As a homeschooled child, I think watching my two older siblings learn to read gave me a headstart. When my mother sat me down at age five to teach me to read, I learned within a week. I was soon devouring full length chapter books, often within one day. When I read, I was utterly lost to the world - my family had trouble getting my attention when I was focused on a book. We not only had many books at home but my mother was also working at a library. My mother steered us toward age appropriate material in the library - and I wasn't intrigued by the dull covers on the grownup categories. After I unintentionally frightened my youngest sibling by recounting a Sherlock Holmes mystery, 'The Speckled Band', my father placed his more mature books on higher shelves. That was only a partial deterrent - I learned not to repeat all the stories I read to my youngest sibling but I still wanted more to read - as I literally climbed the bookshelf to reach books that intrigued me.
My parents would have resonated completely with these approaches to learning. Although I didn’t study Latin, my father put me to reading the greats of Science Fiction from a young age. To show that critical thinking was not limited to such forward thinkers, he gave me the works of great philosophers and scientists. When he did his class work for his PhD in communication theory, I was in 8th grade and he had me read his texts and papers. I later did my Freshman year at the same University. I had my father’s dissertation advisor for a class in communication theory and he was shocked at my essays. I was able to use work that had recently been published and back it with solid scholarship rooted in the classics.
I totally agree with this passage: "When you follow your interests, you’re never bored or put off". I think that the distance from the education we receive and from what we read is constant and it is important to understand, however, that the continuous nourishment of interests is something really important in my opinion. In particular, of course, education can give us different stimuli (there are authors that I have met thanks to lessons or professors in particular) that we might not appreciate at first but that can later reveal themselves to be precious. I think that also the dynamics of a continuous nourishment and exchange between these two 'environments' (school and personal) is relevant.
Reminds me of a video I watched about how sparring in the UFC has changed.
They used to emulate real game situations when sparring. It could be rough sometimes. People would get injured and there was a lot of pressure.
The new way they spar is more similar to play. They don't keep score, people are matched up with different skill abilities and very importantly, since nothing is on the line they are told to experiment. People learn more when they aren't under tons of pressure. When we are under huge amounts of pressure our brains lock up and sometimes we blackout and don't even remember what happened.
I grew up in a house full of reading material from current magazines to books printed before there were copyright dates: my mother's study, lined with books from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, a hallway lined with bookshelves, bookshelves in our bedrooms for the books we got for Christmas and birthdays, books stacked in the window seat in the living room and piled by my parents' chairs, baskets and piles of magazines like the Smithsonian and National Geographic. I read indiscriminately, everything from books aimed at children much younger than me (the Honey Bunch series) to books way beyond me (Of Mice and Men confused me at age 9 or 10, and I gave up on Billy Budd and God Bless The Beasts and Children part way through). I read plenty of "trash" and also quite a lot of classic literature, and I'm thankful for the reader and writer it helped form in me.
One, have students select their required reading from a curated list instead of assigning specific books. Give them some investment in what they end up reading.
Two, have a school library at least at the high school level with a wide range of books, including books with adult content. If a teenager wants to actually read a certain book, the teen is probably mature enough to do so.
I was surprised on a recent visit to a middle school library. The only books were multiple copies of the classroom texts! No wonder Alabama ranks one of the lowest states in education. (I think only Louisiana is worse.)
I started reading and loving to read early. Neither the school library nor the town library had many good books. At home we played the card game Authors, so we knew great books existed. But we could not get our hands on them. The good side of that has been to gradually fill in the holes throughout life.
Growing up, the library was one of my favorite places to be (and still is). I would walk out the door with a stack of books up to my chin, mainly mysteries and fantasy tales. A positive experience with reading is a blessing that I didn't even realize I had.
"Of the making of books there is no end." Written more than once, when books were reproduced by one person reading and 20 people in the room writing down what he said. I was issued a teaching certificate in 1979 and have spent most of my career as an independent educator working with homeschoolers. I recently spent a year in the "Classical" model. Meh. It's astonishing to me that we've been teaching and learning for thousands of years and still have little idea how people learn.
There are things about it I like very much, such as a deep respect for the literature and thinking that got us to this place. But like any school, it depends on how it's being implemented. The setting I was in suffered much cognitive dissonance.
I think I would argue for a middle ground between just letting children follow their own interests and guiding them along. (As I suspect you would also, in fact.) Many of us need a bit of prompting to push ourselves to try things we might otherwise not attempt. I teach at a small Christian university, and many of my best (and most interested) students turn out to be homeschoolers who had a great deal of freedom to pursue their own interests. But every now and then I'll get one who was "unschooled"--that is, allowed entirely to pursue his or her own interests, without a more formal curriculum--and they have generally been poorly served by it. After all, you quote Augustine expressing his gratitude for having acquired skill in Latin that came first through exposure to those primers that he experienced as a "burden and a punishment."
But still: all in favor of lots of unsupervised reading, including the "trash." Hurston is right that "acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing." I owe a lot to the Hardy Boys.
P.S. Augustine almost certainly did learn Greek, at least passably well. Pulling Henry Chadwick's translation of the Confessions off the shelf in my office, where he attaches the following footnote to the passage you quote: "Augustine was never fluent in Greek, but could make his own translations when needed. He knew more Greek than he sometimes admits."
Not that I could make her, but I didn't nag my teen to read her assigned summer reading for school. She read all summer for enjoyment and that's fine with me.
Excellent advice…my own education interspersed serious history, ‘serious’ literature, science and philosophy into oceans of science fiction and bits and pieces of other popular ‘kid lit’ of my ‘50s day…worked for me…the only subject for which schooling was wholly responsible in youth was mathematics, for which I acquired an abiding distaste until, in graduate school, a friend suggested I think of it as simply a foreign language. That enabled me to learn higher mathematics a bit eclectically, but adequately to do graduate work in mathematical economics….
As a child, I loved to read, and I wanted more than anything to instill in my children a love of reading. With my daughter, it came naturally, along with a natural talent of writing. When my son struggled to learn to read and write - which we soon came to know was a result of instruction not appropriate for a child with dyslexia and dysgraphia - I fought hard to give him pleasure in reading. My efforts were almost derailed by a second grade teacher who believed he should only read books that, in her words, he could understand - because she did not understand that his mind gave him comprehension even where he stumbled horrifically in read-aloud decoding. Thankfully, because we made available any book he wanted, and his fourth grade challenged him in a way that still pays dividends, he found enjoyment in books. It is the greatest disservice to thr children of our time that books, for most, are chores and not the incredible instruments of imagination and learning that expanded my world, my vocabulary and my understanding of the English language.
As a retired “English” teacher, I enjoyed this article.
I don’t remember learning to read. When I was very young, I begged my father to teach me, but he refused (probably because he didn’t know how). He said I’d learn in 1st grade.
I do recall our Alice and Jerry books in three aspects. One, I thought their conversations strange: “Look Jerry look. See Jip run. Run Jip run.” Who talks like that? Two: I understood that the pictures at the start of each chapter went with the words underneath them, but I didn’t get why the book continued to show small pictures throughout the chapter. Why did they repeat what they’d already told me? Three: After the class had trudged through the first few chapters, I went ahead and read the whole book—three times. The last chapter had a birthday party and a big cake, and I thought we’d never get there.
I then read everything I could. Even the cereal boxes (with BHT added as preservative). I read neighbors’ school books. I read the newspapers and magazines that came to the house. I read some of my mother’s college books. I found an indescribable treasure trove in the local library. I especially loved fiction, high or low.
I wrote my first poem, a rhyming philosophical piece, in 4th grade, and soon I also wrote stories. By 6th grade I was creating illustrated novels. I also memorized most of the poems in our literature book.
Years later, my husband and I lived in Nigeria with a houseful of Nigerians. We got exasperated with the local schools, and I decided to teach our three young Nigerian children myself. I didn’t give them reading lessons or reading assignments. I read to them. And they quickly became voracious readers themselves. (I did wonder if I’d shared too many fantasy stories when the 6year old expressed a desire one day to “smite” the neighbors—for stealing our water.)
I’ve often thought that other subjects should be more hands-on and fun as well. As much as I read and wrote, I never grasped the purpose of graphing sentences. Likewise, I didn’t learn history by memorizing names and dates or piano by endlessly repeating scales. At least science had labs and experiments.
Let’s hear it for more exposure and less artificial structure!
As a homeschooled child, I think watching my two older siblings learn to read gave me a headstart. When my mother sat me down at age five to teach me to read, I learned within a week. I was soon devouring full length chapter books, often within one day. When I read, I was utterly lost to the world - my family had trouble getting my attention when I was focused on a book. We not only had many books at home but my mother was also working at a library. My mother steered us toward age appropriate material in the library - and I wasn't intrigued by the dull covers on the grownup categories. After I unintentionally frightened my youngest sibling by recounting a Sherlock Holmes mystery, 'The Speckled Band', my father placed his more mature books on higher shelves. That was only a partial deterrent - I learned not to repeat all the stories I read to my youngest sibling but I still wanted more to read - as I literally climbed the bookshelf to reach books that intrigued me.
My parents would have resonated completely with these approaches to learning. Although I didn’t study Latin, my father put me to reading the greats of Science Fiction from a young age. To show that critical thinking was not limited to such forward thinkers, he gave me the works of great philosophers and scientists. When he did his class work for his PhD in communication theory, I was in 8th grade and he had me read his texts and papers. I later did my Freshman year at the same University. I had my father’s dissertation advisor for a class in communication theory and he was shocked at my essays. I was able to use work that had recently been published and back it with solid scholarship rooted in the classics.
I totally agree with this passage: "When you follow your interests, you’re never bored or put off". I think that the distance from the education we receive and from what we read is constant and it is important to understand, however, that the continuous nourishment of interests is something really important in my opinion. In particular, of course, education can give us different stimuli (there are authors that I have met thanks to lessons or professors in particular) that we might not appreciate at first but that can later reveal themselves to be precious. I think that also the dynamics of a continuous nourishment and exchange between these two 'environments' (school and personal) is relevant.
Reminds me of a video I watched about how sparring in the UFC has changed.
They used to emulate real game situations when sparring. It could be rough sometimes. People would get injured and there was a lot of pressure.
The new way they spar is more similar to play. They don't keep score, people are matched up with different skill abilities and very importantly, since nothing is on the line they are told to experiment. People learn more when they aren't under tons of pressure. When we are under huge amounts of pressure our brains lock up and sometimes we blackout and don't even remember what happened.
I grew up in a house full of reading material from current magazines to books printed before there were copyright dates: my mother's study, lined with books from floor to ceiling and wall to wall, a hallway lined with bookshelves, bookshelves in our bedrooms for the books we got for Christmas and birthdays, books stacked in the window seat in the living room and piled by my parents' chairs, baskets and piles of magazines like the Smithsonian and National Geographic. I read indiscriminately, everything from books aimed at children much younger than me (the Honey Bunch series) to books way beyond me (Of Mice and Men confused me at age 9 or 10, and I gave up on Billy Budd and God Bless The Beasts and Children part way through). I read plenty of "trash" and also quite a lot of classic literature, and I'm thankful for the reader and writer it helped form in me.
From a public school perspective, two thoughts.
One, have students select their required reading from a curated list instead of assigning specific books. Give them some investment in what they end up reading.
Two, have a school library at least at the high school level with a wide range of books, including books with adult content. If a teenager wants to actually read a certain book, the teen is probably mature enough to do so.
I was surprised on a recent visit to a middle school library. The only books were multiple copies of the classroom texts! No wonder Alabama ranks one of the lowest states in education. (I think only Louisiana is worse.)
I started reading and loving to read early. Neither the school library nor the town library had many good books. At home we played the card game Authors, so we knew great books existed. But we could not get our hands on them. The good side of that has been to gradually fill in the holes throughout life.
Authors! We played it all the time.
Being a confirmed reader is the most important educational advantage one can have!
Growing up, the library was one of my favorite places to be (and still is). I would walk out the door with a stack of books up to my chin, mainly mysteries and fantasy tales. A positive experience with reading is a blessing that I didn't even realize I had.
"Of the making of books there is no end." Written more than once, when books were reproduced by one person reading and 20 people in the room writing down what he said. I was issued a teaching certificate in 1979 and have spent most of my career as an independent educator working with homeschoolers. I recently spent a year in the "Classical" model. Meh. It's astonishing to me that we've been teaching and learning for thousands of years and still have little idea how people learn.
Do you think the classical model is better?
There are things about it I like very much, such as a deep respect for the literature and thinking that got us to this place. But like any school, it depends on how it's being implemented. The setting I was in suffered much cognitive dissonance.
What do you mean it suffered much cognitive dissonance?
Stated expectations and practice did not match.
I think I would argue for a middle ground between just letting children follow their own interests and guiding them along. (As I suspect you would also, in fact.) Many of us need a bit of prompting to push ourselves to try things we might otherwise not attempt. I teach at a small Christian university, and many of my best (and most interested) students turn out to be homeschoolers who had a great deal of freedom to pursue their own interests. But every now and then I'll get one who was "unschooled"--that is, allowed entirely to pursue his or her own interests, without a more formal curriculum--and they have generally been poorly served by it. After all, you quote Augustine expressing his gratitude for having acquired skill in Latin that came first through exposure to those primers that he experienced as a "burden and a punishment."
But still: all in favor of lots of unsupervised reading, including the "trash." Hurston is right that "acquiring the reading habit early is the important thing." I owe a lot to the Hardy Boys.
P.S. Augustine almost certainly did learn Greek, at least passably well. Pulling Henry Chadwick's translation of the Confessions off the shelf in my office, where he attaches the following footnote to the passage you quote: "Augustine was never fluent in Greek, but could make his own translations when needed. He knew more Greek than he sometimes admits."
Not that I could make her, but I didn't nag my teen to read her assigned summer reading for school. She read all summer for enjoyment and that's fine with me.
Excellent advice…my own education interspersed serious history, ‘serious’ literature, science and philosophy into oceans of science fiction and bits and pieces of other popular ‘kid lit’ of my ‘50s day…worked for me…the only subject for which schooling was wholly responsible in youth was mathematics, for which I acquired an abiding distaste until, in graduate school, a friend suggested I think of it as simply a foreign language. That enabled me to learn higher mathematics a bit eclectically, but adequately to do graduate work in mathematical economics….
As a child, I loved to read, and I wanted more than anything to instill in my children a love of reading. With my daughter, it came naturally, along with a natural talent of writing. When my son struggled to learn to read and write - which we soon came to know was a result of instruction not appropriate for a child with dyslexia and dysgraphia - I fought hard to give him pleasure in reading. My efforts were almost derailed by a second grade teacher who believed he should only read books that, in her words, he could understand - because she did not understand that his mind gave him comprehension even where he stumbled horrifically in read-aloud decoding. Thankfully, because we made available any book he wanted, and his fourth grade challenged him in a way that still pays dividends, he found enjoyment in books. It is the greatest disservice to thr children of our time that books, for most, are chores and not the incredible instruments of imagination and learning that expanded my world, my vocabulary and my understanding of the English language.
As a retired “English” teacher, I enjoyed this article.
I don’t remember learning to read. When I was very young, I begged my father to teach me, but he refused (probably because he didn’t know how). He said I’d learn in 1st grade.
I do recall our Alice and Jerry books in three aspects. One, I thought their conversations strange: “Look Jerry look. See Jip run. Run Jip run.” Who talks like that? Two: I understood that the pictures at the start of each chapter went with the words underneath them, but I didn’t get why the book continued to show small pictures throughout the chapter. Why did they repeat what they’d already told me? Three: After the class had trudged through the first few chapters, I went ahead and read the whole book—three times. The last chapter had a birthday party and a big cake, and I thought we’d never get there.
I then read everything I could. Even the cereal boxes (with BHT added as preservative). I read neighbors’ school books. I read the newspapers and magazines that came to the house. I read some of my mother’s college books. I found an indescribable treasure trove in the local library. I especially loved fiction, high or low.
I wrote my first poem, a rhyming philosophical piece, in 4th grade, and soon I also wrote stories. By 6th grade I was creating illustrated novels. I also memorized most of the poems in our literature book.
Years later, my husband and I lived in Nigeria with a houseful of Nigerians. We got exasperated with the local schools, and I decided to teach our three young Nigerian children myself. I didn’t give them reading lessons or reading assignments. I read to them. And they quickly became voracious readers themselves. (I did wonder if I’d shared too many fantasy stories when the 6year old expressed a desire one day to “smite” the neighbors—for stealing our water.)
I’ve often thought that other subjects should be more hands-on and fun as well. As much as I read and wrote, I never grasped the purpose of graphing sentences. Likewise, I didn’t learn history by memorizing names and dates or piano by endlessly repeating scales. At least science had labs and experiments.
Let’s hear it for more exposure and less artificial structure!