3571. Reading on Paper Books Can Help Our Students

Lately and for my job as a teacher I’m reading a book by Spanish teacher, philosopher and pedagogue Gregorio Luri (born in 1955). 

Before I continue writing, I would like also to say that young kids – complementing what I said on my previous post – can have some abstract ideas; for example they can think of love and other values and virtues. 

Said that, I keep on writing about this post #3571. I’m learning a lot of things about teaching and learning from that educator. 

Thus I’ve learned that we teachers would have to be watchful: we could be insisting too much on our kids should gain skills, yet they have also to learn contents: from their teachers and from their books. 

By the way, they may learn from tablets and other technologic devices but paper books may help facilitate focusing on what they’re reading: paper books facilitate attention, above all if they have long texts, more than one page. 

So skills are okay but students have to learn contents, both from their teachers and from their books. And their teachers have to give knowledge and contents to those students. 

The countries of the world which have better education accentuate reading skills, math, mother language and foreign languages. 

Thus our kids can learn a lot when surrounded by a nice, vast and appropriate library and when they focus and concentrate on studying from their coursebooks. 

And the teacher? He or she, if they struggle to better as professionals and as persons, may mean some nice moral and intellectual authority and reference ahead their students in the classroom or in front of a PC screen, if there’s remote teaching, like now with the pandemics. Teachers fulfill some subsidiary function to parents. 

Some days ago I learned about the appointed best secondary education teacher in Spain. Well, he says he was not good at studying when a kid, but in the school where he studied – the same as I taught 1993 through 2002 in a southern town in Spain, Jaén, and whose name is Altocastillo School! –, however, he encountered a teacher who managed to boost his learning through patient tutoring, conversations and such. 

Actually his teacher was a colleague of mine as well, namely Mr. Antonio José Alcalá Vique. 

If a low-achiever student is received by a patient teacher, he or she can change a lot. Nothing else for this post. Have a nice week.