Jacparov - agree with you. You're right to kick up a stink.
Forcing English through a meatgrinder to make tasty bite sized morsels for nippers doesn't encourage them to learn more, or to grapple with a sentence they can't understand and to make sense of it. It drags the language down to a level where minimum learning or engagement with it is required and it tends to stunt growth rather than encourage.
What pees me off is that the missus often makes the models that school asks her kids to make. Recent example, a model of a spider. My argument is, do it for them and you deprive them of:
1) The opportunity for them to learn about a spider. They have to study a spider before being able to model it.
2) Doing it for them fosters the idea that all learning is put on a plate by others (on demand) and it doesn't involve any use of the head.
3) The ability to analyse a problem and develop skills to solve it, modelmaking, is shortcut.
All so wrong. Teaching is not the greatest gift we can give our kids. The greatest gift is to teach them how to teach themselves
