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As the parent of a nine-year-old girl and an eight-year-old boy, I’ve been learning about all the changes that New York State has made over the years since I was last in high school. To put it simply, they have gone way too far with changes in the education system.
When my daughter first went into kindergarten, I was wondering if she was going to learn addition in first grade -like I did- or if she would learn it in kindergarten. Not surprisingly, she learned addition later in kindergarten. What has really gotten to me is what kids are learning beyond the third grade.
At the start of fourth grade, things went along as expected, when they reviewed multiplication. From there, they went into something that I didn’t learn until junior high school: the formulas for area and perimeter.
I’ve learned from parent-teacher meetings that each year the curriculum for students is getting harder and harder. With the curriculum getting harder, students are struggling more and more.
I understand that our education system as a whole needs a complete overhaul but curriculum should be the last on that list.
The reason is that when students take off for summer vacation they don’t do anything school related. It’s all watching television, playing video games or playing with friends. That leads to students losing skills they acquired during the previous year and as such, must be retaught at the beginning of the following school year.
Lengthening the school year would not only solve the daycare problem that parents encounter when school is out but it would allow children to retain skills that they will need further on in life and learn new ones.
Yes, with that there would be the problem of paying for teachers, bus transportation and materials and the end result would most likely be a raise in taxes. However, I could care less about that, as what’s important is our children’s futures.
