Back to basics

It's been a fascinating week in terms of the academic writing skills and learning more about the teaching of literacy in schools. As a lecturer in the STEPS program teaching Language and Learning I am often surprised at the basic literacy skills that our students present with. This is not to say that they are bad writers. Often, many of our students have a real flair for expressing themselves in the written form; however, this is hindered by their lack of understanding of the basics of sentence structure, punctuation, grammar etc. Something has been missed somewhere when it is a revelation for students when you explain the difference between "it's" and its. Or sometimes, you see the lightbulbs go off when we go through the difference between their, there and they're, or even very basic things like finding verbs in sentences. Not being in the discipline of education per se, I wonder at how this is taught in the current English curriculum in schools. Is it? Having a conversation with a primary music teacher yesterday, I was quizzing him about the place and priority that schools place on the all important Naplan testing. He was telling me that students in Year 3 are expected to be able to construct some sort of "argument" in their writing. I haven't seen the details of this but I was shocked. Surely, that's a higher level task that can wait until students are a little way past their 8th birthday. Is there a fashion for literacy tasks to be so complex that students can no longer see the trees for the forest? I'm not sure on the answer to any of these questions. What I do believe however, is that there is an absolute need for the foundations and basics of literacy to be in place before moving on to higher order tasks.

I had a similar experience yesterday while I was teaching a student the piano (which is something I do in my spare time). This student has been learning for many years from another teacher so I have only recently taken over her tuition. The first few lessons are a process of me finding out what she knows and doesn't know. We have been spending a fair amount of time in the first weeks fixing problems with rhythm and counting. Once I had explained a couple of different things, she was away and flying with new pieces, rhythm all present and correct. Last week, we began work on the first year theory of music book. This is where students learn note names, note values, ties, slurs, rests etc - in fact, all the basics. At the start of the lesson, the student said she had experienced some trouble with the homework. When we had a look at it, suddenly all her difficulties in playing correctly rhythmically were explained. No one had ever gone through the basic fundamentals of this with her. Or, if they had, they hadn't made sure that she clearly understood it before throwing something more complicated at her. I see a real resonance here with the challenges my own writing students face in class. We must all walk before we can run.It's a cliche but it's true nonetheless. Otherwise, will trip over our apostrophes or our syncopation and that's no good for anyone.