Children who are underachieving
Being lazy and dumb are the two labels for students with poor grades ever since time immemorial. Parents and sadly many teachers are led to accept these as the reasons for poor academic performance. In actual fact, many children with considerable academic ability fail at subjects in which they should succeed. That’s why one often see on school reports these dreaded stereotyping comments such as ‘Not working to potential’, ‘Lazy’, or worse still, ‘Dumb’ but in disguised terms.
Why they are so many children work below their capacity? Underachieving is not a simple problem and should certainly be a matter of great concern for parents and the education system.
They are two types of situations under achievements are often identified. The first is where children only achieve on occasions when the mood takes them. It seems when an emotional crisis erupts: a relationship breaks up; a family crisis; a personality clash with a teacher, all these can trigger their refusal to work or put themselves forward.
The second situation is potentially much more serious. The child may have many characteristics that give him a label hard to remove. They may become aggressive, giving vent to their frustration by causing trouble or they may become sulky and withdrawn and refuse to develop their talent.
Sadly, over eighty percent of identified underachievers are boys! Studies within the western world’s education and cultural setting even indicated a range of 25-75% among these under achievers are are actually gifted children!
Generally, these children have few long-term problems if they can get immediate help to overcome their difficulty and their progress at school is closely monitored. In the western world, there have started some boarding schools cater the teens with this aim, to help the many underachieving children from fallen victim to the expectations of society and of their families.
Filed under Education | Comment (0)Homeschooling, Education etc, pt 2
I blog about my view on Homescholing and Education sometime ago. My view on education and schooling can be rather radical for most people. I know many people in Malaysia cannot imagine not sending their children to school nor seeing themselves be the teachers. My doctor friends challenged us [me and Ann, the homeschool advocates. :-)]
” You went through the traditional schooling and you turned out fine, just like many of us, you can’t deny that mass schooling system had served us well”
Well, I know if you are reading this blog, you were doing fine in the mass schooling system, or at least you learned how to read in English through the system.:-)
But, do you know many who don’t? In my primary school, I have 93 classmates in two different classes. After six years of education, half didn’t continue schooling. After another three years, less than ten of us eventually went through high school, guess how many of us went to university?
Some of my classmates who dropped out of school were very successful today. They were not any less intelligent than any of us who spent years studying and studying, but the school system failed to give them an education that enable them to read a letter in English or any language for that matter. Though they are successful monetary wise today, they are so convinced that they were failures/losers in school, instead of thinking that the school system had failed them.
So many parents today either “have” to send their children to private tutors or have to spend equal amount of time stressing over supervising their children’ school work at home. Which make me wonder, even homeschoolers don’t spend that much time doing school. You can imagine the stress for some children who starts school at 5.45 a.m (got to go out early, traffic jam) and don’t come home till 7.30p.m. Even in small town like Malacca, this is a norm nowadays, which worries me.
Since the children go to school for inhumanly long hours and spent long hours doing school work at home, do we even need surveys to find out that our children are over stressed and even 9 years old have suicidal thoughts? Ask anyone who is into counseling and mental health business, you will hear the gory and the not so glorified stories of children who were not able to cope with the stress, exactly opposite of what you usually read about the straight As students after the public exam’s results were announced.
Something is seriously wrong when children have to do school work at school and do school work at home. In my opinion, school work is for school time, family should do family stuff together. Spending time as a family doesn’t have to be a vacation at Caribbean villa rentals, it can be just a read aloud session every night or a picnic on weekends. When family time is spent yelling at children who didn’t want to do homework, no wonder our teenagers think parents do not understand them.
Filed under Education, Parenting | Comments (2)Computers in the Classroom
It worries me to see preschools start offering computer classes or claim that they use multimedia for teaching. And in my opinion, the computer classes they now offered in all Malaysian primary schools are just a business opportunity for a few people to get rich.The New York Times just recently published an article titled “Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops“, which doesn’t come as a surprise to me. But at least there is transparency in the system that allow this to be told in a major newspaper. An average parent in Malaysia will never know who are the people who set the curriculum for the computer classes, who are the people the school hired to teach the classes, what/how do they teach (what approach, which curriculum, which learning theory)?
I think this is a very revealing article. It shows how little educational establishment understands about learning and how to support it — and how little they understand the nature of computing technology. Note the reasons offered for the failure of these laptop programs: technical difficulties, bad children, soaring costs, teachers who don’t know how to integrate computing technology into their curricula, teacher’s resistance. What a list!
IMHO, the real reason these programs failed is because the people who implement the program do not fully grasp the nature of the computer and how it interacts with the nature of the human being.
Computers by nature reflect and amplify our thinking habits and consciousness. Yes, that’s what computers are: amplifiers of thinking. All tools amplify human ability in some way, like glasses help us to see clearer, telescope helps us to see further, but only the computer has such ability to reflect and amplify the mind. The trouble is that computers amplify ALL the thinking habits and consciousness of their users, the bad along with the good, the primitive along with the refined. The computer is like those magnifying mirrors they have at the cosmetic counter - you can see yourself a little too clearly, every pore, every hair, every blemish. :-)
The computer can only transform the thinking of the user, and the thinking itself has to be built the “old-fashioned” way, by many years of self-construction in a developmentally appropriate environment. By just having “computer skills”, let alone just owning a computer, will never be a substitute for the discipline and conscious efforts it takes to build a well-trained mind.
Filed under Education, learning | Comment (1)The 3-period lesson
Introduction of a Three Period Lesson
(1) First step…associates the name of an object with the abstract idea the name represents…this is blue, this is red.
(2) Second step…test to see if the name is still associated in the child’s mind with the object…which is red…which is blue?
(3) Third step…the child is asked to pronounce the appropriate vocabulary himself/herself…what is this…what is this?
Maria said this about repeating a lesson:
“But when the child has failed, we should know that he was not at that instant ready for the psychic association which we wished to provoke in him and we must therefore choose another moment.”
Maria said “..In such cases, the children experience a joy at each fresh discovery. They are conscious of a sense of dignity and satisfaction which encourages them to seek for new sensations from their environment and to make themselves spontaneous observers.”
Filed under Education, Montessori, Uncategorized, learning | Comments (2)
