Laura’s son was assigned to do a book report on a biography. These days, that means filling out a worksheet and making a styrofoam head mounted on a paper tube, with clothes and accessories, of the biographee.
I drove around New Jersey for an hour looking for styrofoam balls, because I just don’t have those things around the house. I unwound an entire roll of paper towels. I drove Jonah to the public library, because he managed to forget the book again. He wanted a book on Julius Caesar. No Caesar, but three books on the Backstreet Boys. Settled for Daniel Boone.After dinner, we finally read the book and make the head of Boone.
Click on the link to see a photo of Styrofoam Dan’l.
It looks like an Abu Ghraib torture victim, doesn’t it? It didn’t help that when our backs were turned, Ian gouged a few holes in the head with the scissors.
I hate arts and crafts. I suffer post-traumatic stress from my attempt to make a George Washington wig for my daughter for a third-grade project. I don’t get the point either. What does a student learn about Daniel Boone by sticking a styrofoam ball on a cardboard tube? Why not spend the time reading more books and learning to communicate with words? I swear I was buying poster board for my daughter right up through 12th grade AP English.
Oh, and now I’m flashing back to my daughter’s 8th grade build-a-molecule science project. Or was it an atom? Well, I did learn one lesson: Use styrofoam.
Homework should always be tasks that the student can and should do on his own using standard materials. This stuff is a waste of the student’s time and a waste of the parent’s time. Parents should not get suckered into it.
So, after that whole project, the son will have the ability to create poor models of famous people… the details of their lives are unecessary.
Precisely why I don’t assign artsy fartsy projects or anything close to it. Guess I’m not being fair to the “kinaesthetic” learners.
Fortunately, the one and only time I ever had to do anything like this was fun – for me. In an English class, I had to do research to draw the characters from a Shakespeare play in proper period dress. I can’t remember what the other kids did. I have no idea what they did if they couldn’t draw.
Every other class of mine assigned homework that was (gasp) directly relevant. That’ll soon be a crime. It violates the rights of the cognitively variant. (”Different” has now been declared un-PC. Take note.)
I can imagine that some students could better understand how molecules bond by building a model. But for others, doing that would be more of a life and death battle with a Skil knife than a learning experience.
Give kids and their parents a choice. Those who “learn by doing” could choose teachers who specialize in model building, diaoramas, etc. They’d also be able to learn arts and crafts in working with their parents.
Those who learn by reading could choose teachers who teach courses with more reading and fewer projects. Not all kids (or teachers) are good at multiple kinds of learning (or teaching)simultaneously.
Looks like ole Dan’l is carrying a drawing of a firearm.
That ought to be good for a visit by the local SWAT squad, a two week expulsion and court-ordered psychological counselling.
Oh the humanity!
Give kids and their parents a choice. Those who “learn by doing” could choose teachers who specialize in model building, diaoramas, etc. They’d also be able to learn arts and crafts in working with their parents.
Words of wisdom!
And of course these kinaesthetic / “learn by doing” teachers and courses could assume differing levels of material support and parental involvement. Some of these can provide a full workshop in the classroom, so the students need not do their work at home.
I was something of a kinaesthetic learner myself with little talent for literature*, even though I was gifted. So there goes another stereotype, that model building is for dummies.
* – I loved science fiction and liked mysteries, though. Too much “literature” was, during the leading edge of PC, dreary stories of medieval peasants and farmers suffering through plagues, famines, floods, and the like.
I would plump for some choice. The only thing I learned was to be envious of the kids who could draw or sculpt. More than forty years of experience later, I still cannot use scissors to cut a piece of paper in a straight line! On the other hand, I was reading magazines and newspapers (and my sister’s Nancy Drew novels) by second grade.
And Indigo Warrior, about “literature” – right on! All I remember of The House of Seven Gables is that I stopped reading when (I think Chapter 2) there was a multi-page description of the blackness of a kettle… I might appreciate it now, but in fifth grade it was torture.
I took a course in college on Science Fiction literature, and darn it, but there is as much literay quality in those works as any other genre. SciFi writers and readers suffer the prejudices of the media and masses who view them as nothing more than geeks, when those writers and readers have simply been beyond the cutting edge of technology.
It’s not so much the masses, but the media, and the arty elites that hate SF. Some of the best selling books and movies of the last 20 years have been science fiction and fantasy.
The hallmarks of classic SF are not so much science and technology, but optimism. (I refer to classic SF not New Wave or cyberpunk) By optimism, I don’t mean “the world is a good place”, but “it can be made good” and “we don’t have to put up with this *%#&@% any longer.”
So-called “literature” is pessimistic, sometimes to the point of outright masochism. This applies equally to the “Dead White Male” classics and their post-modern replacements. Where is the sense of wonder in “The House of Seven Gables” or “The Grapes of Wrath”. Life is hard enough, for a child even more so; so why not read something escapist that tells a good story filled with excitement, wonder, and victory over evil?