Their information access
systems in their little baby brains are not like adults systems.
This is very much what brain research is telling us. There are stages in brain development. The problem with age-dependent school classification, as we have now, is that brains develop at different rates. Thus, some students put into grade 1 are simply physically incapable of learning to read -- their brains simply haven't developed the physical links necessary. Trying to teach them to read before their brains are ready is just frustrating to both the teacher and the student, and sets a pattern of failure which may dog the student for years, if not forever.
I just wish we could learn to group children based on their actual abilities -- putting all children who come into the school environment into a primary class, which might be roughly equivalent to the skills taught now in 1st to third grade, and they move on when they have mastered those skills, whether they do it at age 8 or at age 11.
And, of course, they don't even enter the primary class until they have mastered the basic skills and knowleldge (such as their alphabet, colors, numbers, etc, and basic learning skills) in the pre-primary grouping, roughly equivalent to our pre-school and kindergarden.
It's really difficult for 1st grade teachers to teach reading to a class when some of them are already reading at a certain level, and others don't even know their letters yet. A stupid waste of time, resources, and student enthusiasm. |
