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Learning To Read With Click and Jane

Posted by kdawson on from the that's-no-book dept.

theodp writes "While earlier generations learned to Read with Dick and Jane, the NYT Magazine reports that today's tykes are getting their reading chops at online sites like Starfall (free) and One More Story (subscription). Quoting the Times Magazine: 'In their book "Freakonomics," Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt write that kids who grow up in houses packed with books fare better on school tests than those who grow up with fewer books.' So how will kids who learn to read online fare when they grow up?"

6 of 115 comments (clear)

  1. Not enough data by mangu · · Score: 3, Interesting

    if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school

    That may be true, but it's not enough to tell which is the cause and which is effect. It could be that money is needed to buy books, and maybe poor people would have other priorities.

    An alternative explanation would be that intelligent people read more, and intelligent people are more likely to be wealthy, because few people like being poor and if one's intelligent enough one will find ways to avoid poverty.

    It could be that having books is a consequence of being wealthy, or being wealthy is a consequence of having books, or they are both consequences of another factor.

    And what if having kids that do well in school is a cause, not a consequence, of having books at home? Because if kids do well at school they will have an incentive to read more, and will ask their parents to buy more books?

    1. Re:Not enough data by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Grew up dirt poor. Like... half a step above "christmas is for other kids" kind of poor.

      That said... My mother recognized my desire to read and learn at an early age... so when I asked if we could get an encyclopedia set.... She found a way. A few weeks later, a local grocery store started selling a new volume of the Funk & Wagnalls Encyclopedia... one at a time, every two weeks I think it was. We weren't able to afford a new volume every time one came out, so we skipped around a bit... but when the set was done, and the store went back to the As... we got the ones we were missing.

      And boy did I think that was cool. The minute we bought a new volume, I'd obsess over it. The words and concepts I didn't understand I'd ask about. I got my first dictionary and my first thesaurus that way at a yard sale... Thinking back, it was very cool what my mom did... There were a lot of things that she didn't know, but she always found a way to help answer my questions.... and more importantly - she'd learn with me so that she could better understand the things I'd want to learn and be able to help me more in the future.... and we'd read and discuss what we read...

      Got my first library card (shortly after we completed the encyclopedia set) from the hospital library (I was kind of sick growing up, but I digress..)... and when I wanted to know more about something from the encyclopedias.... the librarian and my mom would help me out. I started spending a great deal of time there, and eventually exhausted their very small collection of books. So I discovered the public library system, and intra-library loans... and then inter-library loans. I got my second library card when I was nine because my mom couldn't afford the gas to take me to the library more than once a week, and my library card was only good for a dozen books I think.

      I started building my personal library when I was fourteen and got my first summer job. My family wasn't rich at that point, either, and neither was I.... but used books from the library are cheap, and I discovered used book stores. An friend of mine used to drive me up to Half-Price Books, which I thought was the coolest place ever.

      Anyway... the point of all this being that I have several college degrees, my own business, and I'm a partner in three other businesses. I went from being so broke that Kool-Aid was a treat.... to being 20 years old, too young to drink, and making more in a month than most people make in a year. When the economy changed, and I wasn't able to travel for personal reasons.... I re-tooled my business, adapted, and came out pretty damn well. I can't speak for others, but I can tell you that the secret to my success was the never-say-die attitude, the intuition, the hunger for understanding, and the resourcefulness that I learned from books and the mother who always found a way to entertain my curiosity.

      Without books, and without the kind of parenting and tutelage I had... I can say for a fact that I wouldn't be the person I am.

  2. Re:Kid that grow up with houses packed with books. by NewbieProgrammerMan · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Thing is, that if a family has a lot of books in their house, they are probably are reasonably wealthy. (In particular, not working class. In other words, people with money have kids that tend to do better in school.

    I'd say that a family that has a lot of books in their house probably gives a shit about learning things whether they're wealthy or not. When I was a kid, we were frequently at or below the poverty line in terms of family income, and my parents had never been wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but we had thousands of books in the house--far more than any of my friends with wealthy parents.

    I'm sure there's a correlation between wealth and academic performance, but it's probably two effects from the same cause in most cases: the parents have a habit of learning things, and that makes them more likely to have better jobs and children that care about learning.

    --
    [b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
  3. in my school district by gandhi_2 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...the techs call this babysitware. it has nothing to do with education and everything to do with a teachers union who demands teachers "need a break". couple this with computer lab aides who get paid under 10 bucks an hour and aren't technically allowed to teach anything.

    --
    THL phish sticks
  4. Re:Kid that grow up with houses packed with books. by LurkerXD · · Score: 3, Interesting
    While it may be true that having books around the house is related to disposable income, that does not mean that poorer parents can't encourage their children to become literate and interested in knowledge. In my case, my parents are only middle class-ish, but they most definitely went out of their way to provide plenty of books for me and my siblings to read (they're both teachers.) Instead of buying more obvious forms of entertainment, like video games or movies, my parents would instead buy books. However, when my interests turned more to technical stuff, I would simply visit the local library to fulfill my needs.

    My mother also would often send me and my siblings to a local library after school so we would could get my homework done. In retrospect, that was one of the smartest decisions she ever made in raising me. It sure beat what I am sure is the insane cost of daycare, and it pretty much forced me to do my schoolwork. Even if for some reason I didn't want to do my homework, well, guess what, the only thing else to do at that point was read one of the hundreds of books sitting around me. Either way I ended up becoming a more educated individual, a definite win-win if there ever was one.

  5. Re:Kid that grow up with houses packed with books. by mysticgoat · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...people with money generally have more books than people without.

    Within the context established by previous posts (where 'people without money' == 'working class'), above quote is a bald-faced assertion and more than likely wrong.

    From what I've seen of middle class life styles in America, most people in the USA who have significant disposable income have more space devoted to their collections of CDs, DVDs, and computer games than they do in bookshelves. And then there is the camper with the water ski boat on the trailer, the TV in every room, the gaming computer for each family member, and the multiple iPods. With all that to play with, there is not a whole lot of time left for reading, so of course a big home library is not that important to the lifestyle.

    A single bookcase in the study does not a home library make. A working class home with boxes of used paperbacks stacked in the corners of the living room and the bedrooms, brought home from the Goodwill Store, is a more literate home.

    There are an awful lot of people in the USA who are living close to the hand to mouth level who are more literate than most of the upper middle class. Books, especially used paperbacks, are cheaper and in many ways much more satisfying entertainment than the unaffordable toys of the middle class.