Digital Cowboy

My five year old has recently taken to coming into my office while I’m working or reading online and reading “over my shoulder.” (She actually stands next to me between me and the monitor; she’s a little short to literally read over my shoulder.) A few days ago she did this while I was working. I happened to be at the jQuery web site reading the developer documentation for a plugin to that excellent Javascript library. She understood none of it but, much like her Dad, it’s unnatural to her that words within her range of vision should not be read.

So without missing a beat, she just started reading out loud, “Using jQuery.extend to extend jQuery itself. In the above section, we checked if any options are given before we applied jQuery.extend(settings, options). The reason for this: If you specify only one parameter, the jQuery object itself is extended with the given object.”

She never so much as struggled with any of it, reading it almost as quickly as I do. (As an excuse, I’ll say that I read it slower than I could because I’m trying to actually comprehend it and she’s not. So there! Thfffttt!) She even correctly read the oddities in the first line, a section header, as “using jay-query dot extend to extend jay-query.”

No matter how many times I see her do these things, I still find it amazing.

That night, I was reading Opinion Journal’s “Best of the Web” while the kids were getting ready for bed. She came in and again automatically began reading. This time, I decided to record it for those who don’t have the opportunity to witness firsthand what home education can do.

That was completely impromptu. She had no preparation and had never seen the text before. The SMOG calculator says that the column she was reading is at grade level 13+ and the section she reads in the recording above is nearly grade level 12. You can hear me helping her some in the audio but what you hear is all the assistance I gave her. I was not helping her in any silent way.

Granted, the SMOG rating is the grade level at which one understands everything they have read and I’m sure she didn’t understand what she read. Then again, I’m not sure anyone including Dubya understands the current Iraq policy. (HA! couldn’t resist!) Anyway, I suspect that is what the ignorant/evil critics of phonics are getting at when they say comprehension suffers – it’s because phonics allows one to read way beyond their level of understanding. Help me understand how that’s a bad thing.

She had real trouble with the words “Rwanda,” “Sunnis,” “ideological” and “Shias.” My guess would be that many high school graduates in this country would as well. Other words, such as “century” and “nonstrategy,” she had to work at but she got them on her own. (It should be noted that “nonstrategy” isn’t actually a word either.)

She made a few mistakes, too. But as someone that has seen her do this frequently, I can also say she wasn’t in her top form when I recorded her. It was past her bedtime and she was very tired.

This child is not yet six years old and would be two months into kindergarten if we had not chosen to educate her at home. Incidentally, my older daughter can read just as well but usually doesn’t. She’s an artist and not as interested in reading so she tends to get in a hurry and guess at the words instead of actually reading them.