An example of the grammar stage of learning

Sometimes it's easier to see something to understand it, rather than just listening to someone talk about it. Here I'm posting my eleven year old reciting one portion of this year's memory work. She has also memorized around 400 other facts including information on: math, geography (including locations and names), science, Latin, English grammar, Presidents, and history sentences.

As you can hear in the video, we are reciting in a busy house with kiddos. Don't let that distract you...she didn't!

Math. What Gives?

I've been looking over mathematics recently as I'm puzzled by the curriculum of my local school district, CSCOPE. It appears that in second grade they are: teaching addition and subtraction, multiplication and division, and common denominators of fractions. You should know that in a CLASSICAL educational sense, this makes no sense.

Mathematics has classically begun very slowly, firmly rooted in concrete principles and word problems using real life objects. My daughter's second grade mathematics text, Ray's arithmetic, covers: addition and subtraction. Period. That's it. Yet by the time she's in twelfth grade, she'll be learning calculus from the same series.

Which leads me to ask: What the heck? How is it that 100 years ago, we knew how to take it easy on little minds and have them all wind up in calculus and today we're shoving way too much difficult stuff into their heads and they wind up not able to do much math at all upon graduating? What has gone wrong? What is the problem?

The problem is, in my opinion, that nobody reveres history as they should. How much effort would it really take for the TEA to say, "You know, Ray's Arithmetic worked for generations of Americans. We're just going to go back to that. It's free, it's proven, it just works." How difficult would it be to simply assign a Ray's text to each grade level and align the TEKS standards to IT? What could we possibly lose? Every kid doing calculus by 12th grade? As opposed to functionally illiterate mathematics students?

The same thing could be said with reading instruction and the McGuffey readers. The same could be said for writing instruction and the IEW curriculum (Institute for Excellence in Writing). These are SUPERB programs used by home schoolers and private schools nation-wide. They produce accelerated readers, writers, and thinkers. Furthermore: they are cheap, they're simple, and they're effective. There's nothing to lose there. Seems too easy, doesn't it? But in order to use those programs, you'd first have to: know about them, which would involve research and a little humility, and two: you'd have to actually want kids to learn something. Which, honestly, doesn't seem to be high on the priority list of any state administrators or local ones, for that matter.

In conclusion, I urge those reading this to investigate the claims I'm making here. Bring them up to your school boards, teachers, administrators, state reps, and the TEA. Let's be the ones who make positive changes for our kiddos.