Pedagogical activity: silent death.

guada1 (59)in #edu-veneuzela • 6 years ago (edited)

Some pedagogical activities cause silent death in schools; Even the supposedly exploited time can not be said to be well used. Hour after hour, class after class, in different schools, we see the repetition of basic work routines that impact due to their low cognitive value.

Source

There is a lot of criticism of the so-called master class, to the class where the students sitting in rows listen without explanations from the teacher. We have rarely seen this kind of class. It would not even be bad if the teacher's good explanation was given, properly distributed. But to explain something well implies a capacity and an effort. And it is not seen.

The activities that predominate in most of our schools are:

The routine exercises of mathematics:

SourceOne equal to another, the first as the next. Accounts and more accounts. Mathematics eliminates all reasoning and all applicability and becomes our school, from the first grade onwards, in an endless repetitive exercise or stereotyped problems:

"Write the numbers from 1 to 20 regressively",
835 +512 + 102 equal to ".
"A worker unloads 60 bags in an hour, how many bags ...?

Dictations

SourceOne of the poorest and most traditional mechanisms of language teaching. It may be useful from time to time but in our school it is too preponderant an activity. Also highlight the inanity and total lack of interest in most of the texts that dictate.

Routine Spanish exercises.

Things like:

"Write a synonym for these words.
"Indicate the subject, in the following sentences"
"Classify these words according to their tonic syllable."

Actually I do not criticize the occasional presence of exercises that allow to consolidate certain essential knowledge of grammar. But if the aberration of converting the teaching of the language, which should be the basis for each child to learn to express themselves correctly, to communicate better with the world, and that must be the key in the field of literature, convert it, let's not , in an almost useless and discouraged repetition of the tasks of many years.

Copy with drawing

Source In this activity, the teacher sends a text from the book or the blackboard to the notebook and asks that an appropriate drawing be made at the end of the copy. Normally children also copy the drawing of the book.

Discussion

SourceThe discussions we have seen most often are of two types. The first is the channeling interrogation; the teacher wants the students to reach a certain conclusion, and they are throwing questions to reach it without remedy. The second type of discussion is what might be called "exchange of ignorance".

The topics that are supposed to touch the students' experience are treated through a discussion without further preparation or consequences, in which the students expose common ideas about people. These discussions are usually made with the whole group class, the children in rows in front of the teacher. The usual thing is that only a minority participates.

In general, the quality of school activities that we have observed is very low. These tasks make the child very well. And they also erode the teacher, they sink him into a poor and repetitive world, from which he can barely get out.

Therefore, every day something dies in the classroom: a little enthusiasm, the ability to learn, the potential to produce our children and our teachers is drying up every day of that routine and restricted.

But its consequences can not be stopped, with knowledge so scarce that it is not unusual to find sixth grade students who are illiterate, because they can not read or write well.