BFTP: The Grandpa Assignment

A weekend Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post March 24, 2008. 

Last weekend I received this from my grandson Paul who is in first grade:

Here is the response I sent. The LWW didn't think it was such a hot idea:

Dear Grandson Paul,

When I was your age, I was a pioneer child on the prairie in the wilds of northwest Iowa. All 13 of my brothers, all 12 of my sisters, my mom and dad, two second cousins and I lived in the little log cabin that is still in the city park. There are now only me, your great-aunt Becky and great-uncle Jeff left of all my brothers and sisters. Two were carried away in a flood, four were adopted by wolves, a tornado carried away three, a band of robbers captured four, giant rattlesnakes scared away five, one went missing in a blizzard, a great golden eagle swooped down and flew off with one, and we think one just got left someplace and nobody remembers where. We are looking for some of my brothers and sisters to this day. It was a hard life when I was a little boy growing up on the prairie. Most parents always had a few extra children - just to have some spares. 

We were very, very poor when I was your age. Instead of toys, we only had sticks and dirt clods to play with. The rich kids in the neighborhood had rocks too, but we didn't. Grandma made all our clothes out of tree bark and animal skins - and not very fresh ones, either. We mostly ate mush, field corn and bullheads for supper. For Christmas, sometimes we got a raisin in our stocking. And were we excited! Breakfast and lunch usually were just the berries we could find in the woods. We had to fight over them with the bears. Our TV set only had 13 channels and color was not yet invented. In fact, the entire world was in black and white except for part of the movie The Wizard of Oz. 

Most of the time we just worked. It was my job to gather eggs from the pigs. Pig eggs are very hard to find and sometimes the pigs got grumpy when they were nesting. You had to be careful or you might get bitten. My sister Lefty, had that happen to her. We tied a rope from the cabin to the barn door so we could follow it during dust storms. Once we had a dust storm that lasted so long we planted potatoes in the air around the cabin. When we harvested the spuds, they were already mashed. Yummmm!

I did get to go to school every other year from ages 5 to 27. Like most children, I had to walk to school, five miles each way and both directions were uphill. My teacher was very nice, but very busy with the 837 children in our one room school. Each of us had a laptop computer, however, and when the teacher was busy with other children, we surfed the Internet. I actually got to talk to Miss Snippet (my teacher) twice while I was in school. Both times she told me I was doing a good job. Our library only had seven books and it took a long time to get one to read at home. It was harder to learn to read when I was a little boy since the letters m and r had not yet been invented. They had just discovered the number 7 when I was in 3rd grade so I had to learn my number facts twice.

But I was happy growing up since I knew one day I would be a grandpa and have a wonderful grandson like you. And that's a fact.

Love,

The Grandpa who lives on the lake 

Allergic to reading?

Ten people contributed opinions on vocabulary development in Larry Ferlazzo’s recent blog on “Many Ways To Help Students Develop Academic Vocabulary” (Ed Week, March 17; http://tinyurl.com/ctesagq).

There is massive research from many different kinds of research showing that reading is a powerful source of vocabulary knowledge, most likely the most powerful source. Also a number writers in the professional literature present evidence showing that direct instruction of vocabulary can have only a limited effect.

Nevertheless, only one contributor to Ferlazzo’s blog mentioned reading. In a tweet, SaroltaGV wrote: “Students develop their academic vocabulary best by reading academic texts on topics they are interested in.”

Why this allergy to reading? - LM_Net post by Stephen Krashen

I, like Dr. Krashen, am a huge fan of free voluntary reading (FVR). I truly believe reading, lots of reading, is the best, if not only, way to increase vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency. Krashen's book, The Power of Reading, is one of those absolutely essential texts every caring educator should read and take to heart. (My review and implications for librarians here.)

So why don't more "consultants" buy into the efficacy of FVR?

• FVR doesn't really require specialists or reading experts - just teachers willing to trust kids and give them access to good reading materials. We all know, the bigger the education ju-ju, the bigger the paycheck for the magician.
• FVR requires a good library collection which is not new or sexy, just effective.
• FVR doesn't require high-priced software running on high priced hardware, no costly reading textbooks and workbooks.
• FVR doesn't make learning painful and we all know - no pain, no gain.
• FVR just sounds too good to be true. 
• FVR allows kids to grow and learn at their own pace rather than in at an prescribed, normed rate that produces the winners and losers that our society seems to demand.
• FVR means kids reading things that adults may not know or find personally appealing.
• Kids engaged in FVR look like they are slacking off instead of "working."

Kids who read, get better at reading. Kids will read when they can read stuff that interests them and is at their level. Kids not only read better, but read for intrinsic, rather extrinsic rewards and thus become life-long readers.

I know this. If I had to read on a computer monitor, if I had to answer a multiple guess test after every paragraph I read, if I had to memorize vocabulary words - I just might play computer games instead reading for fun too... 

Grandson Paul the Reader.

One big room - redux

80 per cent of young people are looking at sexual images online on a regular basis. The average age to start viewing pornography was about 11 or 12 while sexting was considered almost routine for many 13-14 year olds. ... Research has found that 50 per cent of youngsters had taken part in some sort of webcam sexual experience.  Pornography online is warping children's minds, teachers warn. The Telegraph, March 17, 2013

As a grandfather with a soon to be 12-year-old grandson, I find these sorts of numbers disturbing. Despite having active, caring parents, Paul lives and participates in a brave new world - and at age 11, seems to already exhibit some adolescent behaviors and attitudes. But even in 2006, I wondered if trying to keep kids out of unsuitable Internet content (at least through blocking and filters) is a fool's errand: 

Sorry folks. Anyone who thinks he or she can control kids' access to online information or experiences through legislation or a filter is spitting in the wind. We are not facing a simple technical challenge. We are swimming against a cultural tide.

Neil Postman explains why in his book The Disappearance of Childhood (1982). It's been a while since I have read this book, but as I remember, Postman's arguments go something like this: Childhood is a social construct. Before the Industrial Revolution, children were simply treated as small adults. They dressed like adults; they worked like adults; they lived where adults lived; and they saw what adults saw. Adults and children before the second half of the 19th century all pretty much lived in one big room.

The rise in industrialization also gave rise to the concept of "childhood." Society started treating children differently than it did adults; separating them by dress, by activity, and especially in experience. We kept kids in their own rooms with very limited access to adult rooms -- for their own safety, of course.

Postman argued that with the ubiquity of mass media (pre-Internet days), society no longer has the ability to keep children away from adult venues, sights, and experiences. We've all been pushed back into one big room, as it were. Once again, kids see and experience what adults see and experience.

When I first started speaking about Internet filtering back in 1994, I'd ask workshop participants if they felt the following materials were appropriate for children to have access to:

• "Sex After 35: Why It's Different, Why it Can be Better"
• "Men & Sex: Their 7 Secret Wishes"
• "How Our Sex Life Was Saved"
• "Major New Sex Survey: What You Don't Know..."
• "The Sexual Games of the American Male"
• "He Wants What? Men's 6 Biggest Sexual Fantasies"
• "The Sex Skill Men Adore (& How to Do It Well)"
• "The Hugh Grant Syndrome: Why Guys Pay for Sex"
• "Five Total Turn-Ons Men Can't Resist"

Everyone agreed that those were not materials suitable for children -- and that they should be denied access to them.

"Too late," I'd say. "Each of those are headlines were splashed on the front cover of popular magazines easily found near any supermarket checkout lane." And last I checked, those magazine headlines have not become less explicit.

This cultural shift that is removing the wall between the kids' and adults' rooms is unnerving to say the least. Our natural inclination as parents and educators (and even politicians, I suppose) is to shelter and protect. But responsible adults also recognize that it is in their children's best interest not to shelter, but to teach children how to protect themselves in the big, bad world. One Big Room

When the adult bookstore (or nut-case militia or lunatic-fringe religious group) is only a click or two away, when wireless access in homes puts the Internet into every child's bedroom, and when work-arounds, proxies, and VPNs make filters ineffectual, we can only teach and practice our adult values - and hope out children learn.

Image source