Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 19

Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 19 Let’s start with walking and talking. Walking and talking are intrinsically rewarding. No kid needs en- couragement to do either. They do have to be discouraged from crying when a word will serve them better. I want milk works better than wah. But they learn this quite naturally without very much parental help. They learn to walk when their parents hold their hands and cheer when they succeed, but they would have learned to walk anyway. The parents’ role as the teachers of their children can be seen very clearly when we consider walking and talking. Kids can learn to do either without much help, but they do these things quicker and better with parental help. Children who are spoken to by their parents, and listened to and corrected when they make an error, learn to speak well and more clearly as adults. While everyone learns to walk, parental care prevents falls when steps and other hazards present themselves. So, is the parent teaching the child? What does the parent actually know about how to teach walking and talking? Actually the parent knows quite a bit about teaching. We are wired to teach our children and help them. All higher level animals do this as well. It is not a par- ticularly conscious process, So, at what point are children better taught by professional teachers instead of their parents? This is an important and interesting question. A professional teacher is better than a parent if and only if the teacher knows more about what is being taught than the parent does. Teachers may take education courses and that may seem to qualify them to teach, but really those courses are not so much about the art of teaching per se. Teachers learn to teach by teaching, like anyone else learns how to do anything. But teachers learn to teach in the system they find themselves in. This means that typically they learn how to manage classrooms and deal with administrators and handle various issues that are very specific to school. Teaching outside of school usually does not entail managing mul- tiple children nor should it entail dealing with state standards and oth- er governmental interference (although that often happens anyway). So, knowledge is the real issue in teaching, not teaching skill. Or so it would seem. Actually this idea is clearly wrong if one thinks about university teaching. Professors become professors by writing a Ph.D. thesis, not by learning anything about teaching. They may have some teach- ing experience prior to becoming professors because they may have taught an introductory course or two as graduate students, but nobody HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_023765