Dan Triplett wrote to Carl Bogardus on 10-29-96:
-> About kids in England being one year ahead of American kids....I find
-> this hard to believe.  We have kids in
-> prekindergarten.....developmental preschools and developmental
-> kindergartens.  Kids do what kids are able to do at that age
-> (cognitively, socially, physically) and no early schooling will
-> change the developmental sequence or hurry it up.
I'm not sure that I buy into your idea that no amount of tutoring or
intervention can "hurry up" a kid's developmental stage.
I know that in math I often encounter kids who seem unable to deal with
abstract concepts. Yet, if they come in for regular tutoring after
school for an extended length of time, not only do most of them manage
to cope, but for some of them I actually see the "ah-ha" take place to
where they are competent at handling this type of thing, and eventually
don't need to come in for help any more. Had they not come in for extra
help, they certainly wouldn't have improved and been able to
"developmentally handle" these abstract concepts. The tutoring seems to
have made the difference. (I'm sure you are familiar with Bloom's
taxonomy, and being able to generalize and handle abstractions is a
higher level skill than working concrete examples and manipulations and
calculations. Certainly such a student has reached a higher
developmental stage, and it seems to have been brought about by the
tutoring.)
As for reading readiness and kids who enter Pre-K or Kinder with
different stages of being ready to learn...
I thought that much of this (the child's readiness) was attributed to
the environment that they experienced at home and whether anyone read to
them and counted with them and engaged in dialogue with them, etc..
Truly some kids come to school with very little language experience (as
you have noted here previously) and are not well equipped to learn to
read. Whereas others come from homes where they have been immersed in
language and reading and books and are quite ready. Wouldn't you term
this some type of intervention which can actually make a difference in
how quickly a child progresses from one developmental stage to the next?
(I would.) A child who is kept in a dark closet for years and years and
given only basic physical needs for existence and now mental stimulation
is hardly likely to progress from one developmental stage to the next.
I think that it is very niave to say that early schooling will not hurry
a child up in a developmental sequence. I think that such thinking is
essentially an excuse for us to think that students who are not doing
well could not do better and cannot be helped. So we will dumb down our
standards and let these kids get by on less and not try to spend tax
payer dollars on improving their abilities through special learning
programs and tutors and interventions.
Is this a better topic of debate than math texts? I'm sure that others
are not avoiding posting here because of the WL thread, etc.., but
rather (as in my case!) due to lack of time.
Sheila
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