Peter Greene: The Best Laid Plans of Grown-Ups Go Oft Awry

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1. Yvonne Siu-Runyan says:

   January 29, 2018 at 11:20 am

   Love THIS! So TRUE. This is what scares me about preschool education. I hope preschool is not just laden with electronics and the curriculum pushed down. Then for sure we will insure a nation of well (fill in the blanks).

   This is uplifting.

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2. Lenny Rothbart says:

   January 29, 2018 at 12:10 pm

   This makes me think of 2 things:

   1) when my daughter was around 2, in a Florida hotel lobby, with my father watching her, in awe of her sense of purpose as she arranged sheets of newspaper on a coffee table according to some internal process only she understood — that supports the article’s premise.

   2) my wife, a retired NYC school social worker, told me about a school she’d worked in where by design they didn’t teach “reading, writing & ‘rithmetic” in favor of letting “self-directed” students play in the sandbox (or other activities chosen according to their whims) all day, with disastrous results (they couldn’t read or do basic math – what a surprise!) — that suggests that some guidance is appropriate & that any basically good idea can be carried too far.

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   • dianeravitch says:

     January 29, 2018 at 1:11 pm

     Lenny,

     A healthy balance is best but under no circumstances do preschoolers need academic instruction.

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     • Lenny Rothbart says:

       January 29, 2018 at 1:58 pm

       Diane,

       My wife & I agree wholeheartedly about preschoolers; the students at the school I mentioned where my wife had worked was post-kindergarten.

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     • Lenny Rothbart says:

       January 29, 2018 at 2:00 pm

       oops: were post-K
       🙂

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3. Mary Horsley says:

   January 29, 2018 at 7:56 pm

   I wrote this back in May 2014 on my voice memos on my phone. I finally have it on paper.

   A Modern Fable written while driving home from work one day…..…

                                           The Birth of a Data Point
   
    The Board of Education advertised, “Come here and get good children!” So the young couple went to  the Board of Education who gave them a test about having a baby. So they took the test and nine months later, they had a baby. But their baby didn’t look like any other baby. It didn’t have arms and legs or eyes or a nose. It did have a mouth, a mouth that it could eat with, but that was it. It was one big dot! That was all it was, it was a dot. Well, they loved their baby, so much! They named her Dot. 
   
     Now, these parents had their baby, Dot. She did pretty good for the first few months but then they began to worry. How is our baby going to get around in life? How is our  baby going to walk and run  like the other children? So, they took Baby Dot to the Doctor. The Doctor examined Baby Dot and saw that she didn’t have any arms or legs or eyes, he didn’t seemed to be very concerned. He said, “Well, what you have here is a dot. What can you do with a dot?”  That’s exactly what we were trying to figure out, Mister! 
   
   “A dot gets put into a box. It stays there for the rest of it’s life.“  A box? A dot gets put into a box? “Yes, or at the end of a sentence, either one.”  But we don’t want our Baby Dot to be put into a box for the rest of her life!  “No matter, you have given birth to a dot. So, you know what this is? This is no ordinary baby. This is a Data Point.“     A what?   “A Data Point! It’s exactly what the schools desire. Cause you see, when your child gets to be two years old and starts school.”     Two????    “Yes, they start about two now. All they have to do is put your little data point into a box and give it tests for the next 14 years!”    You mean, they are not going to teach my child anything?  “Oh, no, we don’t need to teach anymore. Teach is no longer a word. Nowadays, we just put the data points into boxes. We give them tests and at the end of fourteen years we graduate them out into the world.” But how will our child survive if she doesn’t know how to do things? She won’t know anything! “Well, your child will survive because there are lots of other data points out there, too. They’ll roll around in some kind of automated device, they’ll push a button, then go home, and get up the next morning and roll around again and push another button…..”
   
    Well, that Mom and Dad were very disappointed. They took Baby Dot home and they rolled her around the floor a bit and played with her. Then they did something that was so different, that people just didn’t understand. They took their Baby Dot, put her in a backpack, took some stuff to eat, and they left. They left their home and went to a place far, far away so that their Baby Dot would have freedom to roll up and down the hill and to smell the flowers.   
   
   
                                      The End
   

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