Bearing Gifts

We moved to the town where we live because of the schools. For our state, it's a great school system, although that's really not saying much. And Amy has been properly horrified by some of the more banal trends in the school system and school culture, e.g. eliminating science and social sciences in elementary school to focus almost entirely on reading, writing and rithmetic. Moreover, six months into our little experiment with private Russian Math classes [yes, a pedagogical method developed in the Soviet Union is actually worth paying money to pursue in the United States], where Ian is already doing things like algebra-disguised-as-fun, nobody is thrilled that in the same timeframe, Ian's school is still confounding young minds with the intricacies of single-digit-integer addition and the like. However, Ian's school has officially earned our respect for teaching him to read. Kindergarten got the ball rolling, and his first grade teacher has made some amazing strides with him. [When I was young, circa 1970, Kindergarten meant rote repetition of idiotic little children's songs from the 50's or so, and the like... Reading was the sacred domain of first-grade-and-beyond.]

But Ian really is reading, and the amazing thing is that he has moved way beyond the words from his curriculum, and read almost anything with relatively little trouble. At the beginning of the school year, Ian couldn't really read his own portions of text in Sunday School class, as Teacher Amy reports, but now, she says, he reads as well as the third-graders in the class.

So, with a special sale in place at the Used Book Superstore, I decided to get the lad his own stash of scientific and historical books to read, and this morning I presented them to him. The idea is that there's no time like the present to make hay from his new literacy, and hopefully encourage and reinforce his significant intellectual curiosity, in what should ideally turn out to be a "virtuous circle," where reading inspires ever more reading, by developing and feeding his taste for knowledge while systematically becoming easier itself over time.

The results were even better than I hoped for. In addition to being thrilled, and quite grateful, he got right down to reading about how parrots learn to talk [mindless repetition], why flamingos stand on one leg [to rest and warm the other one], and more. I deliberately got him books full of short, self-contained chapters and half-page, illustrated "blurbs." I know my own combination of intellectual industriousness and intellectual laziness make blurb-centric components of information very appealing, as distinct from anything that requires reading two or more chapters in succession. It was very moving to see how this stack of books just took over that portion of his morning, leaving him sitting at the table thumbing through the books and reading sections out loud, at exactly the spot where I gave the books to him.

The only thing I worry about is what this new "toy" of reading might mean for his time with Daniel. When I was first getting into high tech (basically breaking my way into the industry at that point), I accepted the mission of going to an elderly couple's apartment in Brookline to set up their newly-purchased first computer (e-machine - unsurprisingly a low-budget "starter" computer). When I got there, the couple's home and a quaint, welcoming old-world feeling to it, even though they were both born in the U.S. But by the time I left, a few hours later, the matriarch had a working computer, an AOL account, and a fierce excitement about this new way of keeping in touch with her out-of-town children. But her husband sat there, almost staring, looking ever more unhappy with each new step in technological "progress." Their TV-centered living-room suddenly had a computer in the corner, and an excited old lady saying, "Oh! What does this do? I look - there's a picture of my daughter!" I knew that this dubious gift of the postmodern age had transformed their world, in a way that made it harder for the patriarch to maintain a handle on it, or even to keep his relationship with his wife centered around the two of them per se.

I hope that reading doesn't become Ian's new toy at the expense of his wonderful, ongoing, constant creative play with Daniel. I do suspect he'll find a balance. And if it makes Daniel want to read faster, that would certainly be a good thing.

(March 11, 2011)