As I was reading Curriculum 21 I was incredibly intrigued by the Upgrading Content chapter. I really liked the new perspective on each content area as well as the value placed on each. It should not just be reading, writing, and arithmetic. That there is real value in each content area and real skills that need to be learned to be a 21st century citizen. I did have one area that struck me most as an area desperately needing to be in our curriculum, the idea of teaching our own native language like you would a foreign language. Oh my is this ever needed. In my classroom of 18 I have 4 kids that receive speech and language services and 3 out of the 4 are their for language instruction, not just articulation (speech). In our tiny school over 10% of our students receive some type of speech and language services. Some of these are due to developmental disabilities. The rest I think is to poor models at home and no direct instruction in how to speak our own language. We can do our best during the school day to correct them, but they spend far more hours at home with no correction and parents and siblings speaking the same way.
English in its proper form is a dying language. With the advent of text messaging, instant messaging, the rapid e-mail, etc. the use of grammatically correct English is decidedly missing. Even among professional adults you see the creeping of poor English instruction manifesting itself in their writing and public speaking. I'm surprised I haven't had any 1st graders trying to spell the word "we" in their writing "wii." As a grammar nut myself (and I do make mistakes too), I am afraid of what type of public speakers and writers we are creating. I would be interested to see the writing of high school students. Do high school teachers in all areas see this poor English formation?
I think that we need to start teaching English like a foreign language and teaching a foreign language at the same time. This needs to be added to the curriculum (and will probably be somewhere in my idea of what an elementary school curriculum should include for our final project).
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I completely agree with both you and the text. English instruction is not a priority in our schools and kids are not learning how to speak. More than that, it's not allowing them to understand things they are reading - everything becomes "old fashioned" and they are losing interest. Many of our kids have SL services, as well. Forming a sentence is difficult for so many kids, probably because, as you mention, technology today is teaching us to be short and sweet.
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