Skip to main content

Esteem Engine

imageDespite a few kinks, I’ve found a lot of great resources on Evan-Moor’s site thanks to my TeacherFileBox.com subscription.  But then there are resources I come across like this one, a reproducible book that teachers can print and cut out or kids can colour and read.

It’s only a few pages, but it’s from the school of thought that children should be praised and rewarded for even the most prosaic of ordinary deeds.  In this case, that means the child brags, “I am amazing in what I can do – I can open and shut.  I can sing and chew.”

Well, yay.

image I’m wading through John Taylor Gatto’s An Underground History of American Education, which is far more dense than either Dumbing Us Down or Weapons of Mass Instruction, and “instructional” materials like this stand out ever more starkly as proof of his thesis that the education system is not really designed to educate at all – it’s designed to unprecedentedly “pen” children into schools for however-many years while preparing them to be – not active, contributing citizens, but “human resources,” happy consuming cogs in the machine.

I am not given to conspiracy theorizing, and neither is Gatto (believe it or not), but when children are given materials like this as part of a reading or, worse, a social studies curriculum (“All About Me” “My World” and “Amazing Me” would not be atypical themes for a Social Studies unit for Grade One), it isn’t really surprising that they graduate high school unable to read or understand the world on a level that even average people could without any schooling 200 years ago.

Makes me glad I’m not a teacher, maybe.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

I love your comments!

Popular posts from this blog

לימודי קודש/Limudei Kodesh Copywork & Activity Printables

Welcome to my Limudei Kodesh / Jewish Studies copywork and activity printables page.  As of June 2013, I am slowly but surely moving all my printables over to 4shared because Google Docs / Drive is just too flaky for me. What you’ll find here: Weekly Parsha Copywork More Parsha Activities More Chumash / Tanach Activities Yom Tov Copywork & Activities Tefillah Copywork Pirkei Avos / Pirkei Avot Jewish Preschool Resources Other printables! For General Studies printables and activities, including Hebrew-English science resources and more, click here . For Miscellaneous homeschool helps and printables, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you just want to say Thank You, here’s a
27 comments
Read more

Hebrew/ עברית & English General Studies Printables

For Jewish Studies, including weekly parsha resources and copywork, click here . If you use any of my worksheets, activities or printables, please leave a comment or email me at Jay3fer “at” gmail “dot” com, to link to your blog, to tell me what you’re doing with it, or just to say hi!  If you want to use them in a school, camp or co-op setting, please email me (remove the X’s) for rates. If you enjoy these resources, please consider buying my weekly parsha book, The Family Torah :  the story of the Torah, written to be read aloud – or any of my other wonderful Jewish books for kids and families . English Worksheets & Printables: (For Hebrew, click here ) Science :  Plants, Animals, Human Body Math   Ambleside :  Composers, Artists History Geography Language & Literature     Science General Poems for Elemental Science .  Original Poems written by ME, because the ones that came with Elemental Science were so awful.  Three pages are included:  one page with two po
10 comments
Read more

What do we tell our kids about Chabad and “Yechi”?

If I start by saying I really like Chabad, and adore the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, z"l, well... maybe you already know where I'm headed. Naomi Rivka has been asking lately what I think about Chabad.  She asks, in part, because she already knows how I feel.  She already knows I’m bothered, though to her, it’s mostly about “liking” and “not liking.”  I wish things were that simple. Our little neighbourhood in Israel has a significant Chabad presence, and Chabad conducts fairly significant outreach within the community.  Which sounds nice until you realize that this is a religious neighbourhood, closed on Shabbos, where some huge percentage of people are shomer mitzvos.  Sure, it’s mostly religious Zionist, and there are a range of observances, for sure, but we’re pretty much all religious here in some way or another. So at that point, this isn’t outreach but inreach .  Convincing people who are religious to be… what? A lot of Chabad’s efforts here are focused on kids, including a
Post a Comment
Read more