Competing in numbers, and NOT finding out, if the children understood what they were, reading!
“Mom, what books are we, certifying, today?”, Forest with his brows, raised upward, his lips, pouty.
Forest is a first-grader this year, he’d not recognized enough Chinese characters, nor could he spell using phonetic quickly enough yet, but one of his reading assignment was getting the passages read, and the reading questions are all in traditional Chinese characters, without the phonetic spellings to the side, so the section required the parents to recite the questions for the students to answer. Meaning, that as Forest, used his, turtle-slow pace, reading a storybook from cover to cover, I’d had to, read aloud the reading questions to him for him to, answer one by one. There were ten questions per book, and sometimes, the illustrated books hadn’t been certified yet, because there aren’t the written down reading questions online………and by this, the numerous steps of the learning, being able to read three to five books, for us, it’s, pure, luck.
I’d originally thought, that this is a reading with oneself as the primary competitor, to accumulate the various kinds of knowledge, but I’d never have guessed that this was, a competition, that every kid needed the badges to get to the next level, and, you’d had to read to a certain number of volumes of books, to advance to the next level. Not only are the students ranked by their classmates, this also was, a regional program, and everybody is, competing, in the, numbers.
“Reading certification”, was originally supposed to help the children learn to love to read book, to have the children understand the joys, and gains of reading, but as it’d turned into competition of sorts, for a first-grade student, reading them became, a gruesome, task, and there were the questions of the certification tests with, “what was the character wearing on a certain page of a book?”, it’s simply, to test, if the kids had that book in hand, to use, as, references, instead of helping the children understand the contents of, what they were, reading. As the reading certification program derailed from its, original purpose, do we still, need to, ram, ram, ram, usher, usher, usher too fast, past the finishing lines?
On this, I’d, turned off the webpage of the reading certification, and led my son to slowly discuss, and read through the story thoroughly, because I believe, that you need “joys” in reading, to learn to, “enjoy” the process of reading, and to the end, to gain that understanding, of what you were, reading.
“Let’s, use our own means and methods, to evaluation our own, reading processes first then!”, I’d smiled, and told Forest.
instead of this…this, long, summer reading list!
So this, is like the summer book reading program that the local libraries held back when I was in school, we were supposed to read, a certain number of books, and, we turn in the completed sheet with the author, the title of the books we read, and we get a small trophy for it, and this is a really bad program, because in reading like this, you are NOT checking for understanding of what your children are reading, not asking what they think of what they’d read, you’re just, upping the number of books, shoved down your kids’ brains, and that’s, no good, I mean, H-O-W, can you teach a kid to learn to love the process of reading, to enjoy the act of, reading books, by “grooming” them like that? You can’t!
So, this mother did it right, she’d, TOSSED out the system, and started, using her own methods, to read along with her, young son.