The Love of Reading & Writing

The new wave in education today seems to be a enormous push towards science, technology, environment or engineering (I am not sure), and mathematics. While all of these are worthwhile endeavors, I fear that the appreciation and love of our language, reading, and writing will be lost. One only need look at the decline in knowledge of grammar and punctuation over the past 20 years. Cursive and legible handwriting have disappeared completely…except in my homeschool.

As a genealogist and author, I writing and reading are my passions. Nothing thrills my heart more than to find an interest, research the topic and its issues, and then write about it. I love the construction of writing a novel. Researching the time period, place, and history of where my novel will take place is just as thrilling as writing a nonfiction, news/editorial type story. To do any writing assignment well, though, the writer must know grammar and punctuation rules. A “texting” type language exists nowhere else except in our Internet driven social media driven world. Artificial Intelligence may degrade that even further as it becomes more dominant. (A time I dread!)

It is unfortunate that the laziness of this new world is destroying our language. Punctuation is nonexistent in texting. The formality of writing a business letter is being replaced by the more informal email. As an “old” lady, I, of course, type messages in complete sentences and use appropriate punctuation (though, if the message is one sentence, I may pass on the ending punctuation). I refuse to do otherwise because I appreciate our language, as I would hope Germans, French, Dutch, etc., appreciate theirs.

I do not know what is taught these days in high school literature courses. My daughter, who is entering 10th grade in the Fall, read classic, mostly American, literature this year. She read Hawthorne, Twain, McCullers, Wells, Lee, and others. Next school year, we will read international authors to correspond with our world history course.

The greatest part of reading, in my opinion, is the ability to envision the places and people as you read the story. You can transport yourself as an invisible observer in the story as it is unfolds. As a child who spent many hours alone, reading allowed me to imagine myself as the part of a large family, to live in an exotic location, to be a princess. While you can do this while watching a movie, it isn’t the same because movies often draw conclusions where the book may not have. Movies today leave little to our imaginations, which is disheartening.

When we read books, regardless of who wrote them or where they were written or where they take place, we read the story with our own world view and perspective. A story can have hundreds of different versions depending on the reader. To me this is one of the most amazing aspects of reading and writing.

As a writer I want to describe my characters so that the reader fully understands the character and his/her importance to the story. However, an author shouldn’t go too far with description because you want to the leave room for the reader to imagine the character for himself/herself.

For our children to fully understand and appreciate the written word, they have to learn to use their imaginations. This begins at birth. We immediately begin to show children how to play, how to imagine being a mommy or a daddy, how to play “house” or “work”, how to be a superhero. This education should really never end, except that, of course, they must also learn to live in reality, but that is a topic for another blog post.

As I have watched children over the past 15 years and the changes in education, I have seen difficult subjects being forced down upon younger and younger children; children who do not yet possess the necessary skills to do that work. We know that a child’s brain goes through well defined stages of growth which do not end until around the age of 25. Children are losing their playing time. This is the time when they learn by playing. Instead, they are being forced to sit still and listen to instruction which their little bodies are not able to do. When they inevitably move around, talk, or fail to pay attention, we punish them. Later, we become aggravated because our children are not able to cope, to appropriately interact with each other, or to modify their behavior to the situation. It is because we have robbed them of the most important socializing period of their lives…pre-k to second grade.

I agree that math, science, and technology are important, but if the student cannot write in a logical, well reasoned and structured manner to communicate what they have learned about these topics, what good is it? There are no subjects in education that are not important. All of these skills and knowledge work together to create the well-rounded student. Children need to be challenged to learn the subjects that they do not like as much as they need to focus on the ones that they love. As with most situations in life, we learn far more from the accomplishments made in those difficult times than we do when things are going easy.

Challenge your children to read. Challenge them to write. Challenge them to practice their handwriting. Make it a contest with your handwriting. Show them a letter written to you from an older person and see if they can read it. Print out a document from the 19th century before printing became commonplace. Read it together. These are wonderful bonding opportunities and another way to challenge them in their education because, after all, we parents are responsible for everything they learn.