My Insatiable Curiosity Guided My Curriculum Decisions - Part I

 Dear Mary,

In my second teaching job in base enlisted housing in Bremerton, I was grateful that I started in second grade, because the early emphasis on learning reading was phonics. The texts that we used were the Lippincott Readers, which had a controlled vocabulary beginning with CVC words progressing from there to consonant blends, digraphs, and more. I am glad that I gained a sound phonics background.

I was then transferred into fourth grade, and we were teaching reading out of the Ginn 720 series. The emphasis was on comprehension skills.

I do recall a colleague saying: "My kids can read fine, but they don't understand what they read." That stuck with me. She spoke correctly, in that the kids did lack comprehension skill development. It took me months to ferret out the cause of their deficit.

I knew that reasoning skills and vocabulary come from a child conversing with adults. An enriched environment will build cognition. At the same time I decided to get a second degree in psychology, emphasizing cognitive psychology. If I could understand how a person learns, remembers, and reasons, I would become a far more effective teacher. I learned that memory and cognition are associative, in that one idea in memory will be tied to a new idea to enter into memory. It's associative also with emotions, because like a car that is sound, it requires gasoline to power it; emotions fuel cognitive development and motivates all actions a person might make. I find it sad that so many teachers do not have any background in cognitive psychology.

In my mind I analyzed conversations with my students, and found that they lacked a functioning vocabulary. I then asked myself why this was the case in the lives of my students. I did get around to asking them to tell me what their mothers said to them. It boiled down to short statements of imperatives, e.g., "Go play outside," "Go watch TV," "Wash up for dinner," and more statements like these. No questions. No give and take. No thought provoking ideas shared.

I was good friends with the speech therapist, and I started to ask about auditory language deficits. She had in her caseload quite a few kids who really were hampered in their ability to communicate. She taught me the methods she used to address the students' auditory language deficits. I knew that these pedagogical techniques would help me help my students.

More to come in the next installment.