Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Spooky.

If you want a glimpse into the thinking of the teacher who doesn't want your child reading anything above grade level, here you go.

http://www.nais.org/Magazines-Newsl...Slow-and-Steady-Still-Wins-the-Race.aspx

From the article:

"The symptoms of the Harry Potter Effect persist well past kindergarten and first grade. They appear even more severe as these early readers seem to plateau in their growth just as their peers begin to catch up. Children suffering from the Harry Potter Effect feel these symptoms most acutely as they sense their status as the “best” is being threatened. Children whose self-esteem is bonded so tightly with their image as being “smart”—which is consistently the adjective parents and schools use to describe children who read at a young age—can experience painful resentment as they see more and more of their peers placed in the advanced reading group and thrive there. These first graders who had proudly shared with anyone who would listen that they were reading Harry Potter are at risk of becoming fourth graders who must be incentivized in order to read anything at all."

This gets into what I was trying to articulate with respect to developmental arc.

Some kids are like what this teacher sees.

Some are not.

So, this thinking is appropriate in some situations and not in others.

Almost all of my reading is based on external rewards, so it's certainly consistent with the working world.

I agree - at DD6's school they make such a big deal out of earning AR points to get all of these silly certificates that it turns a lot of kids off form reading. The only books in the library are books that have AR tests associated with them! Granted, most books now have AR tests with them, but why should a child have to take a test on every library book they read? Why can't they just read because they think it is an interesting book? I know some of DD's friends hate reading already in 1st grade because of the tests and the thought of not getting enough points to get the next reward before everyone else does.

" These first graders who had proudly shared with anyone who would listen that they were reading Harry Potter are at risk of becoming fourth graders who must be incentivized in order to read anything at all."

I don't know any kids like this. Does anyone else? A child who read HP or similar in first grade and then became a nonreader in 4th?

What really aggravated me (well, among other things) was her theory that kids who learn to read later become better readers than those who independently learn to read early. There is no evidence for this. Her private school background is probably completely deluding her here, in the sense that sure, there are indeed bright kids (what's the average IQ at her school--115, 120?) who read late and then catch up very well. But much of the time, the child who is struggling with reading in second grade is a child who is going to continue to struggle. Early problems with reading predict future problems for most of the population, and early success with reading, especially untaught, predicts future success. It's not a big mystery. This is established. As a literacy specialist or whatever, she really ought to know this.

Respectfully, psychland, I really disagree. That is, I agree with this:


Yes. When my kindergartener reads The Phoenix and the Carpet, he is missing things that his older sister does not miss.

But I completely disagree with this:


Very, very strongly disagree. I feel sad just thinking about that, actually. In the BOOK? So DD8 should have been able to decode every word in every Harry Potter book before I "allowed" her to read them? You are going to forbid your daughter to read them till she can decode every single word (but one or two) in the 700+ page tomes in the later books. How would you even know? Heck, there may be a few words in those books that *I* did not know.

I don't have a problem with it at an earlier age in an effort to improve reading ability. Of course, if a teacher want to limit a child from expanding their reading ability, there is no point. This year when homeschooling my DD8, we made her read longer chapter books. Initially, she took forever to read her one chapter for the day. She complained like crazy. After a few weeks, she was reading in 1/10 of the time from when we started. After a couple months, she started to actually like reading.

1) Reading comprehension as a skill and reading comprehension as evaluated by early elementary school teachers are not the same thing.

2) "Sarah" is spending most of her reading time reading alone, whereas "Aaron" is reading with adults. One is interacting with educated people and learning to analyze text, the other is not. Should we really be surprised that the one doesn't learn how to analyze?

I think this teacher has made a valid observation, but then she says, "Here is what I think is happening," and her hypothesis is wrong.

Also, I didn't get the impression that her observations extend past 4th grade. I think she might be surprised if she were to look at Sarah and Aaron in 10th grade.

And this part was just plain hilarious:
Errr... late readers have larger vocabularies? In what parallel universe?

My DD is in 4th, and read HP in 1st. A couple of months ago she was outraged that DW and I had visited a new second-hand bookstore without her.

This relates to the conversation over in the Tiger Parenting thread hyper-competition thread.