What does a "Q" look like?
An eighth grader asked a teacher friend of mine that this week. I haven’t stopped thinking about it.
This is the deep end, and it's the one day of my newsletter regimen that is purely philosophical and not design related. Enjoy.
A friend of mine teaches eighth grade history. Last week they didn’t teach any history.
They spent it on second-grade level sentence structure, because their students have to write an essay and most of them cannot build a proper sentence without the help of Gemini.
Somewhere in that week, a student asked what the letter Q looks like.
This wasn't an English language learner or someone with an IEP (Individualized Education Program).
This was an average eighth grader.
I have a two year old. She can tell you which letter is a Q, guaranteed. And based on the amount of times I hear the ABCs sung per day, I'd wager she'd have no problem with the other letters too.
I’ve been chewing on that disparity all week, and I don’t think it’s a mystery. I think it’s a recipe, and I think most of it happens at home.
What I think is actually causing it
Nobody reads to them. I’d love to be wrong about this and I don’t think I am. Not most nights, not at bedtime, not at all. According to a survey by Harper Collins and The Bump, only about 41% of kids under the age of 5 are being read to on a daily basis.
That's worse than a feeling percentage.
A kid who has had one thousand pages held in front of their face has seen a Q ten thousand times without anyone teaching them anything.
The screen is a sedative and it works.
I had a bet with one of my neighbors that my kid would not hold an iPad or iPhone before the age of two. I won the bet.
Understandably, the pressure to use a device is real.
A kid gets loud in a restaurant, bored in a waiting room, meltdowns at four in the afternoon, and all of that can go away with the handy device in your pocket.
I can't imagine anything more short-sighted than caving to the whims of a toddler to get yourself momentary peace.
They are forbidden from pain (even just a little bit). This one is the big one.
Somewhere along the line we decided that correcting a child or letting them sift through discomfort on their own is the same thing as wounding them, so the right answer or the salve gets supplied instantly. Fast, kind, and free.
Intellectually, the kid is spared thirty seconds of problem solving.
Physically, they are shown that they cannot endure anything difficult.
Here’s why that last one matters more than it looks.
Go for a run, and what you’re actually doing out there is damaging yourself. Microscopic tears through the muscle, microscopic fractures through the bone. That isn’t a side effect of the run, it’s the transaction.
The damage signals the body to rebuild the tissue thicker and stronger than it was.
Take the load off and nothing gets built. Not less. Nothing, because nothing asked for it.
Jonathan Haidt made this point in his book The Coddling of the American Mind and applied it to the psychological and mental impact of sheltering the mind from stress and growth opportunity. When you're given consistent stimulation and not allowed to endure critical thinking, the neural pathways simply don't develop because there is no signal for growth.
What we've decided to do
We read my kid every night. Non-negotiable... ok maybe if she fell asleep in the car on the way home from Lolli and Pop-Pop's and I'm itching for a chance to carry her from the car to her bed while she sleeps on my shoulder (I'm only human).
She has never once been handed a phone or an iPad to keep her calm. Not in a restaurant, not in a waiting room, not on a bad afternoon. We go on walks. We eat dinner at our table every night and there is nothing at that table except food and family.
And we correct her. When she gets a letter wrong we don’t let it slide and we don’t supply it. We tell her no, that’s not it, try again, and we keep going until she gets it.
She’s two.
I know how that reads. But the letter isn’t what she’s learning. She’s learning that being wrong for thirty seconds is survivable, that nobody is coming to rescue her out of it, and that the thing which fixes it is her. There’s no way to teach that in a sentence. You just do it over and over until it’s furniture.
Because what I actually want her to have isn’t a head full of letters.
I want her to be strong and capable.
I want her body to be able to fight off an illness.
I want her to fall down and know she can get up.
I want her to look at something, think hard about whether it’s actually correct, and then go figure it out herself instead of being handed the answer with no struggle.
All three get built the same way, by meeting the thing that could hurt her in a dose she can handle, over and over, while I'm standing right there coaching.
If I can get those built before she’s handed the tools that make everything easier, I think she’s going to be fine. Better than fine. I think she’ll pick those tools up and use them the way I use them, which is the only reason I’m doing any of this.
More importantly... she'll know what a Q looks like.
— Zach
