Getting Started

I began writing books on reading, writing and mathematics because my students would say things like, "You're making this up." or "Where does it say that in our book?"  I could see that the text books were assuming that the students had totally absorbed a lot in earlier years that they hadn't learned at all.  I could see that they needed some sort of reference books that they could use from one year to the next.

Another thing that got me started was picking up a manual about grammar and writing conventions.  I picked it up in a university bookstore.  It was not on my course book list, but it looked useful so I flipped through it.  I was completely floored when I came upon a section on the Seven Patterns of Simple Sentences.  Why didn't they teach us that in elementary school when we needed to know that?  I knew that "writing complete sentences" was on the Grade 5 curriculum.   Why did they wait until university to point out something so obvious that there were only seven sentences?

When I taught Grade 8 mathematics, science and English at once, I saw how they all fit together.  I saw that our conventions of writing essays is based on the Scientific Method of Problem Solving.  Now there are many philosophers who will tell you that the SMoPS has been out-stripped by modern theories of problem solving.  Perhaps it has.  However, the way we lay out exposition does still follow that old method.  Furthermore, the way I was taught to write out a mathematics word problem solution also follows that method, and so does how we lay out a note on a science experiment.

However, over the last few decades, we have thrown out teaching rules of grammar, spelling, drilling, re-writing, and all those routines that bore the teacher.  That is not to say, of course, that no one is teaching those things, but they do not get the emphasis they once did, and many of the essentials have been lost along the way because of this relegation of what were once considered worth doing to the filing cabinet in favour of games and novelty.


And I'm not the only one who thinks so.  In checking out arguments against the SMoPS, I ran across this website:  http://www.problemsolving.net/