School Reform: Thoughts?

Sarah Hall53 said:I’m probably going to get shot down here, but honestly, it feels like Rhino, urbantinker8, and I are totally on the same page about this. 😂 A Christmas miracle? 🤔
I’ve been watching my little one—who, let's be real, isn't exactly struggling with school right now... if anything, the kid would practically die of boredom since they've only covered about seven letters so far!

😲
: passes out:

That’s just what I’m saying. Most kids would find it incredibly tedious and wouldn't feel challenged at all, I suppose.
And yet, there’s absolutely no guarantee that these students performing below average will see any meaningful progress—it’s not just about how slowly they move through the curriculum, either.
So, what happens then...?
Eight years go by just "perfecting" the absolute basics across every subject.😵
I mean, maybe they’ll eventually polish their writing skills to perfection, but is that really the goal? If it is, then I guess I should apologize—I just have a slightly different understanding of what the word "reform" actually means.🙂

urbantinker8 said:Well, we definitely covered them in first grade.
Cursive was more like a third-grade thing.

I feel like this whole curriculum adjustment thing has swung way too far in one direction. It’s almost like we’re treating kids as if they’re all below average when it comes to capability.
And I suppose everyone just shrugs their shoulders and accepts it because... well, it's the path of least resistance, I guess. It feels easier to teach less and go slower rather than teaching more at a faster pace, regardless of how difficult or necessary the material actually is.
It isn't going to lead to actual reading comprehension, goodness knows. If anything, it might do the opposite. We'll likely end up with third graders who can recognize printed letters but still struggle immensely with handwriting, and their fine motor skills will probably suffer too. Instead of moving forward, they'll spend most of third or maybe even fourth grade just trying to patch up the gaps from what they should have mastered back in first.

It will produce the perfect result for an educational system like this. Everyone will pull a 4.0 without much effort, enrolling in whatever colleges they want based on high GPAs—not that anyone actually cares about what they know.
The real-world importance of certain subjects is being ignored. 90% of what matters is being tossed aside, while useless trivia is treated as equal to essential skills. It doesn't matter if these future adults know nothing about credit, or if the concept of interest rates remains a mystery, or if they can't calculate their own total loan repayments. What matters is that they can calculate the 7th root of 228 from memory, or know the GDP of Kazakhstan. They don't need to know how to calculate a paycheck; they just need to list every territory conquered by Napoleon. They don't need to understand police authority; they just need to know who invented the steam engine. They won't even know how to change a lightbulb or turn on a water heater.

Wait, didn't we start out with big print in the first half, then switch to smaller print in the second—and then only get cursive in the second grade? I know for a fact Cyrillic wasn't until third grade, but honestly, I can't quite remember the rest.

I belong to that first generation that grew up without those old-school primers—we started right around September 1990. In our first semester, we tackled everything from basic print to larger numbers up to 20, then moved straight into cursive and numbers up to 100 by the second half of the year.

Drawing lines, basic geometry, sets—all that stuff went by incredibly fast. I’d say we were already working through letters and numbers just a few months into the school year.

Personally, I feel like the curriculum in America starts a bit too late. It seems like first graders here are expected to master things that kids in other countries pick up much earlier through a longer, more relaxed process. My child is actually being educated abroad right now. If she were in the US, she’d be in first grade, but currently, she’s already in second. A lot of her peers back home struggle quite a bit with reading, whereas she’s been reading very fluently for almost a year now—and the same goes for math. We haven't had to do any extra tutoring at home (honestly, we wouldn't even know how to teach her to read a foreign language anyway); everything just happened naturally over more than two years of schooling. Here, mandatory school starts at age five, but that first year is very light—it's basically kindergarten, sort of like preschool, but they already start introducing letters. In America, everything is crammed into a single year, so kids who don't have a head start end up playing catch-up constantly.

I was eighty-nine when I started school—back then, they made us do cursive, and we had to get through it even though nobody actually wanted to. It was just printed stuff, really. We were forced to read things like "neither in heaven nor on earth." Honestly? I don't think I ever actually read it properly. My friend, a lady who was quite kind, never even called on me to recite it because I’d just read so quietly—she didn't want to make a fuss over me.

I tried to wrap my head around learning how to write in cursive, but man, looking at it just gives me a massive headache. To me, all those letters look exactly the same!😬

I’m part of that 1990/91 crowd—you know, those kids who grew up right on the edge of the millennium—and if I remember correctly, our first semester was basically just learning printed letters and how to count to 10... then the second half was when we actually started writing things out and tackling numbers up to 20.

Wait, did we even have semi-annual reviews or quarterly ones back then? I remember there was a period where we did quarterly check-ins, but honestly, I can't quite remember if they still exist anymore.

I don't think it was Sarah Hall53—we definitely went up to 100 in first grade, since by second grade we were already doing multiplication and division within 100.
In second grade, I mean, for the class of '91/'92, they introduced the quarterly grading system and updated the emblem on the textbook. I actually have two copies—one from first grade and another one from second grade that lasted me through the end of elementary school.

It’s funny how things shift—now they’re multiplying and dividing up to 100 in the second grade, whereas back when I was in first grade, we only went up to 20. Though, if you look at the third lesson in their science curriculum, they already have kids measuring height in centimeters, which usually goes well over 100... but I suppose that’s a whole different rabbit hole entirely. 😁

In my experience, we covered printed and cursive writing in first grade, and then moved on to Cyrillic in third. Aside from the removal of Cyrillic from the curriculum, I don't think there were massive shifts, though one thing stands out: we started with set theory in first grade. Nowadays, it seems they skip sets to focus more on geometry. Personally, I always felt sets were much more intuitive and practical; we had such a huge variety of elements to work with, which made practicing addition and subtraction feel so much more hands-on. Nowadays, it feels like they just spend all their time drawing shapes instead...

Hey Luna, I honestly feel like the curriculum was supposed to go in stages—firstly, addition and subtraction up to 20, then moving on to numbers up to 100, and only once that's solid do they tackle the multiplication tables through 100.

The way the Republican Party textbooks don't align with any of the other subjects is just... tragic, really.
And even within my own subject, things were such a mess—for instance, we’d be working on numbers up to 10 in the second semester, yet by midterms, some kids hadn't even mastered writing the number six. 🙄 It means you end up having to overhaul half the textbook just to make sense of it all, and every single class for two months, you're stuck answering the same question: "Teacher, why did we skip those pages?"

I’ve been following this thread for a bit, so I figured I’d jump in and share my own experience...

I started elementary school back in 1982 in Washington, D.C., and we used "good morning" as our primary way to practice reading during first through third grade. We worked on large printed letters as well as both uppercase and lowercase handwriting throughout the first grade, and then we moved on to learning cursive in the third grade.

We used those books too, but I only managed to hang onto DJ3. It’s such a bummer that I don't have anything left from PID—that guy was a total genius 😍

Sarah Hall53 said:Hey Luna, I honestly feel like the curriculum was supposed to go in stages—firstly, addition and subtraction up to 20, then moving on to numbers up to 100, and only once that's solid do they tackle the multiplication tables through 100.

The way the Republican Party textbooks don't align with any of the other subjects is just... tragic, really.
And even within my own subject, things were such a mess—for instance, we’d be working on numbers up to 10 in the second semester, yet by midterms, some kids hadn't even mastered writing the number six. 🙄 It means you end up having to overhaul half the textbook just to make sense of it all, and every single class for two months, you're stuck answering the same question: "Teacher, why did we skip those pages?"

See, this is a perfect example of why introducing foreign languages in schools early on is such a headache.
It clearly doesn't bother anyone at the preschool level if kids learn to count to ten in English within the first three lessons, but once they hit elementary school, teachers have to scramble with the curriculum just to prevent the language lessons from clashing with standard math material.
On top of that, I should point out that the early English learning programs in preschool are actually approved by the Department of Education. THE SAME department.
It probably wasn't the exact same official signing off on both, but it's coming from the same agency.

Regarding learning letters back in '85, my dad remembers we learned both print and cursive in first grade (I used to get tiny print and cursive mixed up all the time, like p/a/s/). Everything was taught in the second half of the year, and it actually moved faster than it does now 🤣, and the second semester felt shorter because it wasn't tied to any specific curriculum schedule, just one week after the next.

The first half of the year was mostly pre-writing exercises (which didn't happen at all when my sister was in school eight years later, and isn't happening with my daughter either—they jump straight to letters). We learned tons of rhymes, did constant drawing, and were getting ready for the big school milestones.

For math, we used counting sticks and an abacus.
I'm not sure if your kids have counting sticks; mine didn't (my dad mentioned they used to come in a kit with the books), but our teacher kept an abacus on her desk, and we practiced on it during after-school care.

Even though I see my daughter's textbook is full of drawings of apples and random things, I have to admit she didn't go to a top-tier preschool where they practiced pre-math skills using sticks and other hands-on objects. Plus, I don't really encourage her to help with grocery shopping or sorting items at home, which might be why she isn't grasping math quite as quickly in school. There are real reasons why using concrete objects is important before moving to paper and pencil. Looking at how school works now, it feels like some imaginary reform tossed out tactile learning and basically left it up to the parents to handle.

School nowadays is mostly just paper and pencil, and there's a push to replace all of that with tablets.

Look, I could totally just stick to the first few lessons like the textbook suggests, but honestly? My experience tells me that students grasp it way more easily if I weave in stuff from their other classes—like math, specifically. It’s that whole concept of interdisciplinary integration that the old professors used to preach about.
If people want to argue that it's too early to start learning a foreign language... well, hey, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, right? I could go on and on about all those psychologists who try to meddle in language teaching methodology, but I won't. I'm trying to be a decent human being here. 😬

Sarah Hall53 said:Look, I could totally just stick to the first few lessons like the textbook suggests, but honestly? My experience tells me that students grasp it way more easily if I weave in stuff from their other classes—like math, specifically. It’s that whole concept of interdisciplinary integration that the old professors used to preach about.
If people want to argue that it's too early to start learning a foreign language... well, hey, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, right? I could go on and on about all those psychologists who try to meddle in language teaching methodology, but I won't. I'm trying to be a decent human being here. 😬

That sounds like a great idea, and honestly, that’s how it should be done.
The problem is the massive gap in what kids already know when they walk in.
It really frustrates me when we're forced to wait to cover something like the number 6, when you might have a class of 16 students who already know their numbers up to 20 in English because they picked it up in preschool or at home. What's the point of delaying it?

In my opinion, it would be better to give them more Math and HP hours in first grade, then switch to three hours of English a week in second and third grade so they can actually learn properly.
(And don't worry, your total teaching hours won't decrease; you'll just end up with more paperwork!)

Honestly, it’d be way better if they just had twenty minutes of English four times a week.
And if they could actually group students by their skill level—or at least keep the groups small enough—it would make life so much easier. That way, you can actually manage differentiated instruction without losing your mind in those massive, mixed-ability classes.

Sarah Hall53 said:Honestly, it’d be way better if they just had twenty minutes of English four times a week.
And if they could actually group students by their skill level—or at least keep the groups small enough—it would make life so much easier. That way, you can actually manage differentiated instruction without losing your mind in those massive, mixed-ability classes.

👍
That would be absolutely wonderful!

Some guy who teaches Latin to middle schoolers told me they dive straight into declensions by 5th grade. Back home in the US, kids don't even touch that stuff until the second half of the year, and then the teacher spends two whole hours just trying to explain what a declension actually is.

It’s the same story elsewhere. I’m working on atomic structure for chemistry, but in physics class, they don't even cover that until 4th grade.

Then there's pH levels. We're doing that in 2nd grade, which requires logarithms—but they don't teach those until February. I'm expected to master it by October.

And honestly? That's just the tip of the iceberg. There are plenty of other gems like that.

I did some digging, and apparently, this total lack of coordination between subjects is still happening under the new curriculum and the "School for Life" initiative.🤦

Around Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles County, there’s a massive hole where skilled trades used to be. The IRS is basically telling everyone they need to step up and enroll in three-year vocational programs—we're talking butchers, construction crews, locksmiths, chefs, servers, electricians, you name it.

When it comes to two-year associate degrees in the D.C. area, we're seeing a huge shortage of nurses and medical techs. And if you're looking at four-year university degrees, the recommendation is pretty obvious: go for medicine, engineering, math, physics, and stuff like that.

On the flip side, they're suggesting people stop flooding the enrollment for certain two-year tracks, like vet techs, economists, food science techs, or fashion techs.

The situation in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles County is the same: there's a total lack of trade jobs, so the IRS is pushing more people into three-year training for things like meat processing, various construction roles, locksmithing, cooking, serving, and electrical work.

Looking at two-year programs near D.C., there's a real need for nursing and medical technicians. For the university crowd, the advice stays consistent—aim for doctors, engineers, mathematicians, or physicists.

Meanwhile, they're advising against signing up for too many two-year paths like veterinary tech, economics, food tech, or apparel design.

Nursing is essentially a five-year career path, isn't it? It is likely the only profession out there that doesn't fall under the umbrella of a trade yet still offers a legitimate return on your educational investment. Even if you choose the high school route, those degrees actually pay off, provided you possess the actual drive to study and the raw potential required to get into one of those highly sought-after universities. When we look at how we select our careers today, it seems we have drifted toward an extreme where the "middle class" has simply evaporated. You are either a skilled laborer capable of manual work, or you are a true intellectual; everyone else is just struggling to make ends meet.
(Of course, politicians, drug dealers, the clergy, and those other types of grifters exist as outliers)