Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Cascade of mirrors

A while back, I got upset with the dot school's 7th grade social-studies curriculum. These kids are supposed to me studying something like geography and world cultures this year. Instead they have an ad hoc theme based class. For the theme of "intolerance" they began with watching a video of a Holocaust survivor visiting the interment camp he spent time in. The class was then asked to write a reflection--a self-focused piece of navel gazing--on how the video made them feeeeeel. This was the first exposure these kids had gotten in their entire education to anything in the 20th Century, their first exposure to the Holocaust, and their first assignment is about how *they* feel.

I ended up writing a letter to the head of the middle school saying that of all the topic *not* to be about the kids' feelings and reactions, this was it.

Apparently, this teacher just looooves the "reflection". The kids are always writing reflections about how something makes them feeeeel, how it changed them, blah, blah, blah.

Yesterday in the car, the boy said that this was probably the only teacher he will ever have that would do this: they did a worksheet, then a reflection on the worksheet, then a reflection on writing the reflection.

Seriously! She had them write a reflection about their reflection.

1 comment:

C T said...

That is absurd.
I let my homeschooled child write in her journal on her own time. There is proven psychological value to writing about one's own experiences. But school's not really the place for therapy, is it?