The Daily Mail has found something else to complain about.

Read about it here .

And read my response to it here.

I, to, saw this item and agree with Bob. Reading is a important skill and reading timetables just once facet of that skill.

I was running a training course once on rail work and, in the section on timtable reading, discovered that one candidate didn't know how indeces were sorted into alpahabetical order; to find, say, Dungeness, he had to start at the DAs and work his way through all the Ds until he happened on Dungeness, towards the end of the listing.

I learnt from a colleague who rang the same course, that she, too, had had instances of this.

Clearly that lad needed tuition in some of his reading skills.

My wife tutors adults in a literacy course (one-on-one) and the instructors are encouraged to not only teach basic reading skills but also how to read newspapers, timetables, food boxes, and other practical examples that apply to everyday life. One man she taught told her he had, through his inability to read the package, bought a box of flour, thinking it was soap powder.

Well, Proofreader, that explains all those half-baked immigrants! Now if we could just explain the half-baked natives...

Geoff the former volunteer ESL tutor

quote:

half-baked immigrants

quote:

half-baked immigrants

Sorry, Asa. These are not immigrants but American citizens who have been through the public school system and come out the other end unable to comprehend the simplest reading material. She hasn't had one "immigrant" in the five years she's been doing this.

Probably students from older generations who had reading disabilities, but were, in those times, never identified or helped.

Wordmatic

I hold parents in part to blame for children's inability to read properly. How many parents take the trouble to read to their children and, as soon as they are old enough (no older than 2 years) to give them books of their own so that they can begin to appreciate the pleasure that a book can bring?

If a child's first exposure to reading is at school, the experience is likely to be seen as hard and boring "school stuff" - an experience far less satisfying than the exciting experience of TV, or latterly, computer games.

I was reading well before I started school and I loved my books. I recall one instance when I was at primary school - I was probably about 7 - and I was reading a book about aviation, during a free reading class. The rest of the class were reading mainly fiction - Enid Blyton and such material (incidentally, I have no probelm with her work, I enjoyed her books and consider them perfectly well-written for their audience). The class mistress saw what I was reading and castigated me for bringing in a book that I obviously wouldn't be able to undertand (I suspect it was above her head, in fact) and made me go to the front of the class and read aloud from it, which I did. She then put me down by telling me that I had mis-prounouced the world "miraculous" and told me to sit down and "stop showing off". Sixty years on I still resent that woman.

But I still love reading.

About 30 years ago I acted as a voluntary tutor at adult literacy classes for a while. Most of the students were older than I was (I was about 25) and the main reason for their lack of reading ability was the War. They had been evacuated as children and their education had been disrupted, often several times.

After a couple of years it was decided by the adult education college that volunteers were no longer wanted and that only full-time paid staff were allowed to help in these classes. We were able to give more or less one-on-one help before their edict; afterwards the teacher had to take the class of 10-15 students on his own.