Wrong Roads

Due to my gross lack of a sense of direction plus a slow reaction time, I often find myself on the wrong road. From a very early age my children would let me know whenever the passing scenery didn't look right. One important truth that these experiences continue to teach me is that the longer you go down the wrong road the longer it takes to get back. This is true of life itself.

When bad habits form they are very hard to break. It's far easier and faster to teach a student who knows nothing than to instruct a student who has learned bad habits. For example, when young children are allowed to copy letters without instruction they often start the letters at the bottom, go the wrong way around the "a", and end up writing upside down and backwards. If these habits remain uncorrected the student has to be able to type before anyone can read what he writes! If, on the other hand, the student begins by tracing the letters, consistently starting at the top, legible handwriting will soon appear.

Bad habits can also develop in reading. Some children try to memorize a visual image of each word without sounding out the word. Even when phonetic decoding is taught, some very visual children don't apply what they learn in phonics to reading and continue to compare each word with a remembered image in their minds. Such children can often read well enough at early levels when the material is familiar and predictable. However, when long, unfamiliar words appear in social studies and science, these students become lost. They cease to be able to name and recall the concepts being presented, so they fall behind and fail their tests. Comparing all those images and guessing at the meaning is such a strain that they hate to read. Furthermore, even when they do acquire some decoding skills, they still tend to go back to earlier habits under stress. Educational research shows very clearly the great importance of teaching decoding skills with regular patterns before presenting "real world" reading with many mixed patterns.

Another reading habit that is hard to break is to say the words without associating meaning with each word. Decoding is the first step to reading. Decoding isn't reading. Reading is obtaining meaning from the written word. Beginning students need to picture in their minds the events described in the story. This can be done with images, discussion, and answering questions. It's vitally important to avoid assuming that children know what a passage means just because the adult is aware of the meaning.

As in reading, bad habits in math often involve an attempt to memorize numbers and facts without meaning. If a child counts without pointing to objects one by one as he counts, he has only learned a string of meaningless words. The beginning math student needs to touch objects one by one as he counts. These students need to learn the meaning of the numbers by visualizing them in relationship to each other, as on a hundreds chart. (A number line works up to the number 10. After that it gets too long to perceive.) For addition and subtraction beginning students need ways to count out the facts, just as they need to sound out words. After they have counted out long enough they are ready for more advanced methods, such as remembering related facts or extracting tens. Students also need number charts to help them skip-count, multiply, and divide. Manipulation of fraction bars or cardstock "pizzas" of the same size are essential to the understanding of fraction concepts. Just cutting various objects into pieces is only a preliminary exercise. One of the principal reasons for failure in work with fractions is the attempt to memorize processes without understanding.

A bad habit that can form with older students is the tendency to study only long enough to gain a general impression of the material without knowing enough to remember and apply the concepts.

How can all these bad habits be overcome? With correct practice. Incorrect practice grows noxious weeds in the garden of the mind. It's better to do nothing at all. Correct practice, on the other hand, leads to successful learning. If we walk the right road long enough we'll eventually get there.

What do you think? What are your experiences? Do you have questions about this article? Please contact me at newskill7@msn.com. Happy teaching.

Mary Sue Laing, M.Ed.
Resource Teacher, St. Ambrose School

by Mary Sue Laing, M. Ed., New Skill, Inc. Academic Tutor