Why My (and Possibly Your) Bookworm Kid Hates Reading… But Only At School
In the second grade, my child came home with a book report assignment. “Oh, a book report,” I thought, “that’ll be easy. My kid is reading on a fifth grade level, piece of cake.”
No.
It was torture. She could read the book, she could comprehend the book, but she couldn’t write about it. Getting her to write five sentences about what she read was like pulling teeth. Only, pulling the teeth would have been easier. (Weirdly, this is actually the case. My kid loves going to the dentist. She’s had four teeth extracted and each time was happy as a clam. It probably helps that we have a very Zen pediatric dentist. ) But I was baffled. Was there something wrong with my kid?
Again, no. Digging my brain out from the depths of Mommy Madness, I dusted it off to examine what was actually being taught in school. It finally dawned on me that what I needed to consider is what’s *not* being taught at school. Namely, writing skills. The kids do vocabulary and spelling. They get free time every day to read books. As part of their reading groups, they are given worksheets about the assigned reading with questions to answer. But nowhere do they teach the tools to organize thought and construct a logical paragraph.
“Here, kid. Read this book, then boil it down into six salient points. Organize them, defend them, and hand it in next week.”
Easy for you to say. You’re not a seven-year-old kid who, two years ago, was still learning how to write words, much less organize them.
At university I took an advanced Shakespeare class. We were split into groups of four and were supposed to critique each other’s papers. The other three people in the group handed me papers with spelling errors, grammatical inaccuracies, and sentence fragments. This wouldn’t be so bad if only their papers had any kind of coherently organized thought to them. Did I mention that you had to be a junior to get into this class?
I strongly suggest you read The Well Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and compare it to what your kids are – and are not – learning in school.
