Science? Social Studies? Art and music? Those were “specials” and would just have to wait. First it was 90 minutes, then two hours, then a second literacy block was added at the end of the school day. My school’s “literacy block” was constantly expanding to take up an extraordinary amount of the school day.
The old bromide seemed true: First I learned to read, then I read to learn.īy contrast, reading instruction never ended in my fifth-grade classroom, which was filled with struggling readers, all black and Hispanic children growing up in America’s poorest congressional district. Nowhere was this more true than in “language arts,” itself a term of recent coinage to replace the perfectly useful “reading and writing.” I remembered very little explicit instruction in those subjects beyond the first years of elementary school. Many of the “best practices” I learned and was expected to use with my students bore no resemblance to my distant memories of elementary school. I became a second-career South Bronx fifth-grade teacher in 2002 when I was nearly 40 years old and decades removed from my own elementary-school days.
Education is sloppy with demonstrably mistaken beliefs that warp classroom practice to children’s detriment, particularly in the rock-bottom basic task of public education: teaching children to read. Neither is there any reason to believe children are “right-brained” or “left-brained,” or use only 10 percent of their brain. That is, when you can kill them at all.Ĭonsider “learning styles.” Cognitive scientists have searched in vain for evidence to support the common belief that one child is a visual learner, another auditory, while a third learns best through a hands-on, “kinesthetic” approach. Bad ideas in teaching are like monsters in horror movies: No matter how many times you kill them, they don’t stay dead.
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