A parent recently shared with me an article entitled “Mr. Sugarman’s Class” from my hometown newspaper The Boston Globe. Its author, college professor Carlo Rotella, tells of his visit to his child’s fourth grade class to talk about the nonfiction writing process, one of his areas of expertise. Despite having a fourth grader, Rotella was amazed by the energy, focus, curiosity, and creativity emanating from the students and all the learning that was taking place. While interacting with the class, Rotella recognizes the extraordinary importance of the foundation that gets set in an elementary school classroom. As he wrote, “As we talked about the fundamental tool kit of nonfiction writing at any level… it was driven home to me, as it always is when I visit my kids’ classrooms, that this is where the educational action is. Elementary school is school in its purest and most important form.”
Rotella goes on to muse about differences in the learning that goes on in college versus the nature of what happens in elementary school. Here is how he put it:
“By the time students get to my own classroom, as undergrads or grad students, it feels as if we’re playing out the sequel of this main drama. Students who develop basic skills and work habits in the early grades and refined them in middle and high school can handle anything I throw at them. Students who don’t have that foundation will almost certainly be unequipped to do well, no matter how smart they may be. Even an educational late bloomer who hits his stride in his twenties (as I did) can bloom only if the foundation’s already there.”
As the head of an independent elementary and middle school, I know I can appear biased when I tell parents that their investment in their children’s education during these years is one of the most precious, durable, and fundamental cornerstones they can provide to ensure that future doors of opportunity will be open for their children. So I like it when a professor from a top college validates what I believe! I know what Rotella wrote is true, that “as I stood there, sweating, in front of Mr. Sugarman’s class, the questions flying at me from all angles, one thing was achingly clear: I was temporarily standing on the crucial ground on which the battle is won or lost.”