Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic

["George F. Hayhoe III" <george -dot- hayhoe -at- SRS -dot- GOV>]

In response to the thread on the Department of Education Study:

More than 10 years ago, in an earlier incarnation, I taught writing
(remedial, expository, technical, and business) at a large, reasonably
prestigious state university, and was also involved in a state-wide effort
to train teachers to implement writing across the curriculum. My
observation, unscientific but compelling at least to me, was that the
students who read and wrote regularly tended to be better readers and
writers on average than those who exercised those skills little if at all.
Similarly, I would guess, students who exercise computational skills
regularly are probably better at math on average than those who don't.

Whenever students or parents of incoming freshmen asked me how they could
improve their literacy skills, I simply said "Practice an hour at least
three times a week. It doesn't matter much what you read or write as long
as the reading material is reasonably competently written and you take the
writing task reasonably seriously--that is, with the expectation of an
audience, even if no one actually reads it." I often recommended _Time_,
_Newsweek_, _The Wall Street Journal_, and _Sports Illustrated_, not
because they're necessarily great literature but because the content of at
least one of them ought to be sufficiently compelling to hold the student's
interest for three hours a week.

This may be unscientific, but it seems like common sense to me.

+ + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +

On a lighter note, I can't think of any funny business names, but an
environmental software project my department is currently working on is
called the Boring and Well Data System, or BAWDS for short. When I pointed
out that "bawd" is a synonym for "whore," I was told, "Oh, that's okay; no
one else here besides you will probably know what it means."