Kids can't learn all day long in a classroom. I don't know why we expect them to be able to do it remotely. School has always been 1/3 learning 2/3 baby sitting.
When my parents were kids, they only went to kindergarten for half a day.
When my parents were kids, they only went to kindergarten for half a day.
John Taylor Gatto is an award-winning public school teacher who was honest and brave enough to concur with you:
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
Sounds like it is more about learning to keep your head down and this award winning teacher is very aware of that
Wait, hang on, is kindergarten all-day now? I was in kindergarten in... 1992, and it was half a day.
I have no doubt if I'd stayed there (K-6), I would have been close to fluent. After lunch was a full immersion in French. My teacher was a native speaker from Belgium. I remember having mastered counting in French, which is quite interesting considering most kindergarteners probably have not mastered counting in English.
As for an anecdote, I had one friend who stayed there through 4th grade. He still lists French as a language on LinkedIn.
[Edit] By master counting I mean having mastered the language algorithm, so to speak. Once you can count to 100, it's pretty easy to get to 200, or all the way to 999 with the knowledge at hand. It's not until one thousand that you need a new word. And, IIRC, French has a _very_ mechanical counting mechanism whereby it was even simpler. Perhaps a native speaker can weigh in here?
Like English there are special words for some of the “teens” numbers, which is the least of the troubles. Compare deux (two) and douze (twelve) to huit (eight) and dix-huit (ten-eight, or eighteen). Mildly annoying, but we have special cases for “eleven” and “twelve” in English too, no big deal.
Then some of the tens are weird too. While quatre (four) and quarante (forty) are clear, six (six) and soixante (sixty) are a bit tricky, while deux (two) and vingt (twenty) don’t seem to be related. These are then combined in uneven ways, with twenty one being “vingt et un” (twenty and one), while other numbers using the hyphenated form of vingt-cinq (twenty-five). Again, annoying, but manageable.
And then there are the extra special case numbers like seventy, which in France is apparently soixante-dix, or literally “sixty ten”. In some countries this is a much more reasonable “septante”, but not in France. The French actually count their seventies like “soixante-dix-sept”, which translates into “sixty seventeen”, or seventy seven in English.
And then there’s eighty. Holy crap, the number eighty. In French eighty is apparently “quatre-vingts”, or “four twenties”. Whoever came up with that was a brilliant sadist. Requiring some basic multiplication just to count to eighty is downright evil stuff, especially for young kids. Ditto for whoever made ninety “quatre-vingts-dix” (four twenties ten).
Note: I am not a native French speaker; I’m just learning.
In Spanish it's more or less the same as French when it comes to naming numbers, except more predictable spelling and it's base-10: dos (two), doce (twelve), ocho (eight), dieciocho (eighteen), ochenta (eighty), noventa (nighty), cien (one hundred) and so on.
In the case of e.g dos (two) and veinte (twenty), were there doesn't seem to be any relationship, the root of veinte is "dwi" (dos), but it lost a sound somewhere along the way. Two, dos, duo, dual, double, all share the same indo-european root.
Excuse me but I understand vigesimal (base-20) like a potency. The French are not following through on that at all.
If you have a look at Mayan math you will understand how to do "proper" vigesimal.
With proper I mean that what we consider single digit numbers (0-9) which is a range of ten, to be the basis of single digits.
The Mayans actually could represent first twenty (0-19) as one "single digit".
Their idea of numbers was just much more composable than ours is.
I’ll try to give a short explanation:
There are three "words" which make Mayan numbers. A dot, a line and a shell.
The dot represents a one, the bar represents a five, the shell represents a zero.
5 dots make a line (similar to Roman)
One dot above one shell makes twenty. (1 * 20). Like we consider a one and a zero (10) to be greater than 9.
One dot above one shell above one shell makes 400 (1 * 20 * 20)
One dot above one dot above one dot makes 421 ((1 * 20 * 20) + (1 * 20) + (1 * 1))
Compared to the potency of this mathematical language the idea that French are using vigesimal is laughable, because they only denote their 80 like this.
It’s quite fascinating how logical and functional their math was, they were using the potency of zeros long before we Europeans discovered that.
And small world. My wife hails from Forsyth county.
I've never been there and it isn't exactly close to the Ontario or Quebec provinces of Canada.
Kidding. No, and they pronounce the city of Versailles, IN ver-sales.
I remember my mother saying how a neighbour forgot it was his turn to pick up me and my fellow neighbourhood classmates. It was at 4pm after he was off work and I'm pretty sure I would have started at 8am or 9am.
https://www.nea.org/assets/docs/18001_Full-Day_Kindergarten_...
The TL;DR being that all day Kindergarten is strongly associated with better educational outcomes. As a result, many districts are moving towards full day.
I don't think it was really a hard choice, from their perspective. "Do you want to spend 3 hours having fun with friends every day, or 6 hours?" That's right up there with, "Would you rather have one cookie or two cookies?"
This tight grip on American kids looks extremely stressful and harmful (helicopter/bubble wrap parenting, structuring every waking hour with classes and extracurriculars, driving them everywhere, never leaving them to themselves etc).
When kids play they learn a whole lot more about the world, social interactions, their bodies and what not. Kids can learn some things quite early and it is not a bad idea to teach them early either a second language or to read early or some other useful skills. But the problem is this has been exaggerated greatly and way too much is pushed on them.
/s
On the bright side, for every one of the above administrators there is a teacher who actually wants to help kids grow.
Edit: Teacher -> Administrator. I haven't met teachers who actually like standardized testing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_Japan
I understand that bashing all things American has become en vogue, but some things have just become corrupted due to lack of proper maintenance, really. Much like our health care system which has become over saturated with special interest and privatisation instead of a patient focus.
We've forgotten how to keep our eye on the prize, as it were, and lost focus on what the goal actually is.
I did not mean to make fun of the structure itself so much as point out it's failings in our current environment, as you pointed out, Japan does it well, if a bit stressfully.
> I understand that bashing all things American has become en vogue
This was not my intent, I'm sorry if it came across that way.
> things have just become corrupted due to lack of proper maintenance, really.
I would argue that it's not just a lack of maintanence. There are a number of people who actively work against correct education because "That's not how we do it". I think you summed it up well with
> We've forgotten how to keep our eye on the prize, as it were, and lost focus on what the goal actually is.
Edit: Having read the other comment, it sounds like Japan has issues as well. I still believe this model could be successful, but it would appear it's hard to get right.
> The Japanese educational system has also been criticized for failure to foster independent thinkers with cultural and artistic sensibility. Japanese students that attend schools overseas often face difficulty adapting and competing in that environment due to lack of international viewpoints.
Most research shows that academic study vs play in preschool makes little difference in how kids turn out later in life. And that play might even be better.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/well/family/let-kids-play...
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/29/well/family/taking-playti...
It isn't about materialism or care. It's about having education driven by supposition instead of evidence and what we know works. Phonics would still be core to early curriculum, for example, if we followed the science. It's harder to teach than "whole word" reading, but phonics actually works and we have decades of evidence, and mountains of cognitive science to show us why.
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
> ...it turns out cueing may actually prevent kids from focusing on words in the way they need to become skilled readers.
Turns out this was previously discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23981447
I'm really glad my parents had the time and conviction to put time into teaching me phonics and math early. Really gave me a leg up.
That sounds like wonderful early childhood activities, healthy for the body and mind.
Having gone to a Japanese kindergarten, I remember it being a friendly experience, similar to what you described. However, as soon as basic school starts (6~7 years old), it can get stressful depending on the region, public/private school, and parents' social class and expectations.
My understanding is that this is at least driven in part by academia, who have gradually advocated earlier and earlier interventions for lower performing students.
(for the life of me, I can't recall what we did on rainy days)