First Grade My A**

So anyway, now that I have completed the list of Ava's doctors and their various locations and appointment frequencies, I can bitch about what's really bothering me: the ridiculous standards for students in schools. Now I live in CT so I can speak only about CT. I don't know what things are like elsewhere. I can also speak only about K and grade one, since those are the only 2 grades my daughter has experienced so far.

Let's start with K. Kindergarten is no longer a place for kids to learn to socialize with other kids, to learn to follow a set of group rules, or to learn to solve problems, like whose turn it is to use the play kitchen. This is a shame, since these are lifelong skills and very important ones, if you ask me. All the toys are gone. The play kitchen and Lego table are covered with reading assessments, math assessments, and stacks of word cards. Ava had to learn to read a simple book and 40 sight words (words that can't be sounded out) by the end of K. Now considering that some of these kids are FOUR when they enter K, this seems a tad much. Some of them can barely sit for a story or to have trouble zipping up their pants, and they are supposed to learn to read? And they have to learn basic addition, subtraction and "geometry".

Well enough about K...onto my real rant. So here we are in grade one, which I taught for several years before No Child Left Behind came into play. At the end of grade one a child is expected to know at least 125 sight words; be able to SPELL these sight words, among other words; be able to read what used to be a second grade level book; and to do 50 addition and subtraction problems in 5 minutes.

For some reason, maybe because we've read to Ava lot over the years, or maybe because she's naturally better at language tasks than at math tasks (like this writer) Ava is holding her own in reading. She can read pretty well because she is good at her sight words. However, she has trouble "re-telling" a story. What does that mean you ask? Well she has to tell what happened at the beginning, in the middle and at the end. This is naturally a difficult task for young children because they haven't really yet learned he concept of time. So why do they focus so much on this task? Because the CT Mastery Test (CMT) focuses on re-telling as a comprehension skill. Therefore in order to pass the "comprehension" part of a reading assessment a child has to be able to re-tell a story. It doesn't matter if they can read the book perfectly and answer other comprehension questions (such as a character's name, or the setting of the book), it matters only that they can retell it. This is just plain wrong. There are so many other ways to assess whether or not a child understand what he or she reads. But, because the CMT has become the be-all and end-all of how we grade our children, that's the skill that has become the focus.

As you can see this bothers me a great deal. Reading is supposed to be a pleasurable task. Isn't it more important for kids to enjoy reading and to learn to read, than it is for them to worry about passing a test? I loved to read as a kid, and i love to read to Ava. We laugh over books and enjoy them very much. Yet every night I am supposed to have her retell me a story so she can practice for school. Yeah that's fun at bedtime. And you think this pisses me off? Wait until the blog about math facts...