World Famous Comics: What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten?
What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten?
By: Susan Ohanian Publisher: McGraw-Hill Average Rating: Binding: Paperback Label: McGraw-Hill Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 160 Publication Date: March 26, 2002
Arms parents with everything they need to know to fight the pro-standards movements
Parents all across the political spectrum have united on one issue: when it comes to standardized testing, they all lean toward some kind of educational reform. Drawing on her 20 years of classroom experience and enriched by real-life anecdotes, Susan Ohanian's What Happened to Recess, and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? explains the misguided mania for testing children, why a child's success or failure is currently determined by a set of tests, and what parents are doing to change public policy on education. Even children who are able test takers are hurt by the politics surrounding testing. Ohanian's moving insider's view imparts a sense of urgency about the situation of individual children caught on the front line of our treacherous education system. This beacon will inspire parents who are confused, angered, or intimidated by the forces that control their children's education to take action.
EXCELLENT!! A must read for educators and parents Experiencing frustration with the extreme focus on raising test scores in our public schools today, I went online to see if anyone was writing on the topic. I stumbled upon this book and am SO glad I ordered it. If you, too, have been thinking something's not quite right about this testing craze, you will find your feelings validated and well articulated in this book.
When Kindergarten Becomes "Kinder-Grind" WHAT Happened to Recess and WHY are our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? by Susan Ohanian
In his foreword for this book, Alfie Kohn writes Ms. Ohanian is "our archivist of educational absurdities, fearlessly clipping newspapers and trawling the Internet" who "insists that we think about children as children." RECESS is long on documentation of educational absurdities. The bibliography is almost 12 pages of small font and many of the referenced newspaper, magazine, and journal articles can be read on Ms. Ohanian's website. Almost overwhelming!
Ms. Ohanian records students' triumphs and states: "Such triumphs are not objective. They don't appear on standardized printouts, so no high-powered committee on excellence will pay attention. But I insist that even if one anecdote is just that-a story-two anecdotes are data. And so I persist with stories..." (125)
She invites us to "look beyond the corporate charts and chants and see real children." (160) She intersperses relevant stories about real children from her own teaching experiences, as well as stories told to her by parents and teachers. Dennis eats his pencils to avoid writing. Charles learns that it's OK to be different when he reads "The Ugly Duckling." Leslie's friend Jessica teaches her to understand knock-knock riddles, a must-have skill for children. Michael learns the power of personal letters. And, kids cry over and vomit on tests. There are others.
Stories about children are the heart of this book: Ms. Ohanian's unique gift to us. Personally, I would like to have read more success stories about real children in today's public schools where they are often treated like numbered robots being processed for the global economy and fewer horror stories about the "Standardistas."
In the final chapter, Ms. Ohanian documents honorable efforts of parents and educators to change the test-prep curriculum back to kid-driven instruction for life-long learning. Some parents and educators are encouraging others to just say no to this harmful test mania by opting out of the standardized tests. There may be consequences for these battles, but we must win the war to re-establish our schools as places where people are more important than test scores.
Buy it, read it, and give a copy to any parent, teacher, or politician who reads and who cares about the future. Our children are our future. What kind of citizenry are we creating when test scores are more important than character? Character is supposed to count. We must learn from the kids in the Seattle Special Olympics who demonstrated by their actions that "what matters in this life is much more than winning for ourselves. What really matters is helping others to win, too, even if it means slowing down and changing our course now and then." (51)
This book gives no credit to parents My son has started grade one this year and I am shocked at the lack of accountablility in education today. This book gives no credit to parents or educators that want to know what is going on in schools. Everyone knows that standardized test are not perfect and cannot meet all the needs of an education, but neither can any formal educational method.
What are the alternatives??????
This books argues against applying scientific methods to education.
When I went to school, some years I had good teachers and tests and some years I had bad teachers and tests. With standardized testing at least there is an attempt to improve this. If the tests are no good, then they should be changed, not thrown out.
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater!
Excellent examination of major, unspoken problems Anyone with children will realize that the Golden Age of Education is over. Gone are the halcyon days of elementary school where children were first taught how to be good human beings and live in a civilization, and academics came second. Now, with high-stakes testing and the punitive "No Child Left Behind" initive by the Bush administration (which is more accurately called "No Child Left Untested" by the author), testing has become paramount to just about anything else teachers do or have done in decades past.
Case in point: a school district in Michigan has a 539-page curriculum for PRESCHOOL. Student's ranking in schools and teacher's salaries are directly linked to one or two tests that students take that focus on exclusive and often inappropriate material. Children in elementary schools throughout America are taking tests for days on end, racking up more test-taking hours than potential lawyers taking the Bar Exam. Wild animals used in Hollywood films have more break times in their days than your average schoolchild. Kindergarten curriculum, in the words of many people who run education, should be preparing children for college. In other words, as a nation, we have completely lost our marbles when it comes to testing and too many governmental folk are bowing down at the altar of test-worship.
A local educator recently said, "if I need to know how Little Johnny is doing in school, I go to HIM, not to his Ohio Proficiency Test from 1999." This clear and obvious paradigm for finding out how a child is doing in school has been completely left behind in recent years, and is likely to keep on happening. Ms. Ohanian's book is frighteningly FULL of examples and incidents when educators have gone straight to some standardized test to see how children are performing in school vs. the children themselves. Where the teachers stand in all these goings on is somewhere between a soldier on the front lines being given totally ridiculous and dangerous commands, and a prisoner of war being forced to do whatever the Big Wigs say, or else they're likely to find themselves up against a firing squad (for example, a school in Chicago SUED a teacher for 3 MILLION DOLLARS for looking at a standardized test before administering it to the children. A teacher will go to JAIL if they even GLANCE over a child's shoulder during standardized tests in Florida).
Ms. Ohanian asks some very good questions throughout her book, including why aren't teachers and parents DOING something about this national craze for test scores, and how is this REALLY HELPING any child to be tested to the point of getting sick and vomiting? She also asks some quite valid questions, like why are we spending billions of dollars testing children when so many schools are literally falling apart? Instead of shelling out 3 million dollars to a test-writing company, why not spend that money on repairing the SCHOOL? What do we hope to accomplish by testing children into the ground? What message are we sending our teachers and our children when their teacher is not only NOT allowed to even LOOK at the test, but risks jail time if they do? (can't you just see THAT one: HARDENED CRIMINAL: "whatcha in for, buddy? Murder 1?" TEACHER: "no, I looked over the shoulder of a first grader during a standardized test...").
The message is pretty clear: children don't matter at all unless they fall within a certain range on one or two standardized tests that are usually given once, graded by someone who is NOT an educator, and the results are posted months later (in Cleveland, our proficiency tests were taken back in March, but we're just getting the results of those tests NOW, 7 months later). It's also clear that teachers and parents are clearly not experts on their own children, because the LAST person to be consulted about how Johnny does in school are these very people: those who write the laws and the curriculum and who punish the schools and teachers are only looking at pages of statistics.
Gaaah... Maddening...
Ms. Ohanian's book is meticulously well researched and she cites startling and often frightening statistics and stories about what is considered "normal" educational proceedings in America today. I myself am rereading it for the second time, taking notes as I go and passing it along to my teaching colleagues. Actually, it's getting to the point where EVERY SINGLE PAGE documents something either useful, scary or enraging that I'm finding it easier to simply hand the book to friends and colleagues and say, "here, read this."
My hope is that this book and others like it will actually DO SOMETHING-spark off a national debate and get parents and teachers and students to go out there and stop putting up with this nonsense. There's no reason children in North Carolina have to be tested on the spelling and meaning of "circumference" in first grade. Nothing good will come of testing our children so often that they loose the ability to THINK and can only regurgitate information and bubble in little circles with a no. 2 pencil. PARENTS know that. TEACHERS know that. FAMILIES know that. ANYONE who works with a child knows that. NOW we need to make sure that our lawmakers (who obviously all live in a totally different world from us Common Folk) begin to know that as well. Get the book, read it through, then pass it along to someone else. If the people lead, eventually the leaders will follow.
What Happened to Recess and...other educational activities? Fastmoving, quick-paced, and well-researched, this Susan Ohanian books swims in waters no man has tried before--or woman. What is said is worth reading--twice, mulling over, and wondering about, and then, taking action.
That big business is taking the joy out of education is becoming more and more real every day. What that joy really is, Susan makes very clear to all: discovery, wondering, questioning, and trying...not scores, and informational feedback, and high-stakes testing.
The words beat much like a throbbing heart that has loved education and children maybe too much and therefore breaks too quickly and easily under this new sort of approach to children. No Child Left Untested is more like the way things are becoming. Susan backs up her opinions with strong research and data proving her point.
I found the book to be revealing, to the point of being unable to put it down for long. It leads into the future and the future right now doesn't look good for children.
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