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Open classrooms! I distinctly remember doing a spelling test while listening to a group of kindergardeners on the other side of the room sing the alphabet. It was completely kooky! I think their reasoning was that kids need open space and that teachers could encourage one another, but it was just a plain-old bad idea.

 

After open classrooms I was moved to a school that offered electives in elementary school- for everything. Choose your math kiddo, would you like "square dancing" (yeah, they called it math) or "shapes in space?" Even with involved parents, it was hard to choose anything close to educational. Add in all the time spent wandering the halls, and you can see just how little we learned. What a waste.

 

Another terrible teaching practice - spanking in the classroom. I still remember watching a poor boy get paddled in the 1st grade because his cast was sticking out too far into the aisle. Yikes!

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Forcing 6th graders to *multiply, divide, and do decimal problems* in weird number bases that are never even used in computer science - before all of the base-10 multiplication tables have even been mastered in that class....

 

 

 

It does seem a little odd that 6th graders wouldn't have mastered the multiplication facts.

 

I personally think that teaching kids about other number bases and requiring some arithmetic to be done using them is a great way to solidify the concept of place value. I don't think that doing it for weeks on end would be helpful, but certainly a week or so could be quite beneficial. In fact, it is one technique mentioned for teaching place value in Liping Ma's book.

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I can NOT understand why schools continue to ask students to discuss things they have not yet studied in depth or do projects in areas that may be totally new and foreign to them. What on earth can be learned by this? I've also read science books that just ask kids to start randomly hypothesizing before they know a thing about the subject at hand.....

 

I think they confuse testing with learning.

 

Rosie

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I can NOT understand why schools continue to ask students to discuss things they have not yet studied in depth or do projects in areas that may be totally new and foreign to them. What on earth can be learned by this? I've also read science books that just ask kids to start randomly hypothesizing before they know a thing about the subject at hand.....

 

Did you read the article inside the cover of the Memoria Press catalog that just came out? It's about this very thing. :001_smile:

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