This was so interesting...It makes 'are you smarter than a 5th grader' look like a joke! http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/12872/dumbing-down-the-proof/
Wow. No wonder people so long ago did so well in life even though they only had a 6th-8th grade education.
My favorite part is how the math is all word problems. It's how math was taught in schools until the 1950's. I think we loose a lot more than mere math skills by teaching our children with meaningless math than math skills. Logic and reasoning is lost when you are taught with nothing but 345 x 68 Instead of if you have 345 students who need 68 crayons each, how many do you need? ...and why people don't know how much something costs if it's labeled 5/$3 And why I'm CONSTANTLY messing up cashiers by handing them change after they put in how much money I paid. They are sooooo stumped! I think it also fuels the "how will I use this in real life?" question kids have about math nowadays....
I also noticed that the math was word problems. Math is one of those subjects that has been really dumbed down. I found an old textbook from the 80's that was for 6th grade and I looked at a current textbook from 6th grade at our local ps and I was amazed that the content in the old textbook was far more advanced. I didn't get a great math education because I wasn't taught in a way I could understand. I got C's all the way through high school in math. Now that I am homeschooling my kids I am re-learning everything and I am finding fun ways to help my kids learn the math that I always struggled with. I think it's funny that my dh is a math genius and because of that he can't help our kids because he can't explain it in terms that they understand. Maybe when they getto high school he will be able to help.
I got a grammar workbook for my 1st grader, and it's labeled as a 2nd grade book. We had already covered most of the material in it. Well, we got to the part about simple sentences, and the workbook calls the parts of a sentence the "naming part" and the "telling part", rather than subject and predicate. SO ANNOYING. I crossed out all their "parts" and wrote in subject and predicate.
We placed my oldest into a cyber-school for her Senior year, which meant she was REQUIRED to take the Ohio Graduation Test. She went into it cold (because we thought we had another year, and found out on Thursday that it needed to be taken on Monday!). She said that Phillip, 6th grade at the time, could have easily passed it!!!
My moan is that children today have too many fill in the blank workbooks. For every subject from age 5 I had a text book and an exercise book and I copied questions out before answering them. That also helped with handwriting.
Didn't help with MY handwriting, lol! But yeah, I know what you mean. I studied Bloom's Taxonomy in my college education classes. Tests seem to be all multiple choice, and that's a "lower" thinking skill than even short answers!
Jackie, my older children say that the Ohio Graduation Test was the single most insulting thing they were ever asked to do in public school.
