Thanks to Mrs. Anderson, my second-grade teacher, I know how to use "inclined" in the sense of being likely or willing to do something. It's because of Mrs. Ferguson, who taught tenth-grade English, that I know "bucolic" means gentle, scenic and pastoral. It was not until I had Mr. Jones as a junior in high school that I knew how to spell "highfalutin."
I know the glamorous thing to do in education these days is to let kids fingerpaint their feelings with organic, plant-based pigments and then nap as mellow Joan Baez tunes waft through the room, but there is something to be said for vocabulary lessons and other old-school learning techniques. Do I use words like "efflorescence" in everyday speech? Of course not. But when a situation arises in which "efflorescence" is the perfect word, I know how to use it.
That, in my opinion, is a real skill.
Postscript: A note to Mrs. Wendling, my fifth-grade math teacher - despite your daily Mental Math quiz, I am still terrible at doing even basic addition and subtraction in my head. Sorry about that. I know you tried.
2 comments:
aw, I like this post! :) I agree, that was important. Although you probably retained more than the average student of those vocabulary lists...Vocab + reading! The second part of the equation also seems to be increasingly absent...
I agree. That's why I roll my eyes when parents get upset about their kids reading Harry Potter or The Hunger Games. Okay, so maybe those aren't "A Tale of Two Cities," but at least your child is using his or her imagination and is focusing for a long period of time instead of staring at an ADHD-inducing screen.
And no, I do not let the fact that I do not have children myself prevent me from telling other people how to raise their kids.
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