The other night as I’m sitting watching Kudlow preach from his CNBC pulpit about free market capitalism as the best path to prosperity, I noticed the boy sitting in the chair next to me reading his favorite Star Wars book.   I was so engrossed in the latest financial reason to throw my shoes at the television that I didn’t even notice him reading aloud.  This got me to thinking about the benefits of children reading.

1. It doesn’t involve a cathode ray nipple. (For those of you born after 1990, that means television.)  I mean seriously, does that fact that the kid would rather sit and read books than watch television or play video games need any further explanation?  DUH!  It’s also a way for me to get the boy out of my hair for a while without feeling guilty that I’ve plopped him in front of the electronic babysitter.
2. His language, vocabulary, and ability to understand things has exploded.  I travel occasionally for my job, and last week when putting the boy to bed I noticed he had tucked between the bed frame and the mattress a thick book I hadn’t seen before.  It was Robinson Crusoe.  I asked him, “What’s this?”  The boy’s response wasn’t the excitement over reading a chapter book I had expected. Instead, it was, “Oh Dad, this story is so cool. He built his own boat!”  He then, in great detail, explained to me the adventure of the first four chapters, and how exactly this boat was built.
3. Imagination.  My Dad, who loves math, still at age 69 is constantly searching for new mathematical concepts to challenge his brain, recently discovered fractals.  Fractals are realitively new concept of the past 10-20 years and only with the advent of the computer could they truly been explored.   That’s because a fractal is a pattern that multiplies itself to infinity.  The boy’s imagination right now is like a fractal, just multiplying on itself every time he reads something new.
4. He truly loves it.   When I was a kid, which was in the 70’s, color television was new, at least for my family, and there hadn’t been any research to warn my mother she might turn me into a spastic, jittery freak.  I can remember getting up in the morning, turning on the television, and never turning it off until it was time to go to school, or in the summer, eat lunch.  Our parents didn’t really think anything of it.  (Thus, I have the attention span of a 3 year old at age 37.)  The boy will choose to read a new book over doing a lot of other things when given the opportunity.  Currently, the only thing that he would rather do that than read a book is watch a new episode of Clone Wars.  Although, the tempation of actually reading a Clone Wars or Star Wars book, might even top that. 
5. It makes his Dad proud.  The boy is smart, but he’s human.  He gets good grades, but he struggles a lot with effort.  If there is an easy way or a shortcut to do something, he will find it.   The boy has worked hard to be able to read.  He has given maximum effort, and that makes me proud.

Let me start off with a little background about my wife and the boy. First, I think it has been mentioned in previous posts our son is in kindergarten. Second, the wife is an English major, and language is extremely important to her (not that any of that has rubbed off on me), but as a result the boy is a very good reader already. His school has him testing out at 2nd grade reading level already. She has made it a point to teach both our kids phonics, as the US school system seems to think it’s better we memorize every word in the dictionary, and know it on sight. Yeah, that makes sense! Not to digress, as a result of reading phonetically, the boy sometimes spells words as they should sound, but not necessarily with the correct letters.

So he comes home from school Wednesday, where he’s been dealing with a lengthy visit by a substitute teacher he dislikes, with one of his usual spelling exercises. As any teacher does, the substitute politely crosses out the, “zukeenee”, and corrects it with, “zuccini”. That’s right, I didn’t quote it wrong, the substitute corrected the misspelled word with another misspelled word. We’ve also learned from little things the boy has said that she seems to be a “sit down, and shut-up” substitute teacher. That “style” may work for middle school and high school, but it’s a little much for the hyper-energetic kindergarten crowd. Needless to say, after 3 days of him crying about going to school, and then the “zucchini” incident, the wife made the decision that perhaps he would be better served by a couple of days of homeschooling.