Speaking out at home

Don’t misunderstand me. I know children are also learning things today. But much of their methods are not effective. The knowledge they are acquiring is far more specific with less general knowledge. I believe knowledge should come from a wide information base. When it came to language skills, I know I was fortunate and with the encouragement of our mother, and my older sisters, I was able to read before going to school. In the room I shared with my brothers, we had the building blocks and traditional (Victorian era) alphabet wooden blocks, which encouraged forming words, and games that involved counting, word and card games, were played. We played board games, such as Scrabble®. Not play stations. We read books (most of them more than once), not computers. My older sisters played a variety of musical (and sometimes not so musical) instruments, and my parents (and later my sisters) played records or we listened to the radio (The Goon Show and similar were my personal favourites – more on those in a later blog). Throughout it all we grew up learning. There was even a time when my father used to paint. I recall we had several of his original art works on the walls. Mind you he never appreciated the occasional discussion of the tree and waterfall painting, which at first glance drew comments from visitors such as “That’s a nice painting of a horse.” It was something to do with the light and shade of the painting. There was another painting of a horse and when you saw that, then the other was clearly a waterfall. So we were educated and exposed in the necessary skills (even if much of the music came from Readers Digest collections, at least I learnt a lot about where today’s music came from).

This daily involvement, of visual and spoken information, was part of our discussions and the forming of ideas, were held as essential in our growth. At times there were arguments, sometimes very intense, sometimes loud, but recalling many of them now, it was often over a different opinion regarding a piece of information. Not just over what television channel people wanted to watch (Another advantage was that then there was only one channel. Not a lot to argue over). Of course, you had to stand up for yourself, and sometimes the one who would provide the best argument would win.  Sometimes. Emotions often hindered what a person was trying to say, and it was also often affected by the age of those arguing. Hence, we rapidly learnt a need to A: improve vocabulary, B: increase knowledge C: develop clarity. D: improve our presentation of the information. Having older sisters who were already attending senior classes to my introductory ones, led to a faster learning curve, showing me where the basics of language and maths were going to be taking me.

All of this ability to do what many did not have the opportunity to, such as learning to read, until attending a school, would not necessarily assist me in explaining to my father what had gone wrong with the stilt-kite rescue and subsequently injured brother. Admittedly I had developed my language skills, but as mentioned (blog April 1^st) I didn’t have a sound grasp on physics.

(continued tomorrow)