Learning to read

I have a vivid memory of how reading was taught in my son’s first grade classroom. His teacher had returned to the classroom after working as a homeschool teacher, and had brought some pretty unusual (from the perspective of public school, that is) ideas back with her. One of those ideas was the given the right rich environment, most kids will learn to read in one way or another, but you don’t have to instruct or push them in first grade.

What? No more phonics/whole language wrangling? No “reading readiness” homework? Just enjoying learning? [Read Alfie Kohn if you want to learn more about this approach.]

Needless to say, her ideas didn’t appeal to all parents or all students. It’s hard for parents to feel comfortable when they’ve been taught that children learn to read in first grade, and here comes a teacher who says, children learn to read when they’re ready. In this classroom, the teaching happened through reading aloud, telling stories, writing, and sharing. One student who’d just had it with waiting for reading instruction had a friend teach her! (Of course, her teacher thought this was fabulous.)

My experience and the experiences of lots of homeschoolers say the same thing: most kids are going to learn to read when they’re ready, and though many of them are ready in that 6-7 age year, outliers disprove the idea that learning to read in that timeframe is necessary or even appropriate or healthy for many children.

Psychology Today just came out with an article on this very topic, which sums up what a lot of educators are noticing. First, kids learn to read at radically different ages if you leave the process to a more natural development. Second, the age a child learns to read actually doesn’t correlate with how well s/he will do in school, how much s/he will enjoy reading later, or pretty much anything else.

There are the outliers, of course: kids who learn to read fantastically early and then go on to show other remarkable early intellectual growth may thrive in a different type of educational environment. Kids who have problems such as dyslexia or other learning disabilities will clearly need a lot of instruction and help.

But all those other kids, it turns out, do just fine being read to, listening to recorded stories, and learning in the myriad other ways that humans learn without reading. Once they’re ready to read, they’ll show interest in learning and will ask for help when they need it.

The other thing that the Psychology Today article mentions is the harm that comes to kids when they are pushed to read before they are ready and willing. The process our public schools use for teaching reading can be brutal to a kid who really isn’t ever going to learn to read well until unusually late. I remember those kids in my school — the “stupid” kids. Yes, we all knew who they were, and the other kids could be quite cruel to them.

(I hope I was nicer than the kids I remember, but perhaps not. I remember a lesson in humility early on when I had to help one of those kids with a spelling quiz and I mispronounced a word – “wholly” – because I’d been reading in class rather than paying attention! He was actually very kind to me when he corrected me, and I think we both thought it was pretty funny.)

As all reasonable people know now, those kids aren’t “stupid” at all, and I bet most of them can read just fine now. Their success in life had absolutely nothing to do with the age at which they learned to read.

What else can happen to a kid who’s not an early reader? Being held back, for example. I was shocked when my sister told me that her son had to learn 30 sight words by the end of his kindergarten year or he’d be held back! My son, a prodigious reader, didn’t know 30 sight words by the end of kindergarten. Imagine if he’d been held back — what good would that have done him? (Or the school, given that when he took the STAR test in second grade, he was at the top of the curve.)

About why most children learn to read, the author has two memorable pieces of information: “Children learn to read when reading becomes, to them, a means to some valued end” and “Reading, like many other skills, is learned socially through shared participation.” It’s clear that most kids in that great variety of humanity will learn to read if they are in the right environment and they see good, compelling reasons to read.

If our schools relaxed their approach of pushing kids to read, they could pay special attention to kids who are showing real difficulties — special positive attention. There’s a difference between a kid who’s not ready to read at 7 and a kid who is showing signs of dyslexia, and a good teacher can see that. Then everyone can relax and not be pushed into being failures at the age of 6.

Tell me the truth

OK, so tell me the truth: are my kids weird?

Last week did your kids think that chicken apple sausage was the very best thing they’d ever eaten, and this week did they deny ever putting such a thing in their mouths?

Do your kids get in fights over such deep insults as “You were looking at me weird!”?

Do your kids desperately tell you upon getting off the bus that they need Valentines for school on Tuesday, then deny all knowledge of Valentines when you sit them down to make some?

Do your kids wear their shirts backwards or inside-out? How about their raincoats?

Do your kids believe that you want them to come into your office, play with your mouse, and swivel in your office chair?

Do your kids think that the word “poop” is the funniest in the English language?

When you say, “Stop dropping your food on the floor — I’m the one that has to clean it up” do your kids say, “But Mommy, you like cleaning!”?

When you ask, “Why do you think I like cleaning?” do they answer, “Because you do it so much, so you must like it!”?

When you say, “Please put your lunch dishes in the kitchen,” do your kids answer, “You’re mean!”?

Does he say, “You’re not the boss of me!” when he’s four?

Does she say, “I’m not your slave, you know,” when she’s 7?

It’s been raining for three days straight. Your child tries to leave the house without his raincoat. You ask where it is. Does he say, “Why should I know where it is?”

Has your child learned to tie his shoelaces yet?

Does your child express complete confusion as to why, in the two hours he’s been working on his report, he’s only typed two words?

When you ask your children how something happened, do they blame their imaginary friends?

When your children say they can’t find something, can you find it in under 30 seconds?

Does your child wear mismatched socks? On purpose or because he didn’t notice?

Will your child only wear socks that suit her mood?

Did your child dress up as H1N1 for Halloween?

Do your children talk babytalk when adults as them questions?

Do your children freak out adult strangers by using the correct words for things when they are two?

Can your children repeat the same phrase, over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over,and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over, and over and over….

…..No?

Really? Oh.

Well, uh, mine don’t either.

Just asking…. Bye!

What is gifted? And why?

I was talking to a friend recently about my work on Examiner.com concerning gifted children. What is gifted? she asked. A very reasonable question, and one that no one has completely defined yet – to my satisfaction, at least.

I’m planning an article on Examiner.com about all the various definitions of “gifted,” but here I can address my personal reasons for getting into all this in the first place! (If you want to know when I publish that article, or if you want to read my articles in general, click on “Subscribe” on either of my Examiner pages. You’ll get e-mail whenever I publish anything, and I get paid a higher rate with more subscribers!)

There’s the part of “gifted” that most people are familiar with: my son is a good example. Very smart boy, very sensitive, not into sports. Very good in school. Until he was nearly 9, I had no interest in knowing more or applying the label. Frankly, although it was obvious he was smart, I didn’t think anything more of it. I’m sure I have written before of the experience I had when he was in first grade and a dad said to me, “I wish my son could read as well as yours.” And I wanted to (but didn’t) answer, “I wish my son could hit a baseball!”

Because of course, we get the kid we get, and if we’re good parents we give up on the idea that our kids are going to be Tiger Woods and settle for who they actually are, the magical, amazing person they came out as. (Actually, I was probably more hoping that our son would be Buckaroo Banzai!)

But then along came our daughter. She was amazing as well, but incredibly frustrating. We just didn’t understand her. Nothing I read, no one I consulted with, could tell me anything that rang true for her. After pulling her from kindergarten in frustration, some little bug in the back of my brain spoke up. Gifted. What was it that I had read about difficult gifted children?

So I went on the path that you can read in past posts. I hired someone to work with her who was well-versed in the variety of gifted kids out there, and she gave me some little pushes in the right direction. We went from having a baffling, difficult, unsuccessful child to having  a baffling, difficult, amazing, happy, successful child.

Whether or not the present explanation is correct, there is an explanation that fits my daughter. She showed incredible academic intelligence abilities very early. She showed very weak emotional intelligence. Where other kids were going through those stages that didn’t fit her (and frankly hadn’t fit my son so well, either), she was doing her own thing. The explanation that works for me is that like many people labeled “gifted,” she skipped the normal phase of emotional/social development and went straight to figuring everything out. She couldn’t tell you why she’d thrown the math materials all around the room, but she could figure out real-world math problems with ease.

So yes, I hate the word “gifted.” (Read my post on that if you want the long explanation.) It’s a stupid word that implies value judgment and leaves so much space for ambiguity. Is that kid who could hit a baseball right outta the park in first grade gifted? Of course he is. “Gifted” in the general sense just means that someone was blessed by an ability that they have chosen to develop to the point that other people notice and admire it.

But as a technical educational term, “gifted” is much more specific. And the kids to whom it is most valuable are not necessarily those well-behaved kids sitting the front row with all the answers. It might be the 13-year-old girl getting C’s in middle school so the boys would like her. It might be that totally out-of-control boy who gets medicated for ADHD without an attempt to provide him the right sort of environment to stimulate his unusual brain. It might be that quiet kid in an out-of-control inner city school who gets no notice because her teachers are busy putting out fires.

Those are the gifted kids I’m particularly interested in. They’re the ones that the rest of us don’t recognize, who get stigmatized for their unusual behavior, who get drugged or shoved into remedial classes. They are the unsuccessful gifted kids, but we can help them. As I said in another post, my daughter needed educators who recognized that she needs specialized, not special, education. If I’d put her in public school, she’d have a diagnosis by now, and probably some drugs. I’d have a huge guilt burden that I knew that something was wrong with the diagnosis.

So when my friend asked me, “What is gifted?” and I felt that weird feeling again like using the word was making a value judgment — placing my kid over hers — I just didn’t know what to say. I don’t know what gifted is, really. Researchers are getting closer, but they really can’t tell you for sure, either. But I do know that the label allowed me to access the information I needed to help her get along in the world.

It’s definitely not a value judgment. I treasure my daughter, but all children truly do have gifts to share with us. I loved writing about Lizz Anderson who talks about how her son with Down Syndrome has changed so many lives. There is no way to predict what value any individual will give the world. But as parents, we can do our best to help our child be successful in whatever way that is meaningful.

Some of you out there may have baffling kids as well. If any of this is sounding familiar to you, get yourself over to Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted and start reading. Like me, you may not like the word or the label, but the collected wisdom of lots of parents, educators, and mental health professionals working with these kids might help you as it did me.

The uninvited wedding guest

In this week’s newsletter, Parmalee mentioned that she loves to hear skunk stories. Now that’s a challenge I can’t pass up!

It’s a day after Valentine’s Day, thus 12 years and a day after my husband proposed to me. We were the perfect model of the modern couple: we lived together before we decided to get married, and were planning to discuss it and announce to family when appropriate. The diamond ring? Probably not. White dress in a church or temple? No way!

Croquembouche, though not our croquembouche
Croquembouche, though not our croquembouche

Then we went out for Valentine’s Day to the old Oswald Restaurant, which you may remember was in a very intimate space near the Locust Street parking garage. My hubby confessed later that he’d planned to do the standard thing and propose in the romantic restaurant, but we were literally less than a foot from our neighbors’ backs and he lost his nerve. So on the way to our car, at the entrance to the Locust Street Garage, he popped out a diamond ring.

It was as surprising as it could get for me. He’d recently visited his mom and told her about our plans, and she gave to him the ring that she’d been given by her husband, whose mother had received the ring from her husband, my husband’s grandfather. It was a diamond cut in 1925. Later my husband’s aunt told me about when she was a child in Brooklyn and her mother lost the diamond in a mud puddle! It’s a ring with a history, and I love it.

So with that part done, there was just the deed to do. We thought about just getting it over with, but my father said, “But the landscaping isn’t in yet!” It was our last El Niño year, and it rained and rained and rained. We set the wedding for June at my parents’ new farm, figuring how could a June wedding in Watsonville be rained out? It rained the day before, but our wedding day dawned sunny. The photos show an infant vineyard, now 13 years old, and intensely green hills not seen in June since then.

It was a family affair. My sister’s soon-to-be husband had recently been trained as a pastry chef. He dipped strawberries in chocolate the night before and left them in the garage to cool overnight. He made us an amazing tower of a cake, a Croquembouche. My photographer brother took photos. My younger sister spoke in the ceremony. The judge we hired tried to keep a straight face while reading the vows we’d written, and finally broke off with an aside, “I didn’t write this, you know.”

There was only one hitch: I noticed vaguely amidst my flurry that there was a “Do Not Enter” sign on the door to the garage. I may have noticed that my soon-to-be brother-in-law was dipping a new set of strawberries. It wasn’t until later that I asked why: When my father got up at the crack of dawn and went into the garage, he found an engorged skunk asleep, happily snoring away. He’d eaten all the strawberries.

A sleeping skunk, though not OUR sleeping skunk!

My father hastily locked the catdoor, locked the doors to the garage, and put up the sign. At dusk, he carefully opened the door to the outside and backed away.

For an uninvited guest, I have to say that the skunk behaved himself. Apparently the cats were wise enough to stay away, and soon after the door was opened, the skunk ambled away, probably having noticed that no new feast had been set out for him.

My personal opinion is that no good wedding is without a major hitch, something to make it a more memorable day. I consider that skunk a treasured guest of the day, one who I will never forget though he didn’t turn up in any of the pictures.

From babytime to tantrums with not a moment to spare!

My kids and I just got back from the snow. We found an amazing place that is an easy drive from Santa Cruz. Really. No, I’m not going to tell you. You’ll tell your friends, and then, well, you know what will happen.

My experience with visiting the snow in California was completely confined to visiting my husband’s cousin in Truckee. The great thing about Truckee is that it’s the first stop on the top of the hill. After you’ve endured the grueling drive, which lasted one time 8 hours sitting on 80 far from any bathroom, Truckee seems close.

Fun in the snow
Fun in the snow

But it’s also amusing to a Midwesterner, this idea of driving to snow. I never did it when I didn’t have kids, but then it started to seem important. They Have To Know That Life Isn’t Always Easy.

We went with a friend who has two kids and a baby. We decided to rent a cabin in a place where we could shoo the kids outside while their mothers sat inside eating bonbons. We forgot the bonbons, but otherwise it was pretty true to the plan. We shooed the kids outside; one came in crying. We shooed her outside; another came in crying. Pretty standard fare, I guess.

We got to some of the many projects we’d planned, including my forcing my kids to make the Valentine craft I’d brought along. “This holiday is about Love, darn it! Get making those Valentines!”

My son protested that he didn’t need Valentines. I reminded him that he’d said, getting off the bus the day before we left, “I have to have Valentines when we go back to school!” He denied everything. Good thing I’m the parent.

The snow was fine, and I enjoyed the pine-scented air, but what was really great was baby-time. To think that I spent almost 35 years not getting baby-time! When I was pregnant, I thought, well, it won’t always be a baby, right? It’ll learn to read and play music and talk politics, and then I’ll get to enjoy it.

And then my son popped out with his curly dark hair and dark grey eyes, and that was the end of not getting baby-time. Babies are perfect beings. As my friend said, “I just can’t believe that in five years she’s going to be driving me crazy!”

In retrospect, our trip back was predictable, though I do find that my predictive abilities lie in hindsight. We stopped at a cave tour, which lasted nearly an hour, and then, of course, the bathrooms were at the back of — yeah, you already know that I’m going to fall for this, don’t you? — the gift shop! So daughter of mine wants to buy something, and though I had been saying, No No NO all the way through the tour, I said, “Oh, OK. You can get a rock.”

Son of mine takes me at my word, though he stretches the assigned budget by ten percent. He’s working on being a software engineer. Not sure what my daughter is working on. She just couldn’t decide. And I knew this was going to happen. And she hadn’t eaten anything for well over an hour, and I had further evidence that it was going to happen.

But I think that being a parent sends some sort of memory-erasing hormone through your blood so that each night you forget the horrors of the day that passed.

She can’t choose a rock. She’s mesmerized by the candy, all the colorful rows of it. Finally I have to drag her out, and she has not gotten her rock. All of a sudden she must have that rock. She NEEDS that rock.

“When I’m 13,” she says in a moment of lucidity amidst the storm. “Ask me if I remember this trip. I Won’t Remember This Trip! I will have Nothing to remember this trip by! You Must Let Me Buy A Rock.”

It occurs to me that those who know my daughter now don’t have much of a grasp of where we’ve been. She goes along these days with little eruptions: she is constantly tempted to pull long hair; she is obstinate and defiant; she says things she shouldn’t say. But people who have met her recently don’t know what we’ve come through. From about 18 months to 6 years, this sort of incident was routine. Some days we could take hours just to get out of the house because she had to throw unbelievably long tantrums. She had a husky voice then from all the screaming. She couldn’t go to school. She couldn’t find a way to calm herself.

Babytime
Babytime

It’s been a long road to here, when I had no warning signal that the tantrum was coming. I was walking blissfully along, offering my seven-year-old girl a rock. I should have known better.

But I do know better: these times are further and further from normal. She’s never ceased to be a difficult person, but she has ceased being that child that could never fit in. When she was four, I would never have considered asking a friend to share a cabin. Now, I didn’t think twice about it. Our lives march on.

And life isn’t always easy. But in raising children, it’s all worth it. First you get baby-time, and in kissing that fuzzy head you get to experience perfection. Then you get a person. And you watch them grow and marvel at their abilities and disabilities. It’s a bumpy ride, that’s for sure!

Now available