If you can read this, thank a teacher.
I've seen it on bumper stickers for years, and just today at the bottom of my Penzey's Spices receipt. Only now did I finally wake up to the outrageous insult implied by that platitude.
With all due respect to teachers, of which there are some who are great and many, many more who do their jobs very well, how is it that we presume that a child, who requires only a reasonably supportive environment to learn to eat, to crawl, to walk, to understand, to talk, to love, to manipulate his environment—in short to acquire the essential skills of a lifetime in just a few years—how is it that we presume he cannot learn to read—a minor skill compared with all he has already learned—unless someone teaches him?
That's crazy talk.
I'm grateful for all who are willing to share their knowledge with others, and especially for those who make the sharing enjoyable. I suspect that those who do best, however, are the ones who realize they are not teaching so much as facilitating a child's natural learning.
But that turns out to be much too big an issue to write about just because I was annoyed by a bumper sticker, when I'm surrounded by vacation detritus, my husband is hungry, and I haven't yet managed that shower I promised myself after walking four miles in the 95 degree heat....
