{"id":2751,"date":"2013-02-01T16:41:06","date_gmt":"2013-02-01T23:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=2751"},"modified":"2013-02-02T08:27:43","modified_gmt":"2013-02-02T15:27:43","slug":"what-no-smartboards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/?p=2751","title":{"rendered":"What, no smartboards?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"verses\"<\/a><\/p>\n

At a time when public discussions of education seem dominated by technological considerations \u2014 Should we give kindergartners iPads, or should we wait until they enter first grade? Should we ban printed books from public schools by 2017 or by 2019? When will Tom Friedman write about MOOCs again? \u2014 it seems only fair, purely in the interest of balance, to allow a different voice to be heard. So here is Helen Vendler, the gifted poetry critic, describing<\/a> the perfect grammar school:<\/p>\n

I would propose, for the ultimate maintenance of the humanities and all other higher learning, an elementary-school curriculum that would make every ordinary child a proficient reader by the end of the fourth grade \u2014 not to pass a test, but rather to ensure progressive expansion of awareness.\u00a0Other than mathematics, the curriculum of my ideal elementary school would be wholly occupied, all day, every day, with \u201creading\u201d in its very fullest sense. Let us imagine the day divided into short 20-minute \u201cperiods.\u201d Here are 14 daily such periods of \u201creading,\u201d each divisible into two 10-minute periods, or extended to a half-hour, as seems most practical to teachers in different grades. Many such periods can be spent outside, to break up the tedium of long sitting for young children. The pupils would:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. engage in choral singing of traditional melodic song (folk songs, country songs, rounds);<\/li>\n
  2. be read to from poems and stories beyond their own current ability to read;<\/li>\n
  3. mount short plays \u2014 learning roles, rehearsing, and eventually performing;<\/li>\n
  4. march or dance to counting rhymes, poems, or music, \u201creading\u201d rhythms and sentences with their bodies;<\/li>\n
  5. read aloud, chorally, to the teacher;<\/li>\n
  6. read aloud singly to the teacher, and recite memorized poems either chorally or singly;<\/li>\n
  7. notice, and describe aloud, the reproduced images of powerful works of art, with the accompanying story told by the teacher (Orpheus, the three kings at Bethlehem, etc.);<\/li>\n
  8. read silently, and retell in their own words, for discussion, the story they have read;<\/li>\n
  9. expand their vocabulary to specialized registers through walks where they would learn the names of trees, plants, flowers, and fruits;<\/li>\n
  10. visit museums of art and natural history to learn to name exotic or extinct things, or visit an orchestra to discover the names and sounds of orchestral instruments;<\/li>\n
  11. learn conjoined prefixes, suffixes, and roots as they learn new words;<\/li>\n
  12. tell stories of their own devising;<\/li>\n
  13. compose words to be sung to tunes they already know; and<\/li>\n
  14. if they are studying a foreign language, carry out these practices for it as well.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The only homework, in addition to mathematics, would be additional reading practices over the weekends (to be checked by a brief Monday discussion by students).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

    Because Vendler’s plan doesn’t fit our current frame for thinking about primary education, it won’t \u2014 indeed can’t \u2014 be taken into account. Our reaction to it is that of the mythical robot: does not compute.<\/p>\n

    UPDATE: As for dread middle-schoolers, Susan Sontag had a plan<\/a>.<\/p>\n

    Illustration from a 1951 edition of <\/em>A Child’s Garden of Verses.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    At a time when public discussions of education seem dominated by technological considerations \u2014 Should we give kindergartners iPads, or should we wait until they enter first grade? Should we ban printed books from public schools by 2017 or by 2019? When will Tom Friedman write about MOOCs again? \u2014 it seems only fair, purely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2751"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2764,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2751\/revisions\/2764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.roughtype.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}