In short, parents are sending their children to school unlearned in the skills they should have and far too knowledgeable about things they shouldn't know. As if to echo the Baltimore teacher, another one some 200 miles away in New York City wrote an article for the April 8 New York Times education supplement. Jacqueline Goldwyn Kingon spent a year teaching second, third and fourth grades at a South Bronx elementary school. Acting out masks ignorance. Work that makes students comfortable and feel successful causes fewer discipline problems.
New work is introduced piece by piece at an agonizingly slow pace.
Dumbing down is a discipline technique that keeps children who prefer entertainment to instruction orderly and safe. Some get annoyed when notified a second or third time that their child has acted up. And some low-income parents encourage bad behavior so their children are labeled disabled and placed in a special education class. They can then receive Supplemental Security Income. Kingon tells of two second-grade boys who called two girls in their class lesbians.