【考场题目回忆】：

Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?  

Young children (under 12 years of age) would get benefits if they are taught different subjects by different teachers every day.

【Introduction】

The statement covers a rather wide age range of child learners, including both pre-school children and the school-age ones. Since the age of six or seven is the start of formal education, young children mentioned in the statement should refer to predominantly the older ones, who are in elementary school. And in many American elementary schools, teaching different subjects by one teacher, as has been a convention, has a number of drawbacks. In response, schools should have different teachers teaching different disciplines.

【Body】

Of the many limitations of the conventional arrangement, the first one may be that children are likely to get tired of seeing and listening to the one teacher all day and every day. Well, there may be the counterargument that children need the familiarity and sense of security that develop through bonding with the one same teacher. It sounds plausible yet does not make a strong case, because the intimacy can also develop between a child and each teacher but not necessarily only one teacher. In fact, when there is one teacher alone, children’s feeling may be just the opposite of the desired intimacy—boredom, as the teacher’s presence is on a highly repetitive basis of every class during every day, and the consequent aversion. This is one reason why schools need different teachers for different subjects. 

To further the argument above, it is not difficult to see how boredom negatively affects children’s learning. It actually is a no-brainer that bored children can hardly learn well or learn anything. Since knowledge varies from subject to subject in terms of the nature, the structure, as well as the level of difficulty and cognition required, teaching should be accordingly diverse in terms of its methods and other aspects. And one teacher alone can hardly achieve the diversity and, instead, is inevitably monotonous in his or her method and style, making children disinterested in learning.

I think that many teachers also want to adopt the new arrangement that each of them teaches one discipline or two instead all disciplines. Many teachers have reported that specialized teaching benefits child learners more than teaching the whole broad range of areas. In the elementary schools where I work long as an external contract consultant, teachers are advised to specialize in teaching numeracy or teaching literacy, and in those schools, cross-disciplinary teaching was abandoned years ago when they found that children’s performance was dissatisfactory although their teachers sure seem to know all. The years since the change have witnessed improvement in children’s learning, and the differentiation and specialization scheme has proved right and better. 

【Conclusion】

There are problems with the conventional arrangement that children in elementary schools are taught different subjects by one teacher. Schools should instead designate different teachers for different disciplines.