Home Needs to Hold Up Their End

I taught first grade in 1975.   My first graders played, took naps, had snacks, learned songs.  I taught them their numbers and letters and they began to learn to read using basil readers where Jack, Janet, Tip, and Mitten roamed.  I have subbed in first grade a number of times this year.  Today's first graders read and write complete sentences, add and subtract, learn about solid geometry, and are tested on a regular basis. No more naps & not much time to play.  They do get a snack but during snack time, they have a worksheet to work on.  Yes they are little sponges & Yes much more is expected of them.

In a first grade class you'll find children who can draw well enough  that their people have fingers and toes & all kinds of details.  These same kids can write a complete sentence, filling a page with their complete thoughts.  You'll also have children in the same room who draw stick figures or circles with eyes as their people and who still can't write their names.  Each night, the children take their folders home with all the day's work completed. The first group comes in every morning with their folders empty making room for the day's work.  The second group's folder gets thicker every day as the day's work goes unchecked.

The message is clear.  Those children who come from homes where education is valued, where their learning is nurtured, where they are read to and spent quality time with, will grow and blossom.  But those that are left to fend for themselves, who come from a home where education is left to the schools, where learning means being able to dress themselves and fix their own lunches, will continue drawing stick figures while trying to figure out how to spell their names.

Values are taught in the home.  All schools can affectively do is reinforce the good values.  A child who becomes an ethical person, who has a good work ethic, who learns to love his/her fellow man, and learns to be kind, learns all that in his home environment.  Those that learn to be mean, lazy, and have poor ethics, have gotten their early training in their home environment.  It is reinforced by the friends they choose.  Schools are fighting the good fight to try and instil good work ethics and values but are fighting a losing battle when these children go home each night.

The best way to fix societies ills are to turn the children over to schools at a earlier age.  To mandate pre- school and affective parenting classes.    Children who live in a house where good parenting is lacking & have poor role models, many times make the same mistakes with their children. 

Schools are only a part of the solution.  Putting them under a microscope and holding them to higher standards then we hold parents and society to is not going to cut it.  For Home & School to work together means holding home to the same standards we hold schools to.  Finally Values & Character matter.  We can't sacrifice them for higher scores.

I think we did a better job of that back in 1975.