Sticks + Dirt = Literacy

[dr_pretentious]

Gareth was drawing in the dirt with a stick at the playground the day it occurred to me to write his name for him for the first time. I spend a lot of time at playgrounds, and usually Gareth has handed me at least one stick to keep for him. Frustrated writer that I am, I wrote for the audience I had handy. G A R E T H

The next couple of playground visits, he told me he was writing his name in the dirt. Random lines, of course, but it was cool that he was interested.

Today he wanted me to write his name, and mine, and Dan's, and to sound out all the letters. Then he wanted a letter A all by itself, and then an E. After considering this, crinkling his little eyebrows the way he does when he's thinking really hard, he said, "I will draw the sun for you," by which, of course, he meant to ask me to draw it for him. Still has the I/you problem. So there was the sun, in a rather cruder form than the Lascaux painters would have produced. "Write sun?" Still the crinkled eyebrows. "Moon?" He was especially puzzled by my attempt to explain the double O's, but then he started getting excited and proposed, "Anthony! Tiffany!" They're the longest names he knows.

I'm not sure whether he was thrilled to learn that his mommy can write even three-syllable words, or that three-syllable words can be written at all. Whatever it was, thrilling is not too strong a word for it.

I've read a lot of books about gender differences and brain development over the past two years, all of them for laypeople. Which is fine. Although I can read the original studies and follow them, I'm not sure I have the chops to tell a well-designed study from a bad one, so I might as well make do with the popularizers. Most of these people fret about boys' difficulties in learning to write--very young boys are slower to develop fine motor skills than girls are, have a harder time sitting still than girls do, suffer more than girls do from being cooped up indoors. Broken down into small enough pieces, the arguments sound plausible.

The alarmist tone of some of these books makes it sound like it's a miracle any boys at all become literate. It's tempting to write all these authors and say, When will there be a male Shakespeare? When will a boy grow up to be as great a writer as Yeats? After a couple of centuries of arguments that women were uneducable because there had never yet been a female Shakespeare, now we get arguments that schools should be made less girl-friendly because boys are innately less capable of literacy.

I'm persuaded that many boys have experienced frustration, which then their teachers and parents got to share, with the way the earliest writing skills are taught, but I'm not persuaded that the solution is to delay introducing reading and writing until age seven (though that delay seems to work just fine in Finland), or to slow girls down so boys won't conclude that literacy has girl cooties.

Who says first writing experiences have to happen on paper, with a pencil, indoors at a desk? Who says recess is the only time kids should be learning outdoors? Why not just let kids write big, gross-motor-skill-friendly letters outside, in dirt, with sticks? Surely that would be more fun and productive for kids generally, and not just boys. And surely lots of other people must have thought of it. I wonder why it's not showing up in the mainstream discussion as an option.

Comments

[jasminewind.livejournal.com]

You should look into Forest Kindergartens, they are big in Germany but also exist over here. Another interesting book might be Last Child in the Woods. I have it on my shelf right now but haven't cracked it. I decided that it wasn't the right time for me to read that book right now, just at the start of foul weather without having an appropriate winter coat for myself, I don't want to hear about how I need to take my kids outside more!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I read a piece in Mothering about Forest Kindergartens in Switzerland, but I had no idea there were any in the US. My first thought was, Imagine the liability insurance costs! It sounded like so much fun, the biggest problem I can envision is wanting to attend right along with him.

[purpledice.livejournal.com]

Or with paint on giant pieces of paper...or fingers in uncooked rolls...or with clay...the possibilities are endless!

On a slightly similar note (boys being screwed over in school), have you seen the new study on single-sex education's impact on the different genders? http://jezebel.com/5416112/are-single+sex-schools-bad-for-boys I know you're planning on home-schooling, but still interesting.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Weird. The articles in the Independent refer vaguely to a body of previous research that makes the new findings expected, but the studies I've read about in the American context show very different results about educational outcomes. (I don't know if anything like the British long-term marital and mental health outcomes study has been attempted in the US.)

One of my cousins (on the Avery side, not one you've met) wrote his MA thesis in education on single-sex education. His advisers were all experts in, and advocates for, various kinds of educational inclusiveness, and Mark himself, who has CP, spent his childhood at the forefront of the fight for access to mainstream education for kids with physical disabilities.

He totally expected to debunk single-sex education as a pernicious, reactionary fad, but the evidence forced him to conclude that it was better for students of both sexes. His professors were really pissed off, but he dragged them through the evidence with him, and they ultimately had to sign off on his thesis without pestering him into recanting.

One of these days, I need to read Mark's thesis. Ah, well. Gareth won't be a toddler forever.

[violet-moon25.livejournal.com]

I wrote a short paper on gender issues in education some 10 years ago. Researched showed a lot of what this article is saying: boys do better in mixed gender environment and girls do better in a single gender environment. One theory had to do with stereotype that doing well academically will hurt a girl socially. While it seems like a poor trade to me, the pressure to fit in in middle school can be pretty intense.

Anecdotally it seems true to me. My dad went to an all boys prep school in the 50's and sometimes seem to just not "get" certain things about women, in spite of raising 2 daughters. On the other hand I loved going to an all girls camp as a teenager because we did everything --building fires, playing sports, moving whatever equipment we needed. Also, no one was distracted by acting stupid for boys.

[slackerstalker.livejournal.com]

The Inuit people have an instrument called a "story knife" which is carved from bone by fathers for their girl children, who are then taught to use the knife to tell stories by drawing in the dirt/ snow. There's something really gratifying about cutting the dirt into shapes. (I did a whole full moon ritual scrying/ meditation exercise inspired by this tradition once.) ...I wonder why boys didn't get story knives.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

I remember when Nancy Willard brought a story knife to her poetry workshop. It was a gift someone had given her while she was teaching in Alaska, I think. It's one of those things that stuck in my backbrain, and came out again as the augurs' knives in my sprawling epic fantasy stuff.

The division of narrative labor seems weird to me, too. Everybody has a story.

[vgnwtch.livejournal.com]

Each kid's different. They learn at their own pace, if they're encouraged to. Took T ages to speak, get fine motor skills, or read - and because of the difficult pregnancy, premature birth, drastically low birth weight, turning blue, and being expected to die within weeks, there was a lot of concern about possible brain damage. Now, premature birth and low birth weight are apparently big indicators for ADHD, and he definitely has issues with this, but you couldn't hope for a kid more into devouring books and writing poetry and stories than he was.

You know what? Your post kept making me think of 'The 13th Warrior', when the Vikings realise that the Arab can make sound-pictures.

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

Yes! I love that part of 13th warrior!

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

That was 75% of a really excellent film. The last quarter of the story has so many things that bug me, I'd be hard pressed to watch it to the end again. It's sort of like the original Wicker Man that way.

[freefloat.livejournal.com]

My boyfriend related to me a story from his childhood.

He was about 3 when he decided he desperately wanted to learn to read and write. He went to his mom and asked her to teach him - but, perhaps for fear of stepping on formal education's toes, she told him he would learn writing in school.

He eagerly awaited his first day of school.

He got home from his first day of kindergarten livid, as angry as a five year old can be, and crying. When his mom went to find out why, she learned that apparently, they were learning simple things like the names of the geometric shapes and such, and he was getting bored, so he asked the teacher when they would learn to read and write. She replied that those lessons weren't taught until grade 2 or so.

He felt severely let down. He was more than bright enough to pick up reading at that age, and was very keen on doing so - but by the time Grade 2 rolled around, he had already become so bored of the pace of the lessons that he had started to become a real disciplinary problem in school (which of course, resulted in even less learning).

To this day, he's not very good at literacy - he's extremely well spoken and has a huge vocabulary, but his reading is fairly slow (he uses a lot of audio books as they read faster than he can) and his spelling is atrocious - but if you read his writing almost phonetically, you can figure out what word he meant. (in school, they de-emphasized spelling in a misguided effort to get kids away from rote memorization and into creative thinking by telling them to "write the way it sounds")

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

This kind of story breaks my heart.

All teachers say they want students who actually want to learn, but a sizable minority of teachers are completely unable to cope with students who are active rather than passive learners. Spend enough time in a conventional school system, and sooner or later you get stuck with a teacher like that, maybe more than one. Get them early, or several in a row, and the damage is very hard to undo.

[violet-moon25.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure it a difference of just active vs. passive learners although it may be part of it. I think there is what you are calling a sizable minority of teachers who teach to the average and are in that range themselves and just don't grasp the experience of being distinctly outside the norm. Mostly those at a disadvantage get some help. But if you have an atypical learning style or are gifted in some area...well, the wear and tear of being pushed into a mold that doesn't fit can be overlooked.

My oldest child is in his first year of preschool and it is already evident that kids develop unevenly (especially the younger ones). I think some of the 70's era open schools had a good idea in letting work at their own pace in different subjects. Unfortunately the educational pendulum has swung far in the other direction these days.

[jongibbs.livejournal.com]

I can remember as a young lad of (I think) 3 or 4) trying to 'write' like my brothers did. I drew line after line of squiggles across the pages. Somewhere between then and now I learned to write real words, though my handwriting hasn't improved much over the decades between ;)

[sabrinamari.livejournal.com]

What a great post! Lots of good observations and ideas here. Loved it.

[sligoe.livejournal.com]

Neither of my boys had difficulties with learning to write or read---and they are both voracious readers to this day. So are my girls.

In first and second grade, when the teachers were "teaching" my kids how to write, they allowed misspelled words and bad grammar, because the focus at the time was on getting the kids to make the letters and put words together. I insisted that they could do all that and use the English language with some level of skill as well. I insisted on correctly spelled words used in the proper context. I insisted on correct verb tense and usage. I insisted that if they needed to now what a word meant, they look it up in the dictionary and report back what they found. We played word games, memory games, history games, any kind of game to get them thinking---and laughing at the same time, because learning should be fun and not a chore.

Both my boys were advanced in fine motor skills as well---their pediatricians were always complimenting me on how well-coordinated they were. I didn't do anything special---but I insisted that they have small chores to do to learn how to take care of things. They got toys that were educational in the sense that they had to build something, or take something apart and put it back together, or create something out of nothing. They saw me playing the piano, typing, embroidering, doing other crafty stuff, and they got the idea that they could do it, too. I now have one son with a Master's in Marine studies, working as a museum curator for the Coast Guard, and another who is an apprentice millwright, working on huge engines and machines, and learning how to weld underwater.

In my opinion, we worry far too much about gender issues in education, and we don't focus enough on just plain teaching basic life skills, and making the learning fun. Make it enjoyable to read, and kids will read. Open up a world of wonderful literature, and they will devour every book and ask for more. Show them that they are more than their gender, and there is nothing they won't be able to do. We make too many excuses for bad behavior and for the lack of motivated students, and we don't look at the real problem----we have dumbed-down education to the point that it isn't educating any longer. Parents need to be immediately involved with their children, and not just letting the teacher do his/her job---homework in an interactive activity. No TV, radio, friends, extra-curricular activities, etc. until the homework is done. The job of kids is to learn. The job of the parents is to make sure it happens. Nothing should get in the way of that. Nothing.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

In first and second grade, when the teachers were "teaching" my kids how to write, they allowed misspelled words and bad grammar, because the focus at the time was on getting the kids to make the letters and put words together.

Until the SAT introduced its new writing section, this refusal to teach grammar and spelling was a matter of doctrine that saturated public education. The "whole language" method was easier on teachers, but it's been a disaster for the students. One of the things I love about the new SAT is that teaching to the test actually gives the students something they need and, usually, don't already have.