Teaching Skills Before Their Time?

Oct. 14, 2011 - PRLog -- Bob Watson, a high school algebra teacher, sees this in his classroom all of the time.  “When you have students who walk through your door at the age of fourteen and sit down having been taught all about variables and other spatial and abstract skills, most teachers think that’s great.   However, when they are being introduced to these topics in the third or fourth grade, many of them are simply not developed enough to be able to think in that way.”

Indeed, many teachers have seen that algebra and geometry skills are being added into their curriculum, where before mathematics was simply a question of being able to work strictly with numbers.  

“When a child is around 11 years old, they simply cannot handle abstract thought,” Watson says.  “Introducing algebraic fundamentals at so early an age can do nothing but hurt them.”

He has even seen these problems affecting the teaching of other fundamental skills.  “Some of my freshmen claim to have been told to memorize number facts instead of multiplication tables.  It’s great for them to know things like ‘every other even number is divisible by four,’ but when it means that they can’t tell me what three times five is without their calculator, they’re going to struggle with the materials in higher level classes.”

There are many educators in the world who see these kinds of changes in all of their classes.  Reading comprehension is being assessed as early as kindergarten, when students have traditionally been focusing entirely on decoding and deciphering words and meanings, much less the meaning of a whole story that they need to read.  

What is the reason for this?  Many teachers say that educational reform is the biggest culprit.  Standards-based educational goals are great for measuring benchmarks, but because many schools fear the consequences of failing to hit their benchmarks, they are introducing standards years ahead of time in order to prepare. Other times, students are being required to study a wide variety of mathematical topics shallowly instead of focusing on a few important ones and studying them deeply.


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