Normally I look forward to posting at the end of the week because I love Fridays. However, with the best intentions of posting, Friday flew past me without offering an opportunity. I have time to post this afternoon because I truncated my long run. I had wanted to get out the door early and beat the scorching day I knew was coming. However, like many people in the world find themselves, I couldn't find the motivation to rush my Saturday morning. I leisurely ate breakfast, read the news sites and did the dishes, by then the temperature was around 30C and the sun was high in the sky. I wasn't having fun after 30min so I just went home.
I had a notable experience reading a book to my mixed grade 1 and 2 class yesterday. What seems like harmless fun on paper has a way of surprising teachers. The teacher I work with had just received a new English book entitled No Biting that she wanted to use in the class. I had no reservations because I'm either very naive or very stupid. The book consists of several pages about, say, no biting your friends, and then you flip the flap and it says you can bite an apple. No pushing mommy, but it's okay to push a swing. Kicking, hitting and so forth were all covered the same manner. Naturally, the kids only saw a picture of kicking and immediately started to kick each other; not waiting for the rest of the text. This put the other teachers and I in a state of shock. That a picture book introducing morality had the exact opposite effect was unexpected. Had the author never read it to a group of kids? Eventually, I stopped reading the text and we all just yelled, "No Kicking!" "No pinching!" in advance (not that it helped). Then I turn the page to something like "No spitting on the sidewalk" and I made the executive decision to not even show it to the kids. The ending too is just horrible. The author just wrote on the last page "Is it okay?" What does that even mean? So, yeah, that's my story about good books that go bad unpredictably.
6 comments:
wow.. i can imagine the chaos there!!
good book turn bad... hmm
hehe... changed!
Silly question for you, but it was one that someone asked me when i came back from Japan
While you were in Canada did you come across any favorite smells?
simple answer: no. who the frig you hanging out with? :P
well actualy someone asked what my favorite smell of Japan was. I thought i was a better question than, 'so did you eat a lot of rice?"
Running after breakfast. There's a new idea. I almost always run early in the morning before breakfast. When you have a two year old and a baby at home, you gotta make sure that you are AT HOME when at all possible when they are awake.
About the book, don't write it off too quickly. You can prepare the kids for each page or for the book as a whole. Do you hurt your friends? But since kids take in the picture first and the words later, I would say that the author needed to put a little more thought into layout of the book.
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