So we meet his teacher, goatee and sunglasses...we live in the boonies and yet there’s something here like he’s trying to be a player.
2/
You know what I don’t miss? Parent teacher conferences.
Most of Rocketkid’s teachers were lovely, but we had two that still stick out in my mind as sad/hilarious.
The first one, he was in elementary school. The teacher said it was ‘important’ for us to come in.
1/
So we meet his teacher, goatee and sunglasses...we live in the boonies and yet there’s something here like he’s trying to be a player.
2/
Anyway, we sit does in the kid chairs, he’s behind his desk, again, weirdly focused on ‘power,’ somehow.
No idea why,
3/
4/
And he says to me, ‘So, I hear you’re a writer.’
What?
I tell him yes, I write comics and some animation and stuff.
He says. ‘I looked you up.’
5/
6/
Brrrr.
Teaching is a hard job, all respect and love to them but...that was weird!
8/
So again, we were extremely worried.
9/
We are very concerned, we have no idea what’s going on.
We sit down, she looks at us like a concerned teacher does, but she doesn’t know how to tell us this awful, concerning thing.
10/
Which makes it all much worse, and we’re getting more anxious. It’s a ‘you’d better sit down’ moment for sure.
11/
12/
And this is the thing. For a moment, all I wanted to do in the world was pretend to be shocked and horrified.
13/
“Oh, god, why hast thou FORSAKEN us and delivered of our loins that most foul beast, the NERD?!!?”
15/
We are toast.
We are DONE.
And we just both burst out in hysterics, laughing like deranged hyenas.
16/
And that just made it more hilarious.
17/
18/
19/
...
...
...
A NERD!
20/
I am positive she went right to the teacher’s lounge and said...
“I just met the worst parents ever.”
That was a good day.
♥️♥️♥️♥️
End!
More from Education
An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.
It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.
Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).
Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.
Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).
Sorry - a bit of a brain dump post - but I'd appreciate any responses and/or directions towards any applicable research.@Suchmo83 @Mr_AlmondED @TimRasinski1 @ReadingShanahan @mrspennyslater @TheReadingApe @PieCorbett @ReadingRockets @teach_well
— Mr Leyshon (@RyonWLeyshon) February 4, 2021
It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.
Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).
Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.
Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).
