A concerned friend of a second grade child sent me an email the child’s teacher recently sent the parents. The friend wanted to get my impressions. Here was my immediate reaction to the email (which you will have a chance to read not just once, but twice): my body tightened. I felt sorrow for the child. I felt a combination of disgust and despair that the teacher clearly has no idea how dull and dispiriting this classroom and teaching approach sounds. I was curious to see what Natalie and William thought. I printed out the letter and asked them to jot down their responses. I’ve pasted in the teacher’s email…
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Great Ideas from Finnish Schools
I enjoy learning how “school” is approached around the world and found this interesting article Schools We Can Envy, about Finnish Schools, in the New York Review of Books. Here’s the link to the article: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/08/schools-we-can-envy/ Here are a few sections I marked as especially interesting: To an American observer, the most remarkable fact about Finnish education is that students do not take any standardized tests until the end of high school. They do take tests, but the tests are drawn up by their own teachers, not by a multinational testing corporation. The Finnish nine-year comprehensive school is a “standardized testing-free zone,” where children are encouraged “to know, to create, and…
