When I was in grade school, the teachers often told us:
"When you're reading and get to a wordyou don't know, stop and look the word up in a dictionary."
I just filed that under 'stupid sugestions from teachers' -- a long list I kept in my mind in those days. I figured that nobody would be stupid enough to do that. What's the fun in reading if you're stopping all the time? Well, when I was teaching in a remedial program, I met people who had taken that advice as kids. We would assign the students to read a short article and write down a summary of the information in each paragraph. Most of the students would find a few words they didn't know, look them up, and write down what those words meant. If the paragraph was on the danger of high blood pressure, they would tell us the definiitions of 'systolic' and diastolic.' I still haven't met anyone who both took that advice and reads at what I consider an acceptable level.
Has anyone reading this diary ever followed those rules for a few years?
Another example of the general pattern after the jump.
Years later, my wife was running a tutoring program. She asked a local group which had been quite supportive to fund the purchase of some youth novels. They would only fund the purchase of good literature. "If they are going to read," the reasoning ran, "they should be reading classics."
Well, these kids weren't going read classics. The question was whether they were going to read anything. She got the youth novels from another source.
We keep hearing this pattern. "If kids are going to be doing this, they should be doing that." Fine, sometimes -- as with reading classics -- they should. Occasionally, as with looking words up in the dictionary, they shouldn't. (You learn words in context. Dictionaries are for browsing; only in direst emergency should you consult one for a definition in the midst of something else.) But usually assuming that 'kids are going to be doing this' is idiocy.