Reading someone else's blog about standards of grammar etc. has got me thinking.
I have recently considered some things which bother me - the lack of teachers who are willing/able to spend the time with pupils and teach them one-on-one how to read, how to use phonics. Not just the gifted and talented pupils, but every single one, including those who find it incredibly difficult.
I had a friend whose brother couldn't read when he was 8. She had great difficulty too in reading, and her parents just didn't bother with either of them. I helped her learn phonics (aged 14) because she had huge difficulty in writing. She used to just panic when she didn't know how to spell a word and write any old letter that came into her head. After teaching her phonics ("if you can write how it sounds, the person reading it can sound it out and have a guess what you're trying to say rather than being at a total loss") her grades improved in her written work. It only took a couple of weeks. Why at 14 and a pupil myself did I have to do that? Why had no teacher bothered?
Which brings me onto my next point. Why did her parents not notice? Why did they not do something to help? I think this society has become quite detached from their own childrens' education. They are all for shouting the odds if their perceive there has been unfair treatment in the playground, but a lot of parents just don't engage with their kids' educations in a meaningful way at all. They can't do much reading at home... or they'd notice their child was struggling. Wouldn't they? Or did the government of the time fail them too, and forget to teach them how to read?
The government has put so much pressure on teachers to jump through hoops and make the children exam-passing machines, that they seem to have forgotten to leave the teachers time to spend teaching the children. It's now such a social norm for both of a child's parents to be out at work, that's where the reading time has gone. I think the TV license is great value if CBeebies is your main form of childcare. Coupled with the fact that teachers are spread so thinly these days through no fault of their own is going to culminate in a disastrous mess sooner or later.
I am determined that my boy (whom I get to meet this week) will have a Mum who will read to him, sing to him (poor thing!), and teach him, and when he goes to school, will be asking the teacher how I can help him from home so he is able to excel in the classroom. I think it's my job as a parent to know what they are teaching him.
I am determined to break the cycle: Government interferes with good teaching, standard of education drops, parents powerless to do anything to help due to the pressure of keeping a roof over the family's head, government gets more involved because standards are slipping.
The second dilemma that has been eating away at me, is that unless we make sure the above happens - English being properly taught in schools and at home - we are going to witness the creolisation of a pidgin, and txt spk will become a new language. It will be fascinating from a linguistic point of view, but as a scholar (read: pedant) of English, it will be the death of the language as we know it.
A creole is created when a pidgin (an auxiliary language that is primarily a simplified form of one language, with a reduced vocabulary and grammatical structure and considerable variation in pronunciation) has a new generation born into speaking/writing it, and that generation adopts it as their first language, giving it a proper grammar (this is an innate human capacity, and if you want to read some fascinating stuff, go and read loads on Nicaraguan sign language) and uses it every day.
I suppose it would be an interesting form of spelling reform, in any case. It bothers me though. I like my quaint spellings, and my unpredictably conjugating verbs.
There will be loads of holes you can pick in everything I've said. I blame my brain which probably looks like swiss cheese due to pregnancy and how forgetful it has made me. It's a basic mind dump on a load of stuff I have been thinking of for a while now.
I hope my brain improves after I get rid of the squatter in my uterus. It probably won't though due to the impending sleep deprivation!
