Read to Your Kids!

It's time for another round of teacher observations at EHS. This week I had a couple of interesting experiences in two different classrooms.

In a parenting class, made up of mostly sophomores, they were discussing how to redirect children that may be fighting over a toy. The teacher suggested that they might offer to read a story to the children to get them to calm down. The reaction of the room was disappointing. 90% of the students immediately turned their noses up and expressed their disgust for reading. My job is simply to observe and not to participate. It was hard to hold back. I wanted to tell them that reading to kids at an early age will make them better students in school. This is not only proven by research but by my own experience as a parent.

I thought about this further in a sociology class the next day. The topic was nature versus nurture and all I could think about was the parenting class. My daughter has been read to since she was only weeks old thanks in very large part to my wife. She is already becoming a stronger student than I ever was. I began to think about how glad I was that many of her traits are of the nurture variety. She is surpassing me in so many ways because we were willing to take just a little bit of time to read to her.

Isn't this the goal of parenting? Giving our kids a better shot at life than we had should be paramount. As an educator and a fellow citizen of planet Earth I ask, please read to your kids.