Think and Do
School has started under Covid restrictions, a far cry from when I first started school in 1954. Back then there was no preschool or kindergarten. One just entered first grade cold turkey. Our class had 42 students under the tutelage of Miss Marie Quinlin, who happened to also have been my Dad’s first grade teacher. I’ve written about her in this previous blog-post.
She and most other elementary school teachers at the time used a series of books to teach reading called Think and Do. Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about the series:
"Dick and Jane are the two main characters created by Zerna Sharp for a series of basic readers written by William S. Gray to teach children to read. The characters first appeared in the Elson-Gray Readers in 1930 and continued in a subsequent series of books through the final version in 1965. These readers were used in classrooms in the United States and in other English-speaking countries for nearly four decades, reaching the height of their popularity in the 1950s, when 80 percent of first-grade students in the United States used them. Although the Dick and Jane series of primers continued to be sold until 1973 and remained in use in some classrooms throughout the 1970s, they were replaced with other reading texts by the 1980s and gradually disappeared from school curricula. The Dick and Jane series were known for their simple narrative text and watercolor illustrations. Despite the criticisms of the stereotypical content that depicted white, middle-class Americans and the look-say method of teaching reading on which these readers are based, the characters of "Dick," "Jane," and their younger sister, "Sally," became household words. The Dick and Jane primers have also become icons of mid-century American culture and collectors' items."
Each daily reading lesson focused on just 5 new words, with lots of repetition on each, as the words of the day were put in stories about Dick and Jane, younger sister Sally, pets Spot and Puff and Sally’s Teddy bear, Tim.
The average English speaking person’s vocabulary is 20,000 words, so if you do the math, learning 5 new words a day makes sense:
5 words per day x 250 school days per year x 16 school years = 20,000 words!
The basic premise of the reading series was to help you think, then do, in that order. The message was very subtle but it must have sunk in for me, as my engineering training took the concept to another level via a Plan, Do, Check, Act process to solve problems.
Over the years I most enjoyed the Do portion of the process, where ideas could be tested to see if they work. The jargon at the time was Build ‘em and Bust ‘em. Today, many problems are addressed by computer modeling to supplement or replace building a prototype then testing it. Plus now artificial intelligence capabilities have improved to the extent that the entire PDCA process can be done virtually, allowing many engineers (and others) to successfully work remotely. The pandemic really accentuated this approach.
Virtual education has also become prevalent during this pandemic; but the effectiveness is still uncertain. No doubt it will improve, but the short term impact cannot be positive. I have several nieces who are dedicated teachers. Here’s hoping they stay safe and inspire their students like Miss Quinlan did for me.
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