I have long believed that middle schools were a bad idea.

Under the current DFK crunch boards should consider moving grade 8 and even grade 7 directly into high schools.

Addressed very clearly and directly in Susan Wise-Bauer’s and Jessie Bauer’s book, “The Well-Trained Mind” is the concept of brain development.

While the book is a beautiful “HOW TO” geared towards those who choose to home-school, it actually is a must-read for all parents to understand the physical, emotional, and intellectual capabilities of children at their different stages of development.

(Grant it, those with special needs must be assessed differently, but currently very few people understand human development past the infantile measures of early speech and walking milestones.)

Susan and Jessie point out clearly why, when, and how certain educational concepts should be introduced.

So there is a very definitive jump between ages 5-6 and 7, then again around 10-11 to 12, and once again in the late teen-age years.

This science points to the fact that elementary, middle, high school and post secondary are in place with very good reason. The brain is not always capable in grasping a more complex concept if it isn’t a) developed to that point or b) the foundational knowledge has not been learned.

As to comment about ADHD, I also recommend Pamela Druckerman’s book “Bringing Up Bebe”. Sometimes what we call stifling our children’s creativity, those in Europe call lack of discipline and instruction in manners and proper codes of social conduct…..which again is based on age and brain development, but also on actual instruction and expectation of the implementation of learned concepts.

I think the problem here in Canada and the US is giving up too quickly on kids, without the recognition that we, the adults may in fact be lacking in education and lacking a desire to follow-up in these areas. We turn to tutoring, or extra help out of desperation and needing a quick fix so our kids don’t fail. But isn’t it up to the experts to know what to do, as we can’t be experts in all fields of life all the time?

All kids are teachable, and all kids will learn…....the HOW, HOW MUCH, and HOW WELL aspect is up to us, the adults, but especially the experts….who have a tendency to micro-focus on concepts that are not necessarily conducive to educating all kids successfully.

Are student teachers being taught how to teach phonics these days?

Although I have not been to teachers’ college, I’m inclined to say that not only do they not teach teachers how to teach phonics, but they have limited instruction on teaching teachers how to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic in general.

From a colleague who took the course, he was surprised to see how much time is spent on instruction in classroom management rather than instruction on how to teach concepts.

Not only do teachers lack awareness about phonics, and instructing the subject, they also are lacking in teaching (or knowing) grammar. One would think that in the higher grades, at some point students would have more grammatical instruction than: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, ‘start a sentence with a capital’, ‘use a punctuation mark at the end’, and ‘avoid sentence fragments, or run-on sentences’.

When my daughter had a semicolon circled on her English paper in grade 7, it wasn’t a problem for the homeschooled child of 3 years to approach the teacher and argue that “a conjunctive adverb such as ‘however’, being multisyllabic, when used between two main (related) clauses, is preceded by a semi-colon and followed by a comma. Had I used the word ‘but’, it being mono-syllabic would also have been preceded by a semi-colon, but not followed by a comma”.  The teacher then feared correcting any punctuation on her papers. We, eventually, for many similar and other reasons switched schools.

Keep in mind that my daughter learned the information from me, but I was only lucky enough to have learned it in Humber College post university. Nowhere in any of my grammar, middle, senior/high school or university education was this concept or any other grammatical concept taught in English.

Notice, however, that when kids learn French, and are taught the subjunctive, the conditional, the participles, the reflexive verbs and pronouns, and any number of grammatical concepts, which they CANNOT relate to the English because NONE of those concepts have ever been taught in English.