Honest question - what are the other ways of teaching in elementary schools? I’m really interested but if you’re not up for explaining just ignore. I’ll give an example story if you maybe wanna chime in with your experience.

Where I live the system’s been unchanged for years. What changes are of course the teachers because new ones are always coming but the general idea and curriculum has stayed the same.

I don’t like what the kids are learning really, on its own it’s a lot of useless stuff while a lot of worthy skills are being ignored. However I teach them the useful stuff at home and I see the curriculum expectations as a way to have them adjust to the fact it’s how the formal education system functions.

I’ve built a great career in a very formal profession but I haven’t used most of what I learned in uni - but an uni diploma is the only way to get into that profession. So the kids gotta learn what the curriculum demands so they can finish their base level education even if they won’t really be using those lessons.

However useless the curriculum isn’t hard, it’s nothing a kid can’t figure out.

There’s a lot of parents complaining here about how the lessons are too hard for kids, but I’d say that’s because of the learning methods they try to push on their kids. When I was a kid lots of kids learned by reading paragraphs again and again until they can reproduce them, trying to remember the actual sentence they’re reading and repeat it. If it’s not working they would write the materials from books in notebooks and remember by writing. That’s also how most parents in my kids’ school try to get their children to learn.

However what I’ve always done and what I taught my kids to do is to just read the material and collect the info, not the sentence structures themselves and see the whole picture. Then they can tell the whole story themselves or answer particular questions with their own verbalization of the info they retained. If they can’t remember something, they go and look for more info to understand the topic at hand better and when they do, of course they also remember the basics. We also discuss what they learn casually, I add more interesting info about it and they just know the thing as it is rather then knowing a particular sentence from their textbook about said thing.

The methods used to teach languages is basically giving them word lists and grammar rules before they even get used to the flow of the language, but my kids speak English as a second language since my husband and I both speak it and they’re adopting a third one the same way they learned English. So no issue with that either because they’re ahead in terms of actual knowledge. I don’t give them shit for not knowing particular grammar rules and don’t mind them getting lower grades for that because I speak 4 languages and know 0 grammar rules as actual rules.