Originally Posted by pinkpanther
Originally Posted by Val
The whole focus of the piece in the Times was, as usual, on minimum standards: everyone should be able to add and subtract whole numbers by the end of third grade, etc. etc. The report itself is 120 pages long and pretty much just gives lip service to gifted students saying that learning faster doesn't appear to "harm" them and that they should be "allowed to do so". <sigh>

Don't get me started on this one! I agree with you completely. It's not only in math, but reading as well. Here the emphasis is on DIBELS and meeting a minimum standard of oral fluency. There is NO emphasis on reading comprehension and very little focus on fostering a love of reading. Fortunately, my girls love to read anyway.

As a high school math teacher, I'm seeing the effects of the focus on minimum standards. I have kids in precalculus who still ask me how to do arithmetic with fractions! Some days I go home very discouraged. I struggle to keep my bright kids challenged while trying to bring the weaker ones up to my higher standard. I have addressed this issue with the administration because we don't need to be referring so many kids to precal.

Agreed. I've seen those Spectrum Reading-type exercises that are two pages long and measure comprehension with multiple choice questions. I think of this as a sound bite approach to reading. It certainly doesn't teach any children how to follow a narrative and *think* about stuff.

Unfortunately, the multiple-choice stuff is too common in colleges too; I teach at a local college and see a lot of MC exams floating around. I see MC exams as teaching factoids and not encouraging students to learn to reason with information and to use it to create new ideas.

Val