Five truths I've learned from five weeks of teaching

Elliot H (a 4th grade teacher in Phoenix):

Since I finally have a moment to pause and reflect, I thought I would use one of my infrequent posts to put down some of the things I've discovered thus far. In no particular order...

1. The achievement gap is very, very real. Most of my fourth graders don't know the meaning of simple words like "show" and "pair." Most can't do their 2s times-tables. Most read at least a grade level behind. Most have writing skills that could charitably be called atrocious. It's a miracle that so many of them can find Arizona on a map, because they certainly can't find anything else (but, to be fair, 7th graders were placing "Europe" in Oregon and "Greenland" in Montana).

Then there's the one non-special ed. nine-year-old who I last week taught to read the word "the."

It's not that they can't do it. My kids are a bright, energetic, inquistive bunch. Nor is it that they have no prior knowledge -- it's just floating around in shards, unconnected to anything meaningful. I have to ask this question, though: If thirty students have gone through 4 years of many different schools and understand so little, isn't that a sign that something has gone horribly wrong?

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 20, 2006 6:50 AM
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