Memories - early or general

Reins provoke strongly polarised reactions such as "Children should not be treated like dogs" to "...good for allowing exercise" or "I could not have managed the twins without them!". Today toddlers seem to spend longer in their pushchairs that now have taken over the confining role of prams. Remember when it was the practice to be pushed to the end of the garden in all weathers to take naps and left to cry "to strengthen our lungs" while mother got on with the housework or being left outside while shopping. Modern pushchairs have evolved to be cushioned, folding miracles but have integral 5 point harnesses fitted universally, some with side-blinkered headrests and hoods, that preclude sitting up and looking around. Contrast the identical 1940's pushchair to mine here. Perhaps our gut reactions come from either having imprinted reins and harnesses as the start of an adventure, rather like the reaction of a dog on seeing you pick up its lead, or associating them with punishment for having run-off. I suspect my exasperated mum kept me tethered until nearly school age, while conscious memories were being made; this may explain my negative feelings.

Hello, Illiteracy & numeracy! UNESCO, is reporting that illiteracy is now more prevalent than ever, world wide, Europe included. Germany & France highlighted. What's going wrong? Here in the UK, grab an on the spot sample of folk walking through Broadgate, Coventry a bastion of technology & education, the chances are that out of five folk, one will have very limited reading ability in any language & will struggle with the simplest arithmetic. One in eight of that same sample will have such poor literacy, that they cannot recognise a number, whether it's a quantity or a description. That scenario is now 100fold increase on the same sampling from 1970. Someone that I have known for most of my adult life, can hand out an apple to someone, then hand out an apple to someone else, so in his mind he has quantified 2, but he cannot read the number 2. He's worked as a labourer for all of his adult working life, so it's not that he can't think. He can think. I've got so many questions in my mind about this, but what do we on here think? Coventry is quite bright compared to many other locations that we might pick!

Hi Philip Here in the Australian Capital Territory - the most educated city in Australia - they've just discovered that twenty years of schools without phonetics or grammar have resulted in this country plummeting down the advanced countries rankings for literacy. Some doctrinaire "expert" years ago demanded that kids should be encouraged to "guess" how to pronounce a word, and that all kids should go through the exact same process; as a result, our five-year-old daughter was reading Black Beauty at home and bored senseless reading "Look Jane - Look Peter" at school. Fortunately, we were able to shift her to a school linked to - of all places - the French Embassy! Quotes from the Canberra Times May 3, May 6 2024 And as for maths, I despair - checkout kids can't even work out the bill WITH the aid of a calculator before I tell them the answer! Yet we have contestants on our version of "Letters and Numbers" who are brilliant. The problem is how we teach the least advanced of our primary school kids.

Hello Johnnie, I wonder if the contestants who "Are brilliant", started their formal schooling, already aware of basic reading & counting?

It wouldn't surprise me at all, Philip. Literacy is hereditary. Our 12-year-old grandson (our aforementioned daughter's son) had a bedtime story read to him by his mum or dad every night from when he was born to when he didn't need help to read. He's got through Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of Time" with about as much understanding of it as I did (possibly more!) and can discuss the implications of it! He tops his class in literacy and numeracy, has started to build robot machines, and is a great goalie for his local football team too! Yes - that kid was 11 years old when that photo was taken - he had just saved a penalty! His parents had to take his birth certificate to games to prove his age! Mind you, I don't approve 100% in encouraging infants to read - that aforementioned daughter was given my VERY favourite Bambi picture book to read at bedtime when she was two years old, and she ripped the book to shreds!

The problem is multi-fold and mired in countless political minefields. There is a solution but it requires a society wide will to reset problems rather than bolt on endless small fixes, which in turn generate more flaws.

My daughter was taught the ITA system when she first started at school, words were spelt how they sounded some using funny letters. How any child could spell after that I don't know. Fortunately we went abroad. The system in Luxembourg was completely different. Alan at pre school was given a small black board and a white crayon and had to do rows of a shape joined together. At the infant school Janice had the same board and was given letters to do the same. When they got better they were then allowed to use paper and pencil. They were given groups of letters at a time and their reading book advanced with the same letters. (French!) so eventualy she could after the 2 years we were there do nice joined up writing. When we returned back to England. She started back at school. I was called in one day and told that she could not do joined up writing as the other children wanted to do it. Another disadvantage I found for kids of that era was that digital watches had come in. It was some time before I realised that they could not tell the time on an analogue clock ! Looking at the present time I have spoken to a couple of teenagers at secondary school who say they don't like maths. Have you looked at the maths they teach them now. I realise that some do want to go on into jobs that will require it but surely there could be a level that could use the time better and be taught maths that woukd be more useful in the day to day world. Basic stuff so they can add up their change in shops. Money management and about interest when you borrow. Nit the sort of stuff my granddaughter will say, why do I need that ?

I was started on ITA, as was my brother. It messed him up big time but I can't say that I noticed the difference. I was bad at spelling both but had no trouble reading either. I'd read most things, so long as they weren't boring. I didn't learn to spell until the Sinclair QL. It had a very early word processor with a noisy, irritating spell checker. Not only could I read what I'd written (unlike my own handwriting) but the beep it made when I got something wrong taught my fingers how to spell. I still can't spell out words but mostly I can type them.

I am not very good at spelling which is why I prefer working with numbers. I can spell big words it is mostly things like should it be ee or ea or should there be an e before a y. Yes thank goodness for spell checker, especially on my ipad which seems to put different letters in to what I type, most likely because I don't hit the keys in the middle. You may spot that sometimes in my posts (even that came out as pists ! My brothers are dreadful spellers. My older brother had sosaj on one of his camping trips !

Fortunately, I was taught to read before I started school by mother using the rhyming couplets that accompanied the Rupert Bear cartoon in the Daily Express. My motivation was to be able to read the exploits of Dan Dare in my elder brother's Eagle comic before he returned from school and confiscated it. Writing was taught using individual blackboards and chalk at Richard Lee Infants that I only attended for a few months before becoming ill with polio. After recovering from illness (thank the Lord) I returned to schooling at Stoke Infants, Briton Road where we were allowed pencil and paper. My diet changed from chalk to wood because I have the unconscious tendency to eat what ever is is my hand while thinking what to write. (ATM it is a 25 cl bottle of 'St Omer biere blonde' and I have not yet managed to master consuming glass.) Perhaps using phonetics has inhibited me learning the visual pattern recognition ability that is necessary to master spelling irregular words.

Reminded me of the Rupert Bear rhyming couplets - I loved those stories and they were possibly what kick-started my interest in poetry. It fell dormant through my teens but was revived in spades when Pam Ayres came along! Incidentally, I recently wrote a short play in verse, which won a competition, and the professional who directed it explained that the amateur actors loved it because the rhyming made it so much easier to remember their lines. Our brains must be tuned in somehow to enjoy hearing rhyming.

JW,

I'd never heard of ITA, so I had to bing it. Judging by other people's comments, I'm rather glad we didn't do it. It seems like another of those things that's supposed to simplify, but ends up complicating things. A bit like those foreign alphabets that are full of unintelligible squiggles that all look the same to me. Thake Thai, for instance - hundreds of squiggles, with 60 or 70 characters on a line, all together, with no spaces anywhere! How anyone is supposed to understand that is beyond my brain. And I was gifted and top in languages at school. But those languages all used the normal alphabet. And only 23 characters in Latin. I'm glad we had to learn, as kiddywinks, silly songs like Betty Botter bought some butter. I can still recite it very fast. Easy when you learn it young, and to a tune, and it rhymes. Advertisers know this - "you wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsident". I was proud, aged 5, that I could read the first chapter of our new "red book" before teacher could teach it us. The whole chapter was:

Hello, The story of The Little Red Hen, was also in the Beacon reader books. Think book four. It was possibly watching my mum working her shop stuff out in our front room, where our front room in Sewall Highway was breakfast room in the morning & meal times, but was mum's office several times in a week. Her calculating machines fascinated me, as she balanced her books & stock levels, not that I knew anything of that at age 4. That's one of the reasons that I honestly believe that the Psychology folk have got it right regards the ages of children's learning. I was fascinated with anything working remotely like my mum's mechanical calculators. My Uncle playing the Gaumont organ, where the piano was playing on its own. My career was based on caculating, whilst my music hobby likewise on mechanical coupling, where we can also throw in our railway. My dominating interests had been set before my age of 7.

Probably the first book I remember is the Magic Fish - fantasy, so yes, it was a reflection of my future self. Moral of the story, stop when you've got the castle... "Oh, fish in the sea, come listen to me. My wife begs a wish from the magic fish"