Announcements!
The next book in my Our America series is published! The Revolutionary War Adventure continues Finn and Ginny’s search for their lost parents. For more information and a pdf of free activities to go along with the book, click on the Our America link at the top of this page.
40% off SALE!!!!
To celebrate the publication of The Revolutionary War Adventure, the Kindle versions of the last three books in the Our America series will be on sale for 40% off on March 11th & 12th!
Links to the Amazon books that will be on sale March 11th & 12th:
The King Philip’s War Adventure
The Revolutionary War Adventure
25% off SALE!!!
To celebrate the publication of The Revolutionary War Adventure, on March 11th & 12th all of Sue’s paperback books will be on sale for 25% off! Just click on the Special Orders link at the top of this page and type in the code: HAVY4KRQ at checkout to receive the discount. Orders will be placed through CreateSpace, a division of Amazon.
Cookie-Cutter Teachers
Common Core is in the news a lot lately, and, as a homeschooler, I have pretty much ignored it. However, I am becoming aware that it is a part of a dangerous trend in our schools today—the trend to micro-manage teachers.
Each teacher is an individual and individuals are going to have different ways that they enjoy teaching. If you tell a teacher that he has to teach a subject using a particular curriculum that he can’t stray from, then you are taking all of the creativity out of his teaching. And if you tell a teacher that she has to teach in a certain way, you are not letting her try alternative methods that might work better within her particular classroom. All teachers are not the same, all students are not the same, and all classrooms are not the same. If you take away teachers’ ability to alter their methods, you are hurting the students who might have benefitted by a different teaching style. Teachers are the people in the classrooms with the students, not some bureaucrat in some office. Individual teachers are the best-qualified as to what teaching methods will work best for both teacher and students. Trying to make cookie-cutter teachers is a huge mistake.
Allowing teachers the flexibility to use their own teaching methods is especially important today when there are so many new and exciting options available. However, just when exciting new things are happening in education, states seem to be happily telling teachers that they can’t use them. I’m not saying that any specific curriculum is bad. I’m just saying that teachers, not bureaucrats, should be the ones deciding what to use in their classrooms.
People are wringing their hands these days over how our education system has gone downhill. Instead of trying to find new methods to fix this problem, perhaps we should look back at what we were doing correctly in the past, when our education system was working. It seems to me that we’ve messed up our education system and instead of saying, “We made a mistake, let’s erase it,” we keep adding new mistakes on top of the old ones. Giving teachers back the ability to choose their own methods would be a step in the right direction.
Funtastic Unit Studies! Home 