Really, the level of learning in public schools is worse than I had thought. As most of you know, I have a community center in Sosua with educational programming. We hold sessions for homework help. About 21 kids show up for each session, but typically, most come without any homework.
First, I created a small library of children's books in Spanish....books of all levels. Any child arriving without homework was to read. When they were finished, they were to color a picture from the story. This is what happened. A student would take a book and within a minute, say he was finished. All he/she did was look at pictures.
So, I changed the assignment and told them to read a book, then write a short summary of the story. As mentioned in a comment above, they just copied the text of one page.
Finally, I changed the assignment completely. Each session, the kids were presented with a topic to write about for 30 minutes. For example, "If you were president of this country, what changes would you make and why?"
The kids loved doing this, BUT they had no idea how to write. There were no spaces between words on some papers. There were no paragraphs. They didn't know what an indent was. Sentences did not begin with capital letters. But that didn't matter, as they did not know how to write a complete sentence!
It then occurred to me that I needed to start from the very beginning with these kids who range in age from 6 - 13. I need to teach them how to write just one sentence.....Then 5 sentences.....Then put those sentences into a paragraph.
These are skills typically taught by first or second grade, elsewhere.
Math skills are not great, but seem better than language and reading.
Interestingly, the homework assignments require finding information on the Internet. (or a library, but of course, there are no libraries here.....) We have laptops and Internet so that is no problem. Often, though, I wonder about all the other kids in the class who don't have computer and Internet access. Do they fail?
~ Lindsey
First, I created a small library of children's books in Spanish....books of all levels. Any child arriving without homework was to read. When they were finished, they were to color a picture from the story. This is what happened. A student would take a book and within a minute, say he was finished. All he/she did was look at pictures.
So, I changed the assignment and told them to read a book, then write a short summary of the story. As mentioned in a comment above, they just copied the text of one page.
Finally, I changed the assignment completely. Each session, the kids were presented with a topic to write about for 30 minutes. For example, "If you were president of this country, what changes would you make and why?"
The kids loved doing this, BUT they had no idea how to write. There were no spaces between words on some papers. There were no paragraphs. They didn't know what an indent was. Sentences did not begin with capital letters. But that didn't matter, as they did not know how to write a complete sentence!
It then occurred to me that I needed to start from the very beginning with these kids who range in age from 6 - 13. I need to teach them how to write just one sentence.....Then 5 sentences.....Then put those sentences into a paragraph.
These are skills typically taught by first or second grade, elsewhere.
Math skills are not great, but seem better than language and reading.
Interestingly, the homework assignments require finding information on the Internet. (or a library, but of course, there are no libraries here.....) We have laptops and Internet so that is no problem. Often, though, I wonder about all the other kids in the class who don't have computer and Internet access. Do they fail?
~ Lindsey
