Re: From Thom Hartmann

[Skotansky@aol.com]

Exactly.   Having educated parents is probably one of the largest 
contributing factors to success in school- in my experience.   Children who live in 
poverty very often do not have educated parents and are frequently at a severe 
disadvantage in terms of their language base when they enter school. In order to 
add to   your vocabulary it is said that you need to already understand 90% of 
the words in whatever learning context is occurring. I see it time and time 
again- children who are raised in literate environments learn new material at 
amazing speeds.   Those less fortunate (purely by chance) who come to school 
with a modest or poor language base have the most severe difficulty.
So how do we help those children succeed in school? Children who are raised 
in homes where literacy is a given do not practice for tests, nor are they 
tested at home. They just know a lot from experience, conversations, excursions 
etc. (and consequently get a lot of right answers!) As teachers how can we help 
these children gain a stronger base of language and experience? In my opinion 
let's start when they're really young, take some of the money spent on useless 
test preparation -training- materials etc. and invest it in giving our young 
students lots of experiences such as middle class kids get as a matter of 
course.