It was my sister-in-law's birthday today and after work we met them on a local lake beach for some cinnamon donuts. While it was close to 30 degrees Celsius, it was windy AF and the water is still pretty cold, so there weren't many people swimming, but Smallsteps was in her bathers anyway.
Om the way there, Smallsteps also read her first sign. We have been teaching her to read using letter tiles, where we give her a word and she spells out each sound, placing the tiles as she goes or, we make a word and have her read it sound by sound. She is learning much faster than I thought and she is very good at splitting the syllables of the word to group the letters.
We are doing this in Finnish first (a little English occasionally), because it is a phonetic language, meaning it is said the way it is spelt. This makes it far easier for spelling and most of my friends are better spellers than I, because when they learn words, the say it in a "Finnish way", giving them the spelling - but not necessarily the pronunciation.
The first sign she read was when we were at the stoplights - VAASA, a city on the coast the sign was pointing toward. Since that, she has been looking for signs on the road to read, but with her limited height and view from the back, combined with the length of many Finnish words, she gets a bit frustrated that they pass by so quickly. Still, she is like a language sponge, just as she has always been in her less than five years.
I started reading around the same age as her and I remember parts of the process, but I don't remember being it anywhere near as easy for me. Back then, I learned on "Dick and Dora" books. I can still see some of the pictures and think I can piece together some of the sentences.
One of the challenges of reading early was that for the first couple years at school, I didn't have much to do in class, as I could read and write before the others. This meant that a lot of the time, I was reading books while the others were studying and for me, the "tests" were easy. I think this set me up for a bit of failure, as I didn't learn the foundational skills of learning in the classroom, which probably haunted my results later.
Yet, I still don't put much faith in the education systems, as I deal with the results of it near daily. So few teens or pre-teens like my daughter's cousins, have practical skills in math or language, even though they do well in the classroom. I feel that while the test results are good at the age of fifteen in the Pisa studies, what they really need to evaluate is life much further down the road.
What would be interesting is that alongside the Pisa testing that compares fifteen year old's results across countries, they should also look at the outcomes of the children down the track. If an educational system really is working well, the results of the average 30 year old and forty five year old should also inform part of the story. If adults are struggling, the education they have has failed them. The education system isn't the only factor of course, but it can be quite a big influence on future results of children.
If there is a lot of unemployment, underemployment, crime, loneliness, depression, financial hardship, emotional instability, relationship instability and a general sense of victimhood in what is one of the wealthiest and most highly educated countries in the world - what does that say about what is learned here?
For example, in Finland, math skills are needed for pretty much every job that requires a degree, even if nothing more than rudimentary math is required on the job at all. This sets a higher than necessary bar on admissions, which will often leave out some of the best people for the job, based on a skill in a domain unnecessary for the position. People would find a strenuous physical test to be able to get into an engineering degree ridiculous, but don't mind doing the equivalent to physical disciplines.
I don't know if it will be possible, but I am hoping that Smallsteps will find something she loves and can focus on, but also understand that she will likely require adequate skills in a lot of different areas. Just because she may be talented in a particular domain, it doesn't mean she will be able or want to work in that field. Also, in general having a wider variety of skills helps compound on core talents, by bringing more to the table together.
At the end of the day, her career through life is up to her, but I do think she will benefit more from being able to explore her world through words, than have to rely solely on others to feed her information through pictures. The sother thing is, I have tens of millions of words waiting for her to read on Hive also, and I really look forward to the times that she can read these posts and start asking questions on a childhood she lived, but seen through the eyes of a parent.
If she reads a post a day, up until this point, she has homework material for the next 12+ years. There will likely be something of interest in there somewhere for her and perhaps she will read it all and find a sign that points to her first spoken word too - Daddy.
After all, she likes words.
And I am pretty wordy.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]