Kids These Days

At a lunchtime discussion group at the Iowa early childhood conference this week, the teachers were talking about the kids they know and teach. Actually, they were worrying about kids these days.

Okay, educators have always worried about kids--for as long as I have been in the field and much longer still. Their comments have been frequently focused on things like kids are entitled, selfish, or demanding.

The comments I have been hearing lately from early childhood educators are different.

For example: "I asked the children to draw pictures of houses but they wanted me to draw the houses for them." Why? "They didn't want to get them wrong."

Or: "We were talking about what things float and one of the objects was a sieve. I asked if a sieve could float and a child said 'no.' And then he looked at me and said, 'it could." Why. He didn't want to make a mistake.

Or: "The children were drawing and one child asked, 'Is this going to be in the grade book?'"

These comments are sadly typical. I was in Baton Rouge, Louisiana last week and a grandmother told of taking her grandson to kindergarten. He was beside himself with excitement to start school. A few weeks later that excitement had waned. She asked him what he was learning in kindergarten. He told her that he was learning to take tests.

These are educators who are trying to change things in their own classrooms because they know learning involves making mistakes and that our future is going to depend on children's ability to retain their creativity, engagement in learning, and thinking outside the box. They often feel that they are swimming upstream because, in their words:

• There is too much pressure on performing for the test, at home and at school.

1)What ARE you seeing in kids these days?
2)What do you WANT to see in kids--what kinds of young people do we want to raise?