This Isn't Helping
Jan. 13th, 2012 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisnewdayThere are two sayings that've come out of helping my grandson with his school work. One of them, it will be obvious, relates to math and the other to his outside reading.
The one for math is a sendup of Tom Hank's surly manager in A League of Their Own. In our version, the surly grandfather, irritated by his grandson's resistance to learning addition and multiplication fact families, makes the grandson recite, "There's no crying in baseball and no guessing in math."
The one for the similarly-resisted outside reading says, "If you've got the time to do it now, now's the time to do it."
And it's that second one that's sort of leaning over my shoulder tonight. Little J and I have been working for weeks on a series of book reports which, I guess, are supposed to elicit a variety of creative responses to his outside reading.
But if the point of this reading program is to get kids to read, these book reports have done just the opposite. They've taken time away from the actual reading and placed a huge disincentive at the end of each completed book.
Now, I can look at each one of them and say, yeah, I see what this one is intended to do in terms of sharing the experience and interesting others in a given book.
But right now, I don't really have the time or resources to promote anyone's interest in reading except my grandson's. And the best way to do that is to just do that.
Read broadly, to find out what he likes, and then read. Read, read, read.
LPK
LiveJournal
1.13.2012 (c)
The one for math is a sendup of Tom Hank's surly manager in A League of Their Own. In our version, the surly grandfather, irritated by his grandson's resistance to learning addition and multiplication fact families, makes the grandson recite, "There's no crying in baseball and no guessing in math."
The one for the similarly-resisted outside reading says, "If you've got the time to do it now, now's the time to do it."
And it's that second one that's sort of leaning over my shoulder tonight. Little J and I have been working for weeks on a series of book reports which, I guess, are supposed to elicit a variety of creative responses to his outside reading.
But if the point of this reading program is to get kids to read, these book reports have done just the opposite. They've taken time away from the actual reading and placed a huge disincentive at the end of each completed book.
Now, I can look at each one of them and say, yeah, I see what this one is intended to do in terms of sharing the experience and interesting others in a given book.
But right now, I don't really have the time or resources to promote anyone's interest in reading except my grandson's. And the best way to do that is to just do that.
Read broadly, to find out what he likes, and then read. Read, read, read.
LPK
LiveJournal
1.13.2012 (c)
