Wake That Teacher Up

22 December 2009 22 Comments

Yesterday just minutes after I hit ‘publish’ on the post I wrote, my telephone rang. Up popped the name of my son’s school. It was 3:30 and after normal school hours.

I answered the phone by saying “Is everything okay?” only to find out it was his teacher.

WHO does not dread hearing from the teacher?

Turns out that while my son gets A’s on every test, she does not like the way he completes the required daily reading log. She does not like that some of the names on his log are of websites. And since the reading log counts for part of his grade, this could impair from receiving an A on his report card.

Bitch. Ooops.

Don’t get me wrong, the teacher is a lovely woman, however she is past retirement and is very out of touch on what decade this is.

Last year, when my son was in the third grade. I asked his teacher if it would be okay to include articles he had read on the Internet, as well as reading books from a Kindle. Her response was a firm YES. Reading is reading and however you enjoy doing it is completely fine. To her, even comic books have plots and would have counted. The bottom line is that the logging ritual helps children acquire a passion for reading and develops their comprehensive skills.

I assumed if it was okay with his third grade teacher, then surely it would be okay with his fourth Grade teacher. Oh how wrong I was.

My son loves to read, however reading an actual paperback/hardcover book isn’t his first preference. He’ll read on the computer for hours. Ask him anything you want about Teddy Roosevelt, Lawrence Taylor and Richard Nixon. He learned about them from articles on the Internet. Ask him anything you want on building a bird house or how to make a volcano. Internet too. Ask my son to tell you about the book “Three Cups of Tea” or “If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late”. Ask him to write a book report on those. He read those on a Kindle.

I pointed out to this year’s teacher that not only does he do more than the required nightly 20 minutes of reading, he does close to an hour’s worth of reading each night. Made no difference. Her answer was a firm NO. She wants him to know what holding a book feels like and the joys of turning actual pages.

Some difference in teachers, huh?

Personally, I’m not a fan of the Kindle/Sony Reader or E-Books. I prefer becoming one with a paperback and turning pages while curled up on a comfy chair. This is me, but I also think she is sticking her head in the sand by rejecting these as “forms of reading” for her students. She needs to grab a calendar and see that this is 2010. That her students live in the era of technology. That more than likely readers and e-books are how our children will do the majority of their reading in the future. Case in point, Kindle has released a larger, textbook capable sized reader.

You don’t have to be a genius to see the future of printed media. Aren’t newspaper sales down? Magazine sales? Book sales? Does she think the reason for this is that people have given up reading? What on earth must she think of blogs?

Ugh. Getting off my soapbox now and curling up in a comfy chair with my book.

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22 Comments. Click to leave one of your own!

December 22 2009 at 9:57 PM Nancy Campbell said:

When I was teaching, I just couldn’t understand why some of my colleagues had to make it so hard for kids to be successful.
.-= Nancy Campbell´s last blog ..The Greatest Christmas Pageant Never =-.