I generally agree. Having spent most of my adult life as a school teacher (high school English), I will say that many teachers TRY to at least SOMEWHAT model and discuss all these kinds of things. I think that a lot of folks give us too much credit, though, really. I mean, I have your kid for 50 minutes 5 days a week (well, actually 50 minutes 4 days, 40 minutes 1 day)... he's doing something ELSE the rest of the time. And his peers, parents, friends, and other people have WAY more influence on his life than me. Besides, it's not my job to RAISE your child; it's my job to teach him a little about the language.
To fill in a lot of the gaps that are increasingly lacking in a person's upbringing, I can only suggest that we shorten all this to "develop a really strong reading habit." It is AMAZING how much we can learn with enough reading and enough imagination. Reading, remember, is unlike television and movies and that sort of thing, in that reading is an ACTIVE event, whereas those other things are PASSIVE. That is, what happens on screen is just that. You see it and hear it, and you RECEIVE it, just as it is. Meanwhile, what's in a book calls upon your own past experiences and prompts you to CREATE and VISUALIZE while exposing you to all sorts of things you might not otherwise have a chance to experience.
On Aug 28, 2012 nikflorida wrote:
I generally agree. Having spent most of my adult life as a school teacher (high school English), I will say that many teachers TRY to at least SOMEWHAT model and discuss all these kinds of things. I think that a lot of folks give us too much credit, though, really. I mean, I have your kid for 50 minutes 5 days a week (well, actually 50 minutes 4 days, 40 minutes 1 day)... he's doing something ELSE the rest of the time. And his peers, parents, friends, and other people have WAY more influence on his life than me. Besides, it's not my job to RAISE your child; it's my job to teach him a little about the language.
To fill in a lot of the gaps that are increasingly lacking in a person's upbringing, I can only suggest that we shorten all this to "develop a really strong reading habit." It is AMAZING how much we can learn with enough reading and enough imagination. Reading, remember, is unlike television and movies and that sort of thing, in that reading is an ACTIVE event, whereas those other things are PASSIVE. That is, what happens on screen is just that. You see it and hear it, and you RECEIVE it, just as it is. Meanwhile, what's in a book calls upon your own past experiences and prompts you to CREATE and VISUALIZE while exposing you to all sorts of things you might not otherwise have a chance to experience.
That, and: "parents, get off your asses!"