to impose discipline on children. Nowadays it is a very tricky area. Parents, too, have been put in the position of not smacking their children. While governments legislate and lawyers grow rich, children suffer. I don’t believe it’s necessary to go back to the days of the cane, but I do feel we need to find the middle ground where children are expected to follow rules imposed on them by their parents at home and by their teachers at school. Children should be expected to contribute to the household by doing unpaid jobs around the house.
KIDS WHO RULE FAIL AT SCHOOL
I have taught a growing number of children who have been out of control and for whom learning was initially out of reach. These children have one thing in common. They are all used to getting their own way, usually by throwing tantrums. They have also been given the idea they know all things and can do all things. They don’t listen to or have respect for their parents or their teachers. If their parents or caregivers could only realise, it is outside the experience of these poor children to be the boss. They just don’t know how and they fail dismally, learning all sorts of bad behaviours and habits along the way.
Adults who let children rule are doing them a great disservice. They are also contributing, through their misguided children, to the growing lawlessness we witness daily. Young adults and teenagers who kill themselves and others because they flout the road rules, for example, feel they know better than the police or other motorists on the road. If they had had early lessons in obeying rules, learning within a structure, living within boundaries, they might have lived and contributed a great deal to society. All of this vital learning begins early in our lives. It’s OK for parents to say “No” to their kids. It’s imperative parents take the time to listen to and respond to their off-spring and to teach them right from wrong. The first five years of life at home, and those early primary school years, are vital years for teaching children that, for the time being, until they have more experience, others know better.
The boy who drew this picture was out of control when I first met him. He had a reputation, at the age of seven, for being unteachable. He had been referred to a number of psychologists who had failed to curb his mis-behaviour. The day he arrived at my office he was in complete control of his mum and completely out of her control. He yelled at her that he didn’t want to be there. He screamed at me to let him go home. At the time I rented a small office in a block of offices with journalists, mobile phone salespeople, beauticians etc. as my neighbours. There were no other teachers in the building. Everyone came to their doors to see what the commotion in my office was about. I drew the child inside and asked his mum to go downstairs and have a cup of coffee and come back in an hour. I shut the door. In my quietest voice I told the child I had some rules for him to follow in my office. He watched me through teary eyes, but said nothing. I said the first rule was to talk quietly. I explained this wasn’t a school but an office block where lots of people did lots of jobs and they shouldn’t be disturbed. He nodded. I then went on with the lesson. There was no more shouting and there were no more tears. The child had found someone who made rules and stuck to them. He liked rules. Hidden behind his angry exterior was a learner who wanted to achieve. He learned how to read and write over the next few months and went on from there. He said later he was a pretty special kid because he had been taken to a special place to be taught by a special teacher. He liked that.