Thoughts on Reading...

I got married my first year of teaching. My wife and I had our first kid at the end of my third year teaching. Being a new father and a new teacher (at a south side school) I kind of intrinsically knew how important it is for a father ro read to their children. When Little P was first born, I remember reading him an old reprint of Two-Fisted Tales in the hospital. It was the only book/comic book floating around the back seat of my Saturn at the time.

We had a guest speaker come to our school named Jim Trelease. His who deal was how important is to read to children. This dude had a ton of data and reports about how low-income and less educated parents speak less and expose their own children to their limited vocabulary. More successful students with larger, more robust vocabularies came from families with larger vocabularies. He told some other anecdotes that still stick with me. One was about a little girl at a school who was reading at an extremely high reading level. When the teacher had a conference with the parents, he/she asked them how is was that their daughter was such a good reader. They replied on a sheet of paper that they were both deaf and that their daughter had been reading closed captioning off of the TV since she was a little baby.

Another story/static was that some European country (Switzerland/Poland? I don’t really remember which) was the country with the highest reading level amongst its population. The reason why was that they could afford to make their own TV shows. Want they could afford, was to redub shows from other countries (I think he used Gilligan’s Island as an example) and add subtitles. So basically, the whole country had to read if they wanted to watch their stories.

This is why I will always play a movie with subtitles for my boys (IF the movie has that option.) Hey, It can’t hurt.

So why am I writing about this tonight. Because I’m on vacation and vacation is the one time when I don’t read to the boys. Either we stay up late coming back from theme parks or what have you. Betsy tries to stop me sometimes pointing out that the boys aren’t even paying attention. But what I want is for the boys to hear me and at least SEE me read. My parents always had books on bookshelves as a kid but I never really saw them read.

So, if you ever see random numbers on this blog, it’s just me keeping track of how many days I HAVEN’T read to the boys.

Oh yeah, and Google Jim Trelease if you want.