Some NYC public school kindergarten teachers are concerned that their students are becoming too rattled by new expectations. The Post reports, "The city Department of Education now wants 4- and 5-year-olds to write 'informative/explanatory reports' and demonstrate 'algebraic thinking.' Children who barely know how to write the alphabet or add 2 and 2 are expected to write topic sentences and use diagrams to illustrate math equations." One compassionate teacher said, "For the most part, it’s way over their heads. It’s too much for them. They’re babies!" Um, calling Tiger Mom?
The Post explains that the new shift in curriculum is due to the city adopting the Common Core national standards. For kindergarten math, the Common Core says:
In Kindergarten, instructional time should focus on two critical areas: (1) representing and comparing whole numbers, initially with sets of objects; (2) describing shapes and space. More learning time in Kindergarten should be devoted to number than to other topics...
...Students use numbers, including written numerals, to represent quantities and to solve quantitative problems, such as counting objects in a set; counting out a given number of objects; comparing sets or numerals; and modeling simple joining and separating situations with sets of objects, or eventually with equations such as 5 + 2 = 7 and 7 - 2 = 5. (Kindergarten students should see addition and subtraction equations, and student writing of equations in kindergarten is encouraged, but it is not required.) Students choose, combine, and apply effective strategies for answering quantitative questions, including quickly recognizing the cardinalities of small sets of objects, counting and producing sets of given sizes, counting the number of objects in combined sets, or counting the number of objects that remain in a set after some are taken away.
According to the Post, "In a kindergarten class in Red Hook, Brooklyn, three children broke down and sobbed on separate days last week, another teacher told The Post... 'This is causing a lot of anxiety,' the teacher said. 'Kindergarten should be happy and playful. It should be art and dancing and singing and learning how to take turns. Instead, it’s frustrating and disheartening.'" Another educator says the new curriculum takes away time from coloring, games and puzzles.
The Department of Education explains that while kindergarteners should have free plays, the Common Core is important, "These are the types of activities and exercises that students need to work on to acquire the skills they need to be ready for middle school, high school, college and careers." Especially since the world is not flat—dare we mention how test scores from Shanghai students outpaced everyone else? And how the unpublished scores from poor Chinese provinces were also "remarkable"?
As former Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell said while complaining about stupid snow postponing a football game, "We've become a nation of wusses. The Chinese are kicking our butt in everything... If this was in China do you think the Chinese would have called off the game? People would have been marching down to the stadium, they would have walked and they would have been doing calculus on the way down." Truth—get those first-graders working on some parabolic partial differential equations, okay?
