Huge Disconnect Coming

I get the bad feeling that a huge disconnect is coming between what Stephen knows and what the education system says he should know. This week’s reading words from his first grade class are (in no particular order):

day

red

by

eat

here

say

car

play

He was bored with these words before I was finished with cutting out the flash cards. To spice things up, I turned them upside down and held them up to the light so that he could read them backwards. And he still got all of them without hesitation.

So I decided to experiment with more advanced words to see where my six year was in the grand scheme of things. I had him read a back blurb from the back of Dynamite Entertainment’s Sherlock Holmes #5. I told him this is just an experiment, “skip any words you don’t know and there is no way to get this wrong”.

The original paragraph I had him read was: “Dynamite’s Sherlock Holmes launch and story is reminiscent of the their publishing of The Lone Ranger. Taking a classic character, making him accessible for today’s fans and giving him new life. I am also always impressed by John Cassaday’s cover designs, and his exe-cution, and Holmes is no let down, in fact, it’s taking it up a notch. Leah (Moore) and John Reppion are writing a story that will help cement their careers. Creating a new original story instead of an adaptation of previous works is a plus for comics and Holmes fans!”

The bolded words in the above paragraph are the ones he missed:

reminiscent (which a lot of adults get wrong),

Ranger (which surprised me a little, but not much),

accessible (again a word a lot of adults get wrong),

Cassaday (a name),

exe-cution (this was hyphenated because of a line break, I explained that the hyphen means that it is all one word),

Reppion (a name),

adaptation (not surprising) and

previous (which he thought was the word ‘precious’, which tells me that he didn’t read it all the way through and not that he didn’t know what it was).

Then I followed up with a back blurb from BOOM! Studios’ excellent graphicization* of Do Android’s Dream Of Electric Sheep. Same rules, but instead of a paragraph, he only had to read a single sentence.

The original sentence was “The most consistently brilliant science fiction writer in the world.”

OK, it is actually a sentence fragment, but the only word he missed was consistently and not by much because he pronounced it ‘constantly’ (which would also work in the context of the sentence).

I guess I am a little worried that while he knows words like publishing, character, impressed, original, brilliant and science he is given words like eat, say, car and play to study. That may fly now, but in a few years he will be bored in class and will just started to get lazy. When that points comes, it will be hard to keep him on a good track. Even if he doesn’t get lazy, he might get to the point where he starts wondering “Why should I try so hard when everybody else is getting by with doing much less?”

OK, maybe I’m more than a little worried.

* I know graphicization is not a real word, but it is as good a description of what BOOM! Studios is doing as anything else. Instead of adapting the book into comic book form, they are taking the entire text and adding pictures to it, so while it looks like a regular comic book and reads like a regular comic book, it really isn’t. Most non comic book readers won’t notice much of a difference (and a lot of regular comic book readers don’t notice one), but there is a slight change in presentation. I HIGHLY recommend the title to any science fiction, comic book, graphic arts or literature fans.

Tags: comic books, education, reading, stephen