As a mom, I like the idea of my child being special and having her unique personality nurtured however I wonder if it is reasonable to expect everyone else in the world to cater to her needs.
Let me make a comparison, my daughter likes spinach better than green beans. Is it really a big deal for me as a mom to accommodate her when we are having green beans by putting some frozen spinach in the microwave and heating it up for her? It is not a lot of extra effort and she gets a green vegetable so I am willing to accommodate her individual tastes.
If I had three kids, each with their own individual tastes and I had to accommodate each of them for three meals per day, well that might be a bit more difficult. What if I have 6 kids or 8 kids? What if I have 100 kids and 4 to 6 meals per day to prepare? The selection required to accommodate each persons individual tastes is overwhelming. Now what there was only 40 minutes per day to do all the planning organizing and preparation work???
In this situation, is it not more reasonable to prepare one or two healthy meals, making sure that over the course of the week a variety of foods are prepared. By the end of the week probably everyone would be pretty health overall and the cook would not be completely burnt out trying to accommodate every ones individual tastes.
Similarly in education, is it really necessary that teachers attempt to accommodate the individual learning styles of each student as would be the case in differentiated instruction.
In this online video by Rick Wormeli, he states in the beginning that "differentiated instruction is not individualized instruction." However a little later in the same clip he said "for example in a well run differentiated class, rarely would everybody have the exact same homework assignment ... so if I saw a teacher giving day after day the exact same assignment to everybody, then I would think that they might have differentiated their lesson but they undermine it because they didn't give different forms of practice."
http://www.schooltube.com/video/cb83856191f9470e8937/Rick-Wormeli-on-Differentiation
So if a teacher has 4 different classes in a day with around 100 students. The teacher should not be expected to compose and grade 100 different assignments, maybe only ... 4 or 5 per different assignments per class which would be about 20 different homework assignments to write in their 40 minute prep time. That is still an overwhelming workload.
Wouldn't it be more reasonable to ask the teacher to prepare one good well organized lesson per class with one homework assignment? I think fewer teachers would get burnt out with unreasonable expectations.
Sure I would like my child to be treated like an individual and have her teachers design special lessons for her personally and if I win a lottery, I might be able to hire a private tutor to do just that. However, I don't expect a public school teacher to work themselves into stress leave with unrealistic expectations.
Interesting food analogy, Shauna. But allow me to throw a different line of thinking into your post. I recently found out that I have Celiac disease, which means that I become physically ill when I eat anything made with wheat, rye or barley. I have spent a good 37 years of my life suffering with this illness, but, alas, I have found the answers. The only problem is, I love to eat bread and pasta and cookies and cake. So what do you do now, when someone cannot eat these foods anymore? You make substitutions. I am now learning how to bake with rice flour, sorghum flour, quinoa flour, etc. When I plan meals for the week, I now have to consider how I can incorporate my new diet in with the rest of the family. Sometimes they eat gluten-free pasta or sometimes I make my own, and make the regular pasta for them, since gluten-free pasta is three times the cost of regular pasta. When I eat out, I am very limited on food choices and if I am invited over to someone's house for supper, I have to mention my special dietary needs. But I do not want to be singled out. I want to me treated like everyone else. This is similar to the classroom, in my opinion. A child may need a simple alteration to his/her homework or classroom instruction in order to achieve success, just as any other student. And not every student in the class is going to require a different substitution, just the same as not every person in my family has a special dietary requirement. I believe that teachers, for the most part, are already accommodating different learning styles within their classrooms. And as I mentioned in my blog, we are not asking teachers to throw out the skills they have already acquired. We are providing opportunities for teachers to add to their toolboxes through professional development.
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