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"just within reach of the audience" is very hard when there are 20+ children in a class who have very little in common except age. If the children were careful

"just within reach of the audience" is very hard when there are 20+ children in a class who have very little in common except age. If the children were carefully separated by ability it might work.

jacobolus 7y ago
It doesn’t have to be perfect. If kids don’t understand every word or every abstract theme of a book that’s okay. If kids aren’t maximally challenged by every sentence, or if the teacher interjects a definition of a word they already knew for the benefit of less prepared students, that’s also okay. Kids who are a bit ahead or a bit behind will still generally stay engaged if the story is interesting.
- saint_fiasco 7y ago
  The smarter students can just tune out, read ahead, and enjoy the book. That's not too bad. The other way around is much worse. The slower students get frustrated as they fall further and further behind until they feel it's impossible to catch up and give up. Unfortunately most teachers teach at the level of the more advanced students, not at the level of the slower students. I don't know if they mean to do this, it might be unconscious, but they definitely do it.
  - jacobolus 7y ago
    How much experience do you have watching primary school classrooms, library read-alouds, etc.? I’m talking about e.g. 5–8 year-old students, listening to books that even the best prepared in the class would struggle to read on their own, but even the least prepared have little trouble listening to someone else read. I feel like we must be talking about different activities here. Children are very engaged listening to a good reader reading a good story. Listening to stories does not cause any substantial proportion of them to “fall further behind” or to “give up”. > Unfortunately most teachers teach at the level of the more advanced students This was almost never my own experience as a student in ~17 years of formal education. YMMV.
  - docker_up 7y ago
    > Unfortunately most teachers teach at the level of the more advanced students, not at the level of the slower students. I don't know if they mean to do this, it might be unconscious, but they definitely do it. This is almost universally false. They target the least advanced students and let them more advanced students fend for themselves. In the US it's even more pronounced because of teacher evaluation by test scores, etc. Teachers are incentivized to ignore the smarter kids because their test scores are high already, and they get more bang for their buck by raising the scores of the kids at the bottom of the range.
tomatocracy 7y ago
I'd argue they don't have age in common either in the first years of school - at the beginning of formal schooling in the UK in September, the difference between the youngest child in the class who might only just have had their 4th birthday in late August and the oldest who might have had their 5th birthday in early September just before starting school means that one is almost 25% older than the other. That's huge.

"just within reach of the audience" is very hard when there are 20+ children in a class who have very little in common except age. If the children were carefully separated by ability it might work.

jacobolus 7y ago

It doesn’t have to be perfect. If kids don’t understand every word or every abstract theme of a book that’s okay. If kids aren’t maximally challenged by every sentence, or if the teacher interjects a definition of a word they already knew for the benefit of less prepared students, that’s also okay. Kids who are a bit ahead or a bit behind will still generally stay engaged if the story is interesting.

saint_fiasco 7y ago
The smarter students can just tune out, read ahead, and enjoy the book. That's not too bad. The other way around is much worse. The slower students get frustrated as they fall further and further behind until they feel it's impossible to catch up and give up. Unfortunately most teachers teach at the level of the more advanced students, not at the level of the slower students. I don't know if they mean to do this, it might be unconscious, but they definitely do it.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  How much experience do you have watching primary school classrooms, library read-alouds, etc.? I’m talking about e.g. 5–8 year-old students, listening to books that even the best prepared in the class would struggle to read on their own, but even the least prepared have little trouble listening to someone else read. I feel like we must be talking about different activities here. Children are very engaged listening to a good reader reading a good story. Listening to stories does not cause any substantial proportion of them to “fall further behind” or to “give up”. > Unfortunately most teachers teach at the level of the more advanced students This was almost never my own experience as a student in ~17 years of formal education. YMMV.
- docker_up 7y ago
  > Unfortunately most teachers teach at the level of the more advanced students, not at the level of the slower students. I don't know if they mean to do this, it might be unconscious, but they definitely do it. This is almost universally false. They target the least advanced students and let them more advanced students fend for themselves. In the US it's even more pronounced because of teacher evaluation by test scores, etc. Teachers are incentivized to ignore the smarter kids because their test scores are high already, and they get more bang for their buck by raising the scores of the kids at the bottom of the range.

tomatocracy 7y ago

I'd argue they don't have age in common either in the first years of school - at the beginning of formal schooling in the UK in September, the difference between the youngest child in the class who might only just have had their 4th birthday in late August and the oldest who might have had their 5th birthday in early September just before starting school means that one is almost 25% older than the other. That's huge.