Everybody
was with that winter break feeling, so I try to stay calmed, and I started a
little more artistic activities with children. It was easy to notice the
importance of art in the classroom, children feel relaxed and they can explode
their personal abilities, some discovered to be good to sing, while others prefer
to play instruments. At the end if the language depends on the sounds, singing
and music are part of the same sensory system.
That
evening as usual, I went to talk to my friend. It is interesting how much our
talks were shaping my ideas about teaching. I still have fear of damaging children
minds, how much is too much to ask to them?, May I ask to little?, If they
laugh too much it means I'm not a good teacher... perhaps there is no a way to
measure success, except with tests, or hoping that one day they become
successful people, but I had to wait many years to answer my questions.
We started our discussion about the exaggerated amount of content in books,
seeking to create skills in students, which lost motivation sometimes, and it
doesn’t allow to repeat what should be learn.
-
Sometimes I would like
that children could enjoy the home works and not just going from one lesson to
another, I told her with reluctance.
-
Many persons wish
the same, It is not only boring, it goes against the most basic principles of
learning, which shows you the distance between education and learning.
- Then, should we repeat things more?
- When you look histories of great athletes, artists or anyone whom you
admire, you discover there is something in common: they began to build their
skills from a very early age, and took baby steps before becoming masters.
- It is true, although the competency model describes that slow pace towards
goals that allow children to be fit in your environment...
- Thus they should be designed, but actually only mark the goal, for example think
about reading, it only says that children must be capable of developing a verbally
communicative competence to understand ideas of other persons, but you don't
shred the process.
-
Where does the
process begin?
- It begins in the ability to listen and clearly differentiate sounds of
natural language. However you hear one and other environmental sounds at the
same time, like birds singing, or leaves falling, dogs barking, then you must give them meaning and associate them with words
to every sound. The brain works combining all that information, but it does work
from nothing, it needs to discriminate between a word, a melody or a noise.
That helps you to discriminate sounds better when you are exposed to each
stimulus.
- Then should we allow to children to listen other stimuli to support them in
reading?.
- Of course!, and let them sing, encouraging them aurally, let them do play
with words, because the next big step is to see
the sound, through signs and symbols that represent those sounds.
- I have always thought that reading is a visual process, I have never
thought it was a acoustic task.
-
You are not the
only one!, but when you work with children, you discover if they have failed to
differentiate sounds, they are not able to relate the sound with the symbol,
and that produce a writing with spelling mistakes. This explains why foreigners
can write well, because we also have tools to check spelling, but when we
listen to others and we should talk it
is obvious that we are not native speakers.
-
It's true!, I have
seen that foreigner children are good when they write, but it’s painful for
them to talk sometimes, because they do not understand some words.
- Sometimes they
feel shame to say: I am sorry, but I don't understand!, but if they overcome that
fear and try over and over and over again, usually they finish being capable of
understanding not only words, but
meanings, and that is the language, which eventually turns into written words.
- Then, they should practice a lot, and we should not to change content
sometimes arbitrarily.
- I agree!, if you read about persons who have been excellent in something,
you realize that they began with a very
different activity, sometimes far away from what we know, but eventually those
persons find both taste and motivation to try something new, then if you look
at biological models, any one, you can find two important aspects: one is the
motivation to repeat and repeat and repeat something that ending being
automating such conduct that becomes easy.
- It is true, but in school sometimes we do not encourage it and we don't
allow them to do it a thousand times...
-
When cellist Pablo Casals was asked why he continued playing his beloved instrument after 90
years, his reply was that he wanted to "keep making progress", even
if his his talent was recognized 60 years before that. He also said that the
art of interpretation and not exactly following what is written...
-
Then there comes a
time in which every one seeks to advance and evolve...
- Yes, it occurs naturally, but you must give the chance to your child and forget to say: "You shouldn’t
do that", " Do it again this way"... you should let them
experiment a bit, to look for new solutions, other ways of saying things, and
above all, enjoy...
This talk
made me clear in my mind what Iwanted for Christmas: I asked that one day we
could give kids more freedom to find their own talent, because there is no
doubt everybody has one, something in which we are excellent, but there are
those who never find it.
No comments:
Post a Comment