Writing NOT as Important as Reading???--I DON'T Think So!

I find it ironic that reading and writing are so intermingled, yet they are often still looked at as separate subjects in our American schools. It seems to me that one does not exist without the other. Monaghan & Saul's article, "The Reader, The Scribe, The Thinker: A Critical Look at the History of American Reading and Writing Instruction" discusses the way reading and writing have evolved over the course of our educational history. It is amazing how writing for girls was not as important as sewing in the early days (1640s) of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. I guess home is where the girls stayed and education was only for the males, unless you were of a high social status.

Defining writing is not an easy task. It seems that reading is much easier to define with its many various subcategories and therefore ". . . reading has been and continues to be clearly defined and therefore better able to define itself and its assumptions tot he pedagogical community at large" (Monaghon & Saul, 1987, p., 91).

When I read, " in most contemporary classrooms, composition is still deferred until reading instruction is well under way" (Monaghan & Saul, 1987, p. 87), it made me think of how very young children (even under age 2) will grab a crayon or whatever they can get their little fingers on to "write" something somewhere even walls (and believe me they can tell you exactly what they wrote about). They young children do not grab a book and start reading; although they make some really good attempts at it. (They will pick up a book and start babbling about its pictures and tell the story that way, but they really want to write.) So why do we wait to introduce writing?

Monaghan & Saul talk about reading as a receptive skill and writing is more of a productive skill. Although I agree that writing seems to be more productive on the surface, I think of reading as having the potential of engaging an active reader. To me, receptive skill sounds more like you are a passive reader. Even if you are listening to a story, there are plenty of opportunities to take an active part in the story.

I was somewhat offended by the information about how basal reader publishers are expanding the teachers' manuals in an effort to combat what they feel is a problem that teachers know less and less even though they have had more and more training. I can remember my own new whole language teaching manual having actual sentences that were to be recited by the teacher. Wow-what nerve!!

To end on a better note, I liked the idea of the school in Chicago that allowed children to create their own stories for instruction. I wonder how long this idea lasted. It seems like the students would really benefit from it, especially since it was so student oriented. I wonder what the negative sides to this would be, assuming there must have been some or it would used more frequently today.