Episode 152: Curriculum Planning, max speed (Wed., May 29, 2024)

Episode 152:  Curriculum Planning, max speed   (Wed., May 29, 2024)


Stop teaching nothing all day.  Teach all the wonderful things children need to know and want to know. Not to mention, you'll have more fun. Here are about 50 ideas  you can use this year.

 Deliberate Dumbing Down is not an ethical approach. Nor is keeping children in a vacuum so they never grow up.

Smart Content Makes Kids Smarter
http://www.improve-education.org/id88.html

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Podcasts are presented as both voice and print  (i.e., TRANSCRIPT)

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Visit  Education Reform 
for a 2-page explanation
of what everyone can do.

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Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price

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Bio: Bruce Deitrick Price is a novelist, artist, poet, and education reformer.

(For a list of literary titles, visit Lit4u.com. 
Under construction but worth a look.)

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LET'S FIX EDUCATION:  OVERVIEW

 Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.

Transcript

LET'S FIX EDUCATION       by        Bruce Deitrick Price

Episode 152       Wed., May 29, 2024

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Curriculum Planning, max speed

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All too often, public schools embrace the strategy of teaching as little academic content as possible. Instead, teach some SEL, more propaganda, lies from CRT, gameplay, another shot of  Adderall, and stare out the window.

Why not do some real teaching?. The world is full of wonderful things that children want to know about. 

Here’s my favorite story of educational half-wittery. Told that first graders should learn the names of the oceans, a gang of principals and superintendents objected: why would children need to know such useless information???

My  mind runs in the opposite direction. What couldn’t we teach them, with just a little effort? I say: any subject you can teach to ordinary, middle-IQ adults, you can teach to young children.

A few years back I compiled a long list of ideas for my site Improve-Education.org. The site has been damaged for several years but I’ve just discovered that the article I love so much is available on the Internet, so please look at it now. You'll find a lot of good ideas. You can plan curriculum quickly

QED: Teaching something is better than teaching nothing. Starting anywhere is better than not starting. Here's edited transcript of :  Smart Content Makes Kids Smarter

“LEVEL A: Get Them Thinking [8 categories, abbreviated]

1. DIAGRAMS AND SIMPLE MAPS. A diagram of the classroom, a map of the school grounds -- conceptually they are the same. The concept of scale--let’s say you have a diagram where 1” equals 1’--is easy to grasp if you can see and measure the distances…. 

2:  GAMES AND RULES. Explore the concept of structure and of working creatively within rules….You can segue to street signs and traffic lights: highways work only because people are all observing the same rules…

3.  RIDDLES AND PUZZLES. …..Find simple riddles, puzzles, and mazes to pull kids into the pleasure of solving a mystery. Also, there are knock-knock jokes, where the second question (“Sam and Janet who?”) poses a riddle of sorts…

4. GEARS AND CLOCKS. Everyone is in awe of the tiny parts inside a watch. Compare those tiny parts to the big gears in, for example, a winch; and point out that it’s all the same thing: ways of moving energy around. The spring, for example, is stored energy, like a battery…

5. DICE AND PROBABILITY….. One interesting phenomenon is that two sixes and two ones are very rare combinations, whereas sevens are common. You can show all of these things on a chart.

6. A PICTURE OF ANYTHING. Find a beautiful picture of a place, a building, a monument, a battlefield, a river, ANYTHING as long as it’s an interesting picture, and then invite the children to walk around inside this picture, and comment on the details….A teacher with imagination and knowledge can take almost any picture and open up a new world.

7. BY FOOT; SAILING SHIP; HORSE; TRAIN, CAR; OR PLANE. Talk about transportation over the centuries…..

8. EASY AESOP’S FABLES. Remember the crow figuring out how to drink the water in the jar? People are still fascinated by the crow’s cleverness. How about teasing this dilemma for a few days. What can the crow possibly do? Let kids offer their own theories…. Pick a new fable each week and have fun with it. I suspect that Aesop teaches more critical thinking than the contrived discussions often used in public schools.  

LEVEL B:  A Little More Complexity [7 more categories]

LEVEL C:  Advanced Thinking [15 more categories]”

IN GENERAL: The problem with many schools is that they have abandoned facts and knowledge. To justify this, they have lied about what kids can do. 

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Smart Content Makes Kids Smarter
http://www.improve-education.org/id88.html
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I've been thinking about these matters for many years, as revealed here: https://facesoflearning.net/bruce-prices-learning-story/

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• Sad truth #1: the Education Establishment has a hammerlock on K-12. Very little change or improvement is allowed. Only the jargon changes.
• That means every episode on this podcast is timeless. Scroll through the titles, pick some episodes at random, and you will see for yourself. They're all today's news.

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