I finished reading Disrupting Class. I actually found it interesting to read. Of course I was interested in Chapter 6: The Impact of the Earliest Years on Students' Success. As most of you know, I am a strong proponent for funding quality preschool programs. It was interesting to read Christensen's take on this topic. He suggests teaching children how to be parents before they become parents. I definitely can't argue with that. I've always stated that people should have to be licensed before they can become parents.
The chapter ended abruptly though. I wish he would have delved deeper into the dynamics of how this program would be implemented. I was left to wonder how technology was going to assist in the development of this course.
Christensen also discussed the importance of "language dancing" (face to face interactions between parent and child) and how it is an integral component to reading success. This is a prime example of why we need to get parents off of the computers, so they can spend some quality time interacting with their children. My greatest fear in all of this social networking (facebook, myspace...) is that we are going to spend so much time writing about our lives and less time living it with the people that mean the most to us, our families!
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Thanks for your post. I think you raise some very good points. We clearly still need to develop out what are the implications of this research much, much more -- and then follow those, be they a technology solution or something else entirely. Waterford Institute has put an interesting product/service in Utah at the moment around this.
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