In the past week there has been a lot of discussion in the media over Amy Chua’s book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” The book, by being critical of American parenting, has sparked a debate on how best to raise our children. From what I can tell, Chua claims that our country’s kids are not pushed hard enough by their parents to excel and in contrast to childeren of Chinese parenting, are soft.
Opinions on how to create optimum conditions that will lead to a child being motivated to excel vary, and typically fall into the old school, heavy handed approach (practice your violin for four hours a day or no television) or new school where children are relatively free of such structure and can spend a lot of time in social situations that welcomes self-discovery. Each approach has obvious benefits and shortcomings. My take is that if our students are to be the best, we will have to do both.
We are asking our teachers to take student learning to a higher level where the assessment of acquired knowledge includes analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. When I share this request with teachers I am occasionaly met with a “not so fast” stare. I get this because the teachers know that acquistion of basic skills must come first and are often as “far as we can get.” Unfortunately, as far as we can get is often not far enough. We need to refine our practices for acquistion of skills so that we can more easily move to the higher order level of learning. The benefit of repeated practice must be accepted and embraced by parents, they should not however, be satisfied with an A on a spelling test.
Motivating Our Students
In the past week there has been a lot of discussion in the media over Amy Chua’s book, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” The book, by being critical of American parenting, has sparked a debate on how best to raise our children. From what I can tell, Chua claims that our country’s kids are not pushed hard enough by their parents to excel and in contrast to childeren of Chinese parenting, are soft.
Opinions on how to create optimum conditions that will lead to a child being motivated to excel vary, and typically fall into the old school, heavy handed approach (practice your violin for four hours a day or no television) or new school where children are relatively free of such structure and can spend a lot of time in social situations that welcomes self-discovery. Each approach has obvious benefits and shortcomings. My take is that if our students are to be the best, we will have to do both.
We are asking our teachers to take student learning to a higher level where the assessment of acquired knowledge includes analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. When I share this request with teachers I am occasionaly met with a “not so fast” stare. I get this because the teachers know that acquistion of basic skills must come first and are often as “far as we can get.” Unfortunately, as far as we can get is often not far enough. We need to refine our practices for acquistion of skills so that we can more easily move to the higher order level of learning. The benefit of repeated practice must be accepted and embraced by parents, they should not however, be satisfied with an A on a spelling test.