Literacy

It’s been a long time since I was in elementary school, its hard for me to remember what I knew back then and compare it to what these kids know now.  As I help the kids at Easley with their homework, especially math homework, I’m surprised by how little they know.  I was helping one first or second grader with simple multiplication homework.  Math has always come easy to me, I actually remember doing my multiplication tables in kindergarten so I’m not sure how much the average second grader should know.  I’m also not the best at teaching basic mathematics.  Mathematics and the sciences are subjects that build off a foundation.  These kids are in the process of learning that foundation.  I feel perfectly comfortable using that foundation to teach more complicated topics but I do not know how to build that foundation out of nothing.  While I’m helping the children with their math homework, they are constantly trying to use their calculators.  I can convince them to do a few problems by hand, just to make sure they know how its done, but they are easily distracted and it can take them up to 10 minutes to do a simple math problem.  In the end I usually just let them use their calculators so they can finish up and move on to other things.  In the end though, I don’t feel like this is doing them any favors.  If they can’t do simple multiplication by hand or in their head and have to constant rely on a calculator, it will be a crutch for them the rest of their lives.  Based of my own learning experiences, these children are behind in their mathematic abilities, but I realize that I was ahead of the game and it’’s unfair to compare them to me.  So I’m really not sure where exactly these kids fall on the academic scale.  I would assume they are behind based on all the reading we have done about inner city kids but I don’t actually know.