Hey, advanced reading did a lot for my personal enrichment and enjoyment and precisely dick at teaching me how to work hard, how to treat my classmates, how to multiply and divide (I’m told I was also doing math at a fifth or seventh grade level, which seems ridiculous to me: I know I couldn’t multiply or divide and I didn’t know fractions, though I did understand that four twos made eight and there were eight twos in sixteen), how to study, how to write an interesting and well structured essay, or how to do a close or critical reading. I’m really not trying to say I’m some kind of super genius – or, if I am, that it’s done me a damn bit of good.
It’s actually held me back in a lot of ways. I never had to work hard for anything in my schooling until I got to college. It took me a long time to learn how to study and how to write well, and as a result I dicked around a lot and escaped with a crappy GPA. I’m cursing myself even as we speak because if I’d stayed in for one more semester or one more year I could have pulled my grades up enough to have a decent enough average to get into grad school today. Instead, now I have to find some way to scrape together a quick three grand so I can take two more upper-division undergrad classes to pull my average up to a B.
Let me tell you, being able to read Laura Ingalls Wilder at six does not help much right now.
Would you point to this please? because I’m at a loss. . .
Although I will admit to being heartily sick and tired of being called everything from liar to delusional whenever I try to talk about my child, I did think I was doing a good job of being civil about it.
For a thread like this I did a study on the proportion of Jeopardy contestants on the Dope. Being on Jeopardy is not equivalent to high intelligence, but I think most people would agree there is a correlation. A Doper is between 100 and 1,000 times as likely to be on Jeopardy than an average person. I don’t think the distribution of intelligence around here is anywhere close to that of the public at large.
This is absolutely true. When I was in fifth grade we moved to Africa, and I had a lot of free time before we started school. I read the entire “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” - learned about footnoting and references from it. I read and pretty much understood every word, and I thought I got everything, but looking back there is no way I put what I read in the context of both European history and the detailed history of WW II.
In a less impressive context, I’m rewatching some TV Westerns from my youth (late '50s, early '60s) and there are tons of buried sexual references I totally missed when I was 8 and 9.When you understand it is hard to remember back to when you didn’t.
I’m not the poster in question, but I do think it might have had something to do with:
Thanks! I do like to have a sense of humor about it. My kids are super-awesome, but I don’t necessarily believe that anyone else (besides their other family members and their teachers) really care about that right now. In fact, others may never care and are under no obligation to do so.
I can see, though, how some memories can get stretched and distorted with time. A good example is my own mother’s claim that I read at age 3-1/2. I have no reason to doubt her, but suppose I didn’t actually read until I was 3 years and 10 months. So, for a while, we say that I learned to read at 3 years and 10 months. But that gets clunky. And 3-3/4 years just sounds odd. So, OK, we’ll just say I was 3-1/2 when I learned to read. Well, that’s 3, right? I mean, I was 3 and not 4. So, go and ask my mother and she can truthfully say, “**Lorene **was reading at 3.”
The difference between 3 years and 3-1/2 years is pretty immense. The difference between reading at an 8th-grade level and reading at a college level is immense. The difference between being able to read something and being able to do critical reading and thinking about something is immense. Get loose with all of those variables and suddenly you have a 3-year-old who is reading at a college level and able to write essays on what she has read, rather than someone who is almost 4 and can decode a lot of words one might find in an 8th-grade-level text and even derive some basic plot information, but might not be able to add much more to a truly analytical discussion.
I was a prodigy in the visual arts. By all measures I was able to render at level surpassing the average adult by the age of seven. For those that will nitpick and snark, this means that I was demonstrating an understanding of perspective, anatomy, and depth of field; something that most adults don’t master before giving up on doodling in favor of some other pursuit. By fourteen I was working at a semi professional level. From college on I improved those skills and have begun to hit my stride in the late twenties/early thirties. I still haven’t been able to find good employment in the field though due mostly to lack of connections and the economy. I’m married, and we get by fine financially and are happy, though we aren’t rich at all. I sometimes think that I would have done better to pursue some other interest of mine like herpetology or zoology, but overall I find that need an outlet for creative thought.
This isn’t my area and I don’t have any cite for this, but someone I know who is a psychologist specializing in child development once mentioned to me that the way performance on (some?) tests of reading ability is described is misleading. She said that when a child is described as reading “at a 6th grade level” then this doesn’t necessarily mean they read and understood a passage that was written for the average 6th grader. It could mean they read and understood a lower-level sample passage as well as the average 6th grader would.
If we imagine a 4 year old who tests as being able to read and understand something at about the same level of difficulty as The Cat in the Hat as well as the average 6th grader (age 11 or 12) then this child has demonstrated much better reading skills than most kids their age. However, such a test would not be evidence that the 4 year old actually has the same reading ability as the average 6th grader.
Like I said, this isn’t my area, and I couldn’t swear that I’m correctly remembering what I was told. But I wanted to bring up the possibility that reading score test results might not mean what people think they mean.
I could read by three. Wait, before you lay in let me very, very carefully qualify.
I caught a huge amount of flak here once for offhandedly dropping that I could “read on a college level” by three, which I then had to redfacedly admit wasn’t the case. What I’d meant was that I could read out loud pretty much anything that was shown to me in a newspaper by that age, not so much due to any sort of genius on my part but rather the cumulative effect of around 1000+ hours of obsessively watching Sesame Street and the Electric Company. Basically I’d figured out the fundamentals of phonetics, which is a pretty neat trick for a little kid but not actually reading at a college level if I didn’t understand what I was reading.
Some time back, “speed reading” was very popular, with classes (for profit) being offered all over the place. One of their claims was that when students were given reading comprehension tests based on passages they sped read, they did very well.
This sounded very convincing until someone thought to give people who didn’t even read the passages the same tests - and discovered that they did just about as well as the speed readers. It turned out that the questions themselves had enough clues and content to allow a clever person to guess the answer.
I haven’t seen ads for speed reading for quite some time.
This was my understanding. We seem to have at least three separate measures of what the phrase “reads at an X level” means:
the psychological testing description (from you), “reads a X-Y level passage as well as an X”
the pedagogical description (from LHoD), “can pass a X-level literature course with reasonable marks”
the colloquial description (used by others in the thread, and I’ve used it in the past), “can read most/all of the words and understand the basics of books written for people at or around the X level.”
By these standards, when I was in third grade (I don’t claim to remember accurately any further back), I was respectively reading at a 10th±grade, 6th-grade, and college level–I would read military history books for fun, and knew most of the words relatively quickly, but I didn’t have the slightest idea of what all that stuff MEANT in real terms–I was picturing G.I.Joe vs. Cobra, not my grandfather and a lot of guys who didn’t make it vs. the Nazi party.
But prior to this thread, I may well have claimed I was reading at a college level in my elementary school years, since I was reading college-level history texts. Ignorance fought.
Perversely, I’ll occasionally check out an older history book from the library and remember having read it. Exactly once a few years back, I got one from inter-library loan from my hometown and it was so uncommonly checked out that my mom’s library card number was still stamped on the little card (my hometown library expanded into a much bigger building and then found they didn’t have the budget to fill it, so a LOT of less-popular books stayed on the shelves for ages. Still kinda funny to know they kept a book that was checked out fewer than 40-50 times in over a decade).
My case exactly. I had very good diction (better even than most grownups around me, and a lot of them were teachers! I had figured out how to read almost every word in the Spanish language. It helps, of course, that Spanish is extremely consistent in its spelling, and there are rules for everything. Once you figure out the rules you can read aloud practically any word.
My best example of the difference in reading comprehension between ages is my favorite book: The Little Prince. I have read it in 3 languages, and my English-French edition is on my daughter’s bedside table right now.
The first times I read it it made a wonderful story, the ending was a little sad, but also happy, because the little prince finally got to go home to tend to his flower. That’s what I got from the text at 5, when I was in second grade. None of my classmates could read The Little Prince, not because their comprehension level was worse than mine, but because they hadn’t gotten the mechanics of word-decoding yet. If somebody had read the book to them they’d get the same version of the story I did.
When I was in mid-school, and years after I first read it, I was assigned The Little Prince in a lit class. Instead of just writing from memories I decided to re-read it. That’s when I figured that the little Prince hadn’t just gone home, he died!
The whole book entirely different from the first word to the last. Subsequent reads over the years revealed more and more layers that I kept missing before. And that’s why I am determined not to let people get any ideas with my daughter, I am not pleased when I have been told by people she must be “a genius”. That way lie madness (and bad college grades).
My son, LOUNE read when he was 3 to 3 1/2. He would order off a menu . It is no big deal, because he was bored to hell in the 1st grade when they were teaching reading.
Chiasmus, from the Greek for X, because the Greeks didn’t understand plain English. If you say “O, Chiasmus…” it would be an apostrophe, but since there’s no reason to bring that up, it would be supercilious, from the Latin for “eyebrow”. Also, if you rearrange the letters in “I, Jesus” you get “Je suis” in French, for reasons theology has yet to come to terms with.