Crazy Tags and Craziness Over Tag
BevK October 20th, 2006
I read the news about the school forbidding tag and decided not to comment. Just more nanny state silliness. At times it makes me weary. But after reading Spunky’s post [http://spunkyhomeschool.blogspot.com/2006/10/game-of-tag_20.html], I decided to say something about that and her longer comments on the use of tags to denote a student’s academic interests and abilities.
First on tag. I heard last night on the news that a Maryland school had to close because 50 of the students and teachers had come down with the Norwalk virus. The school has to completely sanitize the school and playground before students can return. So, there’s danger just by walking in the door.
Second on the tags. Do you remember the Monty Python sketches with John Cleese as the Minister of Silly Walks? Well I wonder if there isn’t somewhere an office of silly educational ideas.
I used to be a school librarian for a small Christian school that my children attended prior to homeschooling. Someone before my tenure had thought it was a great idea to stick big round colored dots on the primary level books to denote reading levels. This accomplished two things. Struggling readers avoided checking out anything that might be “hard reading.” Proficient readers made a big deal over the fact that they didn’t check out the baby books. Lovely. I was constantly reminding proficient readers that some of the “baby books” were really quite better reading and pushing the struggling readers to read something they thought sounded good even if it might challenge them a little. All could have been avoided if those dots weren’t so prominently displayed on the spines of the books.
Kids certainly segregate themselves into cliques easily enough without the adults providing color coding to assist them.
