Sticks + Dirt = Literacy
Dec. 2nd, 2009 11:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dr_pretentiousGareth 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.
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.
