There's something in that

Melissa wrote a good post this week about some of the issues of classroom education. One of her commenters described a primary classroom where the teacher was doing a good job of mixing up sit-still-and-listen with hands-on and move-around activities, and yet where some children still could not/would not participate and thereby distracted the others.

A long time ago when The Apprentice was two and three years old, I co-taught a toddler/preschool Sunday School class in our very small church. The class ran for two years, the ages of the kids ranged from just-two to mid-four, and there were usually four children in the class, sometimes a couple more. We had a fantastic time--and the kids learned a lot too. We didn't have a fancy classroom--very far from it, it was a college classroom with large-size tables and chairs. Anything we wanted to use had to be brought in and then taken down again when we were done. But it really worked, and this is why: besides the fact that we tried to mix up the activities, have fun and stories and songs and nature walks and so on, those four core kids all came from families where they were at home, read to, talked to, and otherwise treated like intelligent small people. Their parents often came in to help with the class. (Strangely enough, all four families ended up homeschooling, although they weren't all considering it at the time.)

A few years later, our church situation had changed, and I got permission to teach a similar class at our new church, for the post-nursery kids (including Ponytails). Now this is important: I set up the lessons in pretty much the same way as we had done at the other church. In fact, I did a lot of the same activities. And the class--as much as I could tell--went nowhere. The kids--when they did show up--usually didn't participate, unless maybe food was involved. They didn't want to sing the Judy Rogers songs. They couldn't sit still for the stories. Why? I have my own ideas about that, some of which are probably unfair, and I know there are exceptions...but my overall impression was that these were all...um...babysat kids. TV kids. Mainstream kids. Their families probably had more money than those in the first church, and they probably had more "stuff" than the first group of kids; but my guess was that they weren't getting the kind of mother AND father time spent with them that the first group did. (Taking your kid to T-ball doesn't count.) None of their parents volunteered to help with the class, either.

After awhile we just agreed to end the class. It was pretty obvious that none of us were getting much out of it. I think people thought, "oh, those kids were just too small to get anything out of Sunday School anyway."

In our local paper today there was something about how our brains are wired for learning--or not--by the time we're four. And I think there must be something in that. Those two groups of preschoolers showed me every week what they were getting--or missing--in their lives outside of church.

Of course there could be other reasons why the groups were different and why one class worked and the other didn't; three of the four kids in the first group were oldest children, if that makes any difference. Of course there were other variables that I don't know about, one way or another.

But I take these two small examples and think about the school classroom that was described, and I know exactly what that commenter means.