Chapter 13 4.repair a flower pen

There is a story about the idiom "Miaobi Shenghua". It is said that a scholar dreamed that a lotus flower bloomed on the end of his writing brush. Idioms reflect a long-standing wish of people, and it is also a difficult problem that many people seek to solve: how to write good articles.Especially for many elementary and middle school students nowadays, writing essays is their biggest headache.If there is any way to solve this problem, it must be the "dream" of children. I personally have been engaged in Chinese teaching for more than ten years and writing work for many years, and I also like writing.My daughter Yuanyuan's essays have always been well written. As far as I can remember, she has never had a wrong sentence in her essays since she was in elementary school, and there are very few typos, and her grades are always very good.Especially after entering high school, her compositions were often used as model essays by teachers and recommended to classmates. In the 2007 college entrance examination, Yuanyuan scored 140 points in Chinese.According to media reports, among the nearly 120,000 candidates for arts and sciences in Beijing that year, only 12 had a score of 140 or more in Chinese.Her composition must have also received a high score - there may be an element of luck in it, but it also shows that her writing level is indeed good.

For these reasons, I am often asked how to develop children's writing skills.But when I summed up my experience over the years, I came up with only two words: reading. I don't like to teach so-called "writing skills" to children who have little reading experience.I have watched some teachers' "composition classes", and I always feel that such classes are just performances for teachers' self-entertainment, and have no effect on students' writing.People have made the matter of writing skills too complicated and summed up so many methods. Some teachers who can't write at all can talk about "writing skills" well-this can also prove that these "writing skills" "It's useless for students.

"Beauty" and "simple" are often synonymous.The same goes for learning to write, the best techniques are the easiest.Reading is the most fundamental, important, and effective "big skill" for writing; while the various skills mentioned in reading are aside, they can be called "small skills" at most.With great skills, small skills come uninvited; without great skills, there is no condition for the realization of all small skills. I have always attached great importance to Yuanyuan's reading.I started telling her stories every day since she was about one year old. Maybe she couldn't understand at first, but she liked to listen. Her bright eyes were fascinated by my mouth or the book, and she didn't cry or make trouble.When she was a little older and could understand, she kept asking me to tell her stories, listening to each story over and over again.No matter how many times she asked to speak, I almost never said no.

Every infant likes listening to stories and reading books.If some children show that they don't like reading or listening to stories, it must be because their parents didn't let them get in touch with reading in time, and missed the best opportunity. The children's interest in reading is replaced by other things (mainly watching TV at the moment) Yes - many parents take this matter lightly as if a child accidentally spilled a bowl of rice. In fact, this is a very big loss. "Don't let the children lose at the starting line" is the current buzzword in family education. Every parent thinks this way, and every parent will say this, but why do children fall behind when they are running? Why are disappointed parents always the majority? ?Just because many concepts of winning and losing in children's education are mistaken.Doing things according to the wrong concept will of course spoil things.

In early childhood education, parents are more willing to see those immediate results.People are keen to send their children to preschool to learn pinyin and foreign languages ​​in advance, eagerly expect their children to get good grades in every exam, and enthusiastically enroll their children in many extracurricular classes to cultivate various talents. They think this is the starting line One step ahead. Whether or not to do early reading, there is no difference for the time being.From preschool to elementary school graduation, and even junior high school, students who read less outside of class often show superior performance if they only study for various exams.This has brought illusions to many parents, thinking that extracurricular reading is not necessary, and even thinks that it will affect learning, so it generally does not attract the attention of parents.

In fact, not paying attention to children's reading is one of the worst behaviors in early education, and the difference in reading at a young age is the important "win or lose" difference.Children who seldom get the influence of reading, even if they were smart and had excellent grades when they were young, but because they have only reserved a small amount of intellectual energy, they often show that their overall quality is becoming more and more mediocre from the beginning of middle school, and their learning is getting worse. A growing trend.Difficulties and confusion in this regard may accompany them throughout their lives.As for those children who read a lot, they generally not only show intelligence since childhood, but also have a strong explosive power in learning.As far as the development of a person's life is concerned, they have laid a good foundation and interest in reading since they were young, and they are the ones who really win at the starting line.

Specifically, the cultivation of writing ability is directly related to reading.Without reading, there can be no writing. Reading should not only start early, but read enough. At present, the state stipulates that the total number of extracurricular readings for primary school students shall not be less than 1.45 million characters, that of junior high school students shall not be less than 2.6 million, and that of high school students shall not be less than 1.5 million.That is to say, by the time they graduate from high school, a child’s normal reading volume should be between 5 and 6 million words—I feel this is a very conservative standard based on the actual situation in our country—even so, it is far higher than The actual reading volume of the vast majority of students today.

According to some survey data, the reading volume of primary and middle school students in our country is very low at present, and it is roughly estimated that the average reading volume should be below 20% of the national standard. Why is it so low?Some articles analyzed that this is because the college entrance examination caused too much homework pressure and "insufficient reading motivation".The college entrance examination has now become a scapegoat, and everything is hit here.I think the root cause is the interest of the child.Why didn't the college entrance examination make those children who are addicted to games feel the pressure of homework, so they are "lack of motivation" to play games?

Middle school students don't like to read. This is a problem that formed when they were primary school students. Primary school students don't like to read because their parents and schools didn't try to mobilize their interest in reading before and after school. If parents can cultivate their children's interest in reading early and make reading a very natural part of their lives like eating, it will be very natural for them to read millions of words by the time they graduate from high school.For a child who likes to read, there is no "pressure" for him to read. What he experiences from it is the simplicity and enjoyment of eating or playing games. If you don't want him to read, he will be reluctant.

Yuanyuan started reading novels in the second grade of elementary school, and has been reading them continuously since then.During the winter vacation, which was only three or four months away from the college entrance examination, she still read about 400,000 words of literary works during the busy study break. This was not an increase of burden for her, but a kind of relaxation and supplement. Roughly counting Yuanyuan's reading volume, by the time she graduates from high school, she should have 15 to 20 million words.This is not much for children who love to read, and many children who love to read can even read several times this amount.

The most important thing in learning a language is to establish a sense of language.Why there are no wrong sentences in Yuanyuan's composition, because she has seen fluent sentences thousands of times, established a good sense of language, and accumulated a rich vocabulary.The sense of language is good, the vocabulary is rich, and the sentences written are naturally flawless. A lot of reading gives children not only the ability to express correctly, but also creative talent.Yuanyuan's compositions often show amazing talent, and I even feel astonished.I accidentally saw the novel she secretly wrote when she was a freshman in high school. I was surprised by the smoothness and sophistication of the writing.Because I have been looking at what she wrote in the composition, after all, it can only be called an exercise, not a creation.I thought at the time that it was possible for her to eat writing in the future.It's not that Yuanyuan has any special talent. Other children who can read as much as her can also write well. Chinese education in our country has always been done very awkwardly for a long time. Teaching never dares to jump out of the framework of Chinese documents. Both teachers and students spend a lot of time and energy on "dismembering" texts and sentences.Old-fashioned teaching methods such as sloppy paragraphs and central ideas are still the mainstream of teaching methods in primary and secondary schools, despite repeated criticism.Every thin language book will take up the children's time for a whole semester for no reason, which is really a huge waste.Chinese teachers don't pay attention to students' reading, and make the most interesting class into the most boring class. I have heard children say more than once that he hates Chinese class, and he hates writing essays even more. Our ancestors, those literati in the Han, Tang, Song, Ming and Qing Dynasties, whose brilliant names and works formed the cultural splendor in the history of mankind, but who of them spent many years analyzing the paragraphs and main ideas of other people’s articles? Grammar, learning to write after correcting bad sentences?After the tradition is abandoned, what kind of thing do we enshrine and want it to rule the language learning of generations of children? ! Decades of facts have actually proved that ignoring extracurricular reading and trying to guide primary and middle school students with immature sense of language to write sentences with correct structure by learning grammar, and write beautiful sentences by analyzing other people's words, this is taking a long way and scratching the surface .What is certain is that under the premise of lack of extracurricular reading, Chinese books cannot teach students' Chinese level, and composition classes cannot teach students to write essays. Once a mathematical theorem is understood, it becomes your own knowledge and can be applied immediately to achieve immediate results.Writing is an open and ever-changing activity, and it takes a long way to transform external knowledge into one's own ability.Any writing "skill" is not difficult to understand, it is easy, but absorption is difficult, and application is even more difficult.Although the composition classes in primary and secondary schools are taught in various ways, many teachers really put their minds on the lectures, and there is no problem in the class itself. It can even be said that some classes are taught very well, and teachers are also good at revising students' compositions. A lot of hard work.But if there is no a lot of reading for the students, these activities will just sprinkle the rice seeds into the desert, which is meaningless. For those whose writing skills are relatively immature, especially for lower grade students, learning to write must first return to reading.A good work itself contains superb writing skills, and the process of reading is the process of learning writing skills.If you read a lot of books, your writing skills will naturally develop—the ancients summed it up a long time ago, "If you read more than ten thousand volumes, you can write like a master". Improving writing ability through reading seems to be a long process on the surface, but in fact it is the most economical, effective, and worry-free method, and it is a real "shortcut". But the simplest things are often the hardest to do, and the mentality of eager for quick success makes many people lose their judgment.Many parents have not paid much attention to their children's reading, but they want their children to learn to write in a short time-the market demand is formed in this way. Newspapers and magazines now often see advertisements that can make children's composition fast, such as "four-dimensional grid learning method", "explosive composition method", "one-week comprehensive method" and so on.I have seen a few so-called "capable people" who let children learn to write essays on the spot. They use some on-the-spot mobilization skills to guide students to build some thinking frameworks, and use the usual compulsory means in conventional teaching to push students to write words and sentences. The effect is really good, the students really wrote a composition on the spot.But then, without the teacher to put up an airs, without the teacher's forced guidance, the students themselves were at a loss, with neither words nor sentences. After the training class, the students' level was still stagnant. Writing, like being a human being, is a long-term process of cultivation.It is absolutely impossible to teach children to write essays by using some tricky skills and using a few days of effort. A few days ago, a staff member of "Learn to Write Composition in Three Days" called me. I don't know where they learned about my situation.They knew that my daughter Yuanyuan had good grades in the Chinese college entrance examination, and that I myself had been a Chinese teacher for many years and could write, so they wanted me to speak out.I said I'm sorry, my daughter couldn't learn to write in three days, she spent more than ten years learning.I have taught for more than ten years, but I have not practiced the ability to teach children to write in three days. What I especially want to say here is that writing is never just a matter of words, it is more of a matter of thinking and understanding.Wherever words go is where one's thinking goes.The significance of reading is not only to enable children to have good language and writing skills, but also to enrich children's spiritual world and improve their cognitive level. A child who has experienced all kinds of social life in ancient and modern China and foreign countries through reading, has experienced a long history of development, listened to many wisdom words, and shared countless thinking results. He is not only more mature in thinking, but also more perfect in values—this is It is the foundation of being a human being and the condition of writing. Those who have pale hearts, empty thoughts, and no mature values, even if they have a stomach full of wonderful words, they are still unable to produce works with soul.Many teachers and parents are criticizing their children's composition as "not profound", but the "profound" in the article is the scale of a person's level of thought and understanding. If the child never or rarely shares the previous social life experience, others Given his young age, how can he be "profound"? Every book can let children experience something and learn something from it.Great educators such as Dewey and Tao Xingzhi all emphasized learning from life.Everyone's life is limited, and it is impossible to participate in everything personally. Reading essentially constitutes children's participation in life and the richness of their experiences. All those classic works that have been famous for generations at home and abroad, no matter what their content is, must contain things of truth, goodness and beauty.These truths, goodness and beauty affect a person's values ​​and way of thinking, and of course also affect a person's writing.The kind of person you are will say what kind of words, what kind of ideology you have, and what kind of words you will write. A person who does not read is ignorant, a family that does not read is boring, and a nation that does not read is shallow.The government advocates quality education, but now when it comes to quality education, people always think of "little skills" such as piano, chess, calligraphy and painting. The most vulgar ones are playing golf to cultivate "gentlemanly demeanor" and dancing campus group dances to cultivate "artistic temperament" . Why has no one thought of promoting and popularizing reading? It may be that reading is not easy to build momentum, and it is not easy to form visible "results" quickly.The Ministry of Education stipulates 30 Chinese and foreign masterpieces that middle school students must read in the form of Chinese curriculum standards. Which school takes this seriously?How many parents know about this? No matter from the survey data or from our common sense, more than 90% of the current primary and secondary school libraries exist in name only.This means that it is almost impossible for children to borrow the books they want to read from school. The child is the only one for us, and his growth cannot wait, so the current defect must be made up by the family as soon as possible.Parents, instead of taking their children to eat McDonald's when they are happy, it is better to take him to a bookstore; instead of using mobile phones and walkmans to equip their children, it is better to put a few good books on his desk.Especially those parents who are worried that their children can't write essays, and want to spend a lot of money to enroll their children in crash courses, use the money to buy books for their children!Please take some thought to guide your child to discover the joy of reading, and let him regard reading as something as interesting as watching TV and playing games! A child's reading is the best practice process, nourishing his potential silently, and one day you will be pleasantly surprised to find that the pen in the child's hand has sprouted at some point and blossomed into a fragrant flower. ●The difference in reading since childhood is the important difference between "winning and losing". Children who have never been educated in reading are really one step behind from the starting point. ●Middle school students don't like reading, this is a problem formed when they were primary school students; primary school students don't like reading because their parents and schools didn't try to mobilize their interest in reading before and after school.If parents can cultivate their children's interest in reading early and make reading a very natural part of their lives like eating, it will be very natural for them to read millions of words by the time they graduate from high school. ●For people whose writing skills are relatively immature, especially for low-grade students, learning to write must first return to reading.A good work itself contains superb writing skills, and the process of reading is the process of learning writing skills. ●Improve writing ability through reading, which seems to be a long process on the surface, but in fact it is the most economical, effective and worry-free method, and it is a real "shortcut".Writing, like being a human being, is a long-term process of cultivation.It is absolutely impossible to teach children to write essays by using some tricky skills and using a few days of effort. ●Everyone's life is limited, and it is impossible to participate in everything personally. Reading essentially constitutes children's participation in life and the richness of their experiences.