4th graders who flunk reading have faces marked

[GiaGiovanni]

48. Actually, this teacher's blog has some student reading videos that are anything but shaming

http://summerlarsendes.blogspot.com/p/farmer-rt-group-1.html

Here's what I think happened. This teacher seems very student centered. A student centered classroom requires that students make many of their own decisions as a class, including decisions about incentivizing learning. The students themselves (according to the AP article) chose the disincentive of writing marker on children's faces. A student centered classroom might in fact go with the student's own idea of an appropriate punishment to see what happens and to talk about it later. I heartily agree that this particular exercise was cruel, and something to be expected of 4th graders whose moral systems are still developing. However, some student centered educational methodologies require going along with such decisions, provided they are not truly dangerous.

You might argue that the exercise was psychologically damaging to students, but remember, there have been lots of educational "experiments" in the past 30 years, such as the discrimination game described in the documentary A Class Divided. Under the guise of education, such psychological experiments certainly affect children, and not only in a good way. One Florida school, for example, decided to play a "Holocaust Game" in which certain random students were chosen to be Jews for a day. There were many children traumatized.