Reply to The teacher is not aware of my DD's reading level

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I was that kid who was reading Harry Potter at 4. I was a very early, very advanced reader. I read books that were far above my grade level. I was skipped ahead in reading by multiple grades and even then it was easy. My mom sounded a lot like some of the PPs here.

And you know what? I [i]didn't[/i] comprehend it the way they thought I was. If anything, it caused me emotional problems because I read things that were far too advanced for my age, didn't have the emotional resources to truly understand them and put them in context, and yet at the same time was praised across the board for my early reading (from parents, teachers, grandparents -- just like PP described). Everybody celebrated my early reading. I remember very few people digging into what I got out of it.

Early reading is not a purely positive gift. It's an outlier skill that's real but isn't the end-all and be-all that the parents of these kids sometimes think. It lets lazy teachers stop looking at intellectual and emotional progress of a child that goes with the skill. I remember encountering one teacher in third grade who insisted I read grade-level work and discuss it with her. I was frustrated and my mom complained. Years later, it's funny, my mom still dislikes that teacher, but I remember her as my best elementary school teacher. She challenged me in ways no other teacher did. I don't talk about it with my mom because many years later she's still invested in idea that this one teacher suppressed my brightness. But I see it as the one teacher who saw what was really going on and really made me think.

I skipped through many of the famous classics of American literature early in life. It was eye-opening to me when I started re-reading those books as a young adult. I had missed so much and I didn't even know it.

I think PPs above will just ignore this or claim I'm a troll because PPs are invested in a narrative about their own children that's important to them. I understand; my mom was too. But if you get anything out of this, just try to remember that early reading is a particular skill that doesn't confer additional emotional or comprehension skills, that your child might very well be missing things, and maybe that you should look at your own emotional investment in their skills. [/quote]

I was also reading dense classics at a very early age, and I agree with you on all points. Some of those books focused on topics I didn't have the emotional maturity to understand. It would have been better if I'd waited to read them. Even some texts that are recognized as children's texts affected me in ways that, in hindsight, weren't terribly constructive.

Some parents, like mine, are enchanted with the idea of their children reading well above grade level. These parents may be bright and well educated, but unless you have a degree in the relevant educational fields, you don't have the expertise to understand how to foster your child's appropriate reading development. Just because you can read doesn't mean you can understand how to nurture your child's reading development.[/quote]

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