Rigorous First Grade: Suspect

Intriguing article stresses those who prefer an academic kindergarten versus those who are more developmentaly appropriate. It's a double helix for me:

1. With No Child Left Behind (NCLB) continuing to exist, teachers have no choice but to prepare children for this awful reality of academics and more academics beginning as early as possible. Unfortunately, at the expense of high grades, children become less equiped to navigate the social waters of an increasing diverse world and less equipped to deal with all of the turmoil our war weary world is enduring.

2. With increasing focus on early childhood within states, this academic focus will not last that long or risk losing credibility. Seriously, early childhood has only really emerged since the early 1990's (due to Bush 1's Goals 2000 initiative) as a viable force. As the industry becomes more and more converted from babysitters and untrained people to college and early childhood educated workers, the mutiny against Kindergarten As First Grade Boot Camp will get ugly. For those who continue to try and hurry these young ones to Harvard, their research will fail, their anecdotes will be highly questionable, and their goals will be too narrow.

We shall see.

Infants and Memory

According to Duke University's Particia Bauer at the annual AAAS meeting, babies DO in fact for memories...but they just forget what they took in.

Does this fly in the face of child development theory? I doubt it because research does not refute the fact that infants deep within the sensorimotor stage are not remembering. They are just not processing the information like adult brains do (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). It's analogous to having someone store more and more resources in a store house, but having no idea what do with it even though he instinctively know its important in some way.

I'm going to watch this research.

Cited Resources:

Shonkoff, J.K. & Phillips, D. (2000). From neurons to neighborhoods: The science of early childhood development. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Feeding To The Early Childhood Community

Well, here goes...I'm attempting to place my blog on other spaces a la RSS/Atom.

Wish me luck.