Re: Ideocosmology

[Jerome Epstein <jerepst@worldnet.att.net>]

> I have been thinking about this reading problem for some time now, and I
> think that this thread is heading in the direction I have been working
> toward for a couple of months. One of the problems with what students bring
> to our physics courses (by no means the only one, but an important one) is
> an inability to read a textbook.

Or is it an unwillingness to even try to do so, since they have never
previously been required to do so, there have been no consequences to
refusal to do so, and how much have we catered to that refusal?
Jerry Epstein
> As I think back on how I was taught to read, lo these many years ago, and
> that I too was a non-reader of textbooks in college (I'm still not very
> good at it), it has occurred to me that perhaps the problem lies in how we
> are taught. From the beginning we are taught how to read stories, and only
> that. I never remember reading anything in elementary school that was other
> than either a story or simply descriptive (like my history or geography
> text). Never were we expected to read anything in which we were going to
> have to follow an argument to a conclusion, much less critique that
> argument. A student who has no experience in that kind of reading will be
> totally lost in any worthwhile science text
>
> Why couldn't reading, by the second or third year at the latest, include
> samples of the kind of writing that they need to be proficient at by the
> time they get to high school? They could be very simple at first, even
> couched in the guise of stories, with increasing complexity as time goes
> on, until by the seventh or eighth grade, they can be expected to read
> selections from appropriately graded texts and understand them, pehaps
> even, find intentionally planted errors by applying the logic included in
> the selection.
>
> I would like to hear from others with more experience (or more recent
> experience) with early reading instruction than I have. Are we creating a
> country of non-textbook readers because we never teach them how to read one
> (telling them how to do it-I do it all the time-is not teaching them how)?
>
> Hugh
>
> ************************************************************
> Hugh Haskell
> <mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>
>
> Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
> have to..
> ************************************************************