At the dentist

A visit to the dental hygienist today led to an interesting conversation. We will call her Kay and her assistant Jenny. Their children are in nursery and infant schools locally. Kay has known me for years and was asking about my research and I mentioned that Living Contradiction was published last September. That led to a conversation about infant schools when I said that my ambition is for schools to be happy places for children.

Jenny’s daughter was in Reception but receiving an extraordinary amount of homework “because the curriculum was too big to fit into school hours” (quoting the class teacher). Jenny’s concern was that this was upsetting her quality time with her child. She would normally read to her and with her, play imaginatively, chat about the day and so on. But homework was a formal list declared completed in a homework book. The child is 4 years old. What madness is requiring schools to do this? Seeking to fill every minute up to a 7pm bedtime? The mother’s instincts that relationship, enjoyment, and well-being should take precedence are absolutely correct. Homework at this age is inappropriate, the school’s neurotic response to government and inspectors misguidance. I advised ignoring homework and being creative with filling in the homework book. Jenny said she already was, but felt vindicated by our conversation.

Kay’s eldest was 7-8 and entering the world or digraphs and trigraphs (incidentally disempowering parents). This is classic step by step SSP (Miskin phonix) assuming that the children had not puzzled over tough, rough, bough, cough, dough, through and though long ago. I could read before school and can barely remember the process. Then, recognition, sounding out and reading as a habit all mingled. By 1982 I wrote a dissertation on reading readiness in which the current wisdom was this multi-approach was advocated. Of course phonics were not ignored, but English has more exceptions than rules, such as I before E.

I explained that my philosophy was that school should be an enjoyable place where children were happy and motivated, and that this was against government ideas of top-down authority and punishment. We will talk again. I have looked out a spare copy of Living Contraction for them.