Do you remember your times table? It serves me well! Not to mention reciting the alphabet when going through the phone book!
What else did we learn by rote memorisation at a young age?
I started attending a private Catholic primary school (one of only four protestant girls in that year) full time before I was 5 years old. No one I knew went to pre-school. Was there even such a thing?
I was taught by nuns of varying sizes who still wore their full black and white habits. I well remember my old school friend meeting up with Sister A. in later years when they’d dropped full nuns’ habit and she said “she has hair!â€
But I digress. Memorisation was the method used to teach us all over 50 years ago. It is only recently that I’ve come to understand that I was taught to read by (probably) the look and say method with some phonics thrown in for good measure BUT I wasn’t taught to read in such a way that comprehension was also considered important.
I can read well and I can spell well but somehow comprehension eludes me on many occasions. My lucky break was that there was no TV in my dark ages!
But at last I can attribute that missing piece of my puzzle to rote memorisation.
Recently I had yet another conversation with a grandmother who said her grandchild was “a late talkerâ€. The child has just turned 2 years old.
Since one parent works and the other is training to be a physician the child has been in a daycare since she was a year old. Her parents are calm and attentive but I realise that they fall in my ‘parents in their late 30’s to early 40’s age group’.
Such older parents are ‘very attentive’ but they tend to use flash cards and educational TV a lot – their lives are busy. Sometimes they even use sign language ‘to help their child communicate’ – it’s really because the parents don’t/can’t spend the time with their child to understand them and improve the quality of their speech!
If you tune into a child and are around them every day they can usually drag you over to what they’re trying to tell you about, in fact they ought to drag you over to the object. Then you have a flash of inspiration and they are delighted that you even bothered. You thus diminish the prevalence of the terrible two’s (which are now becoming the terrible three’s and four’s!!)
Now here’s the light bulb moment: such children are loved certainly (having been in the calm company of this particular couple I know it to be so) but their child isn’t getting much in the way of daily ‘real world’ conversation with her parents or in the outside world. She is being taught about her world by flash cards and memorization with her parents, and the rest of the time she’s in a daycare – remember, there are no certified teachers of the under-3’s in daycare programmes.
The parents and grandparents were initially delighted that she memorises and says words, knows her colours etc., ‘loves to read’, and then suddenly “she’s a late talkerâ€. How does that happen?
Well children actually need to be with you and talked to as though they are the true and important focus of your attention.
I never used flash cards with my children or anyone else’s. I now realise I spend very little time in the first couple of years of a child’s life reading to them.
Speech is my primary focus. (I have two very verbal sons and the other children I taught to speak do so very well). I teach colours, shapes and objects through the real world. A simple walk in the neighbourhood or to the park does the trick. Then after some time, and repetition of the activity, the names of most colours, and many other concepts, are totally integrated into a child’s brain.
It isn’t important to me that a child points to their nose, eyes and mouth – the preferred way of proving that a child is ‘developing OK’ – I think such things must be on ‘a list’ that reassures a parent and pediatrician that a child is developing ‘well’.
But from flash cards comes little or no ‘conversation’ thus they aren’t learning to speak, just to recite words from memory. Of course the parents are delighted with such ‘learning’. It gives them a chance to show off what their child knows. But they often aren’t learning, in real world terms, words and short sentences like “up, down, over, under, back up, etcâ€. Those action/instructional words and sentences which we also use ‘to steer’ a child in the right direction are critical on occasion to keeping a child safe from danger.
Throw in regular daily cartoons, ‘educational’ TV and DVD’s and a child hardly hears (or sees a face — a little known critical factor in learning to speak!) pronouncing full and real words and sentences about anything that matters to them or anyone else in their company.
In the 1940’s Leo Kanner commented on the ability to recite from memory as one of the common factors in the first 11 children he diagnosed with autism who were also struggling with language.
That’s pretty scarey stuff!
Get out of the new ‘dark ages of educationâ€: switch off the TV/DVD’s, throw away the flashcards (even close the books for the time being) and get out in the real world!
You’ll have a talker in no time!