From: firstinitiallastname@texas.net   
      
   GTT wrote:   
   > "Chris Mark"  wrote in message   
   > news:20040207113017.20033.00001633@mb-m17.aol.com...   
   >   
   >   
   >>As far as teaching kids to read today, I think it is still true that   
   >   
   > children   
   >   
   >>tend to immitate their parents; if mom and dad read, then that's what the   
   >   
   > kids   
   >   
   >>will do.   
   >   
   >   
   > Well, Chris, that's one point of view.  But neither of my parents ever read   
   > except when the bills came, and I grew up with a book grafted to my hand.   
   > (I've got one right now that's making me anxious to get off this computer.)   
   > On the other hand, I've raised three kids and two of them are of the "I like   
   > to read...sometimes when I have a lot of spare time" variety while the other   
   > one almost reads the spots off the pages of my books, plus every other book   
   > available to her.   There does not seem to be a direct correlation in my   
   > personal experience, but I would have thought there SHOULD be.   
      
   It's reasonable to assume that access to books in the home and/or   
   modeling the parents' reading doesn't insure kids will become avid   
   readers, but it should at least show that there's information and   
   entertainment to be had from books.   
      
   One of the best things about growing up, for me, was that our house had   
   a long hallway lines with bookcases. There were no limits on what I   
   could read at any age. Kinsey was there, alongside Ian Fleming (many   
   years before Hollywood ever heard of James Bond). All the great   
   irreverent humorists of the mid-century were there, and the quirky   
   titles at least made me look inside to see what they were about. I   
   received a fair number of children's books at gifts, but the adult stuff   
   was always so much more interesting that I read through quite a number   
   of them.   
      
   I think that the ability to "live" through a book, to have it form a   
   vivid mental picture, is probably, to a significant degree, a learned   
   ability. It seems to me to be akin to language learning and therefore   
   something that comes more easily to form in the young mind. I think it   
   had a lot to do with my ability to do well on tests like the SAT, where   
   you can't do well on the verbal sections without a strong vocabulary.   
      
   My own 16 year old, the other day, was worried that he didn't do as well   
   on the PSAT as he was accustomed to do on other tests. We were looking   
   over the analogies section of an SAP prep manual, and it became clear to   
   me that he was weak on vocabulary. (Video games don't do much for   
   vocabulary, and even the AP English teacher has been shying away from   
   sophisticated works, because the students have vocabulary problems.)   
      
   Fortunately, he's really motivated to do well, and we talked about where   
   strong vocabularies come from, primarily reading, where the context   
   makes the meaning somewhat clear without tedious trips to the   
   dictionary. We had talked with him before about movies, the making of   
   which interests him, and pointed out that many films are adaptations of   
   novels of different titles. He took off to his room with Heart of   
   Darkness, with the promise that we'd rent Apocalypse Now when he   
   finished the book. You can't make 'em, but you can sometimes get them to   
   want to read. You can't direct their interests, but you can show them   
   what books have to offer to what the things in which they are interested.   
   --   
                          Gerald Clough   
       "Nothing has any value, unless you know you can give it up."   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)