Two Teachers Reviewing Their Textbooks

Two Teachers Reviewing Their TextbooksThis is an interesting story of the adult education teacher and students in a South Carolina public school system. In this brief article I will only cover the two students in the class, both of whom are more advanced in the subject matter than most teachers.The text books in the classrooms seem to be all of the same breed. You find five pages of science facts, three pages of history, and four pages of American culture. That is a total of eight pages per subject, just enough for students to understand what they have to learn, but not for the teachers to understand what they are supposed to teach. That is where my student in this story comes in.Science and math are probably the most difficult subject taught in an education classroom. Science is the most current discipline and there is so much information to keep up with that teachers must keep their lesson plans vague so as not to confuse students. Teaching them about certain animals, or how the hu man body is the perfect energy efficient machine makes some sense, but it doesn't cover every minute detail of the scientific method. Students who are learning about biology and anatomy know what it is to do the experiment, but a teacher may be lost on how to explain the process.So the teacher turns to 'kumon' as an important part of his curriculum. Kumon is a method used by many teachers to introduce basic principles of behavior into their lesson plans. By the fourth grade, nearly every classroom will use it, and it is used in many different types of classes.While teaching 'kumon' to the students in my class, I also had to make sure that I explained how it worked. It was helpful to introduce it to the class, but I needed to find ways to keep it from getting too confusing.When I started explaining the basics of 'kumon,' the first few times, students got a little confused. I found it helpful to prepare students with a demonstration on how the method works and then give the students a homework assignment where they would write down something related to the subject.It helped a lot to use a few examples of this method in the book, as well, to get the students used to the way the whole thing worked. It is helpful to explain it to students in smaller steps, where one is covered in one day, then another step gets covered in the next day.The second class of students, who I called the 'bottom end' of the class, was made up of students who were struggling with basic mathematics. It turned out that their teachers did not have a whole lot of material for them to work with, so it was more of a test of how well students did with doing the activities. While I did not find a lot of problems with these students, it was nice to know that I could point out those areas where they struggled.