"With patience and repetition, the seed blossoms.” -Shinichi Suzuki

The Suzuki method is what opened my eyes to what has been lacking in my children’s public school experience. As my school-aged children have been working through “balanced literacy” and “spiral math,” I have seen how curriculum developers and school administrators have eroded direct instruction of basic skills and mastery of those skills through practice. This is why I have decided to afterschool.

My family’s experience with the Suzuki method clearly illustrated the value of working with content in a deep and sustained way. The music in Suzuki Book 1 is simple, yet beautiful. The children experienced it with different senses again and again. First, they listened to it with their ears. Next, they sang it with their voices. Then, they played it with their hands. Finally, they saw it with their eyes. Each new song introduced a new element to learn. Their piano teacher built their skills in steps, only moving ahead when each song and skill was mastered.

This type of skill-building appears to be neglected and haphazard in the way math and writing is being taught through standard elementary school curricula today.

Most parents born in the fifties and early sixties recited times tables and practiced solving problems we copied from textbooks using rules shown to us by our teachers. We heard, spoke, wrote, and memorized content. Most children today experience math instruction that is peppered with introductions to concepts that don’t make sense for their developmental stages. For example, the headings in my second-grader’s math workbook include “algebra” and “probability.” It doesn’t make sense to teach this way in a discipline that is as hierarchical as math.

Parents resort to hauling their kids to Kumon and Kaplan to try to address the skill-building deficiencies in the curriculum. Websites of schools where administrators and teachers speak derisively of “drill and kill” post links to math practice websites such as Kitten Match and Batter Up Baseball.

Knowing that current classroom instructional structures and inefficient homework will not contribute to mastery of certain skills, I have been finding resources to ensure that foundational skills do not fall through the cracks. I will continue to add to the Resources section of this tab as I find more.