Don't read this. It's not a blog

Ok. So i save important things in like 50 billion places so that when i'm not at my computer i can still work on them/print them/find them. I need to finish this up and polish it up tomorrow morning during my 8am, and don't know where my flash drive is, therefor i'm emailing it to myself twice and throwing it up here just to be sure. i repeat: DON"T FREAKIN READ>>> it's not interesting or a good representation of my writing ability. I'll post a real blog later.



Kindergarten: The word immediately brings to mind clumsy construction paper cutouts and the smell of Elmer’s glue. For just a second you are transported to a world where there is play-dough perpetually under your fingernails and permanent smelly marker stains on your desk. Success and happiness are defined with a bright sticker on a worksheet or extended recess. A fresh box of crayons is the ultimate reward and the golden rule is law. Unfortunately, due to the simple uniformity of standardized tests and pressure from new academic standards, your memories of kindergarten may be radically different from your children’s memories. In the 2003 article Why is Kindergarten an Endangered Species?, Kathy Morris and Linda Plevyak investigate the changes that have taken place in the last couple of decades that have our kindergartener’s concerned with memorizing “sight” words and learning subtraction.
The article explains that ever since that fateful day when standardized test scores were used not as broad generalizations of our youth but as a tool for measuring absolute academic standards, teachers have been feeling the “backward domino effect”. First and second grade teachers nationwide began to feel pressure to cover higher level material in order for students to score higher on the third grade standardized achievement test, thus displacing the strain onto kindergarten teachers. And why shouldn’t they feel pressure? In the long run it’s these scores that determine how much money is coming to the school. As the “jam as much as we can, as fast as we can” mentality infects elementary schools nationwide, kindergarten teachers are left wondering if four and five year olds should really be able to master the sight-word recognition, phonics, and math skills that used to be covered in first grade.
Teachers are not the only ones on the burner, because in recent years the heat has been turned up on parents. According to the article, parents that observed modern kindergarten programs often left feeling as if their child was “not ready” for this warped kind of primary education. However, instead of questioning the establishment and the practices thereof, the parents would be left deliberating whether or not to wait another year or just enroll in an “academic preschool”. The result was crops of kindergarteners that were older, more socially mature, taller, heavier, and inevitably, bored. The article states that by third grade there is very little evidence to suggest that the extra year at home “prepping” for kindergarten had any positive benefit to the cognitive development of the child. On the contrary, these “super kindergarteners” were significantly more likely to engage in dangerous sexual and alcohol related behaviors in later years.
School districts nationwide have enormous amounts or pressure to define “kindergarten readiness”. In the past few decades the focus has changed from advancing the social, emotional, and cognitive development, in order to better ready a child for elementary school to a distorted system that revolves around teaching to the test and