By Drew Gulyas
Don’t tell my seven-year-old daughter, Charlotte, but I am thinking about giving up on her Grade 2 spelling homework.
No discredit to her teacher. Since September, I’ve seen my child’s reading ability make a steady climb from a place of total disengagement to near self-sufficiency, and I’m certain it has more to do with the quality of the instruction she has received at school than what she gets at home.
For my part, I have decided that I’m going to place my focus for my time with her elsewhere. More specifically, outside.
Sounds pious, right? Maybe. Although it might more accurately be categorized as an act of acceptance. A few years back, after my third daughter was born, a friend and fellow father of daughters told me that of all the things I was responsible for as a recently minted dad, the most important was my daughter’s view of her physical fitness. It was a counter-intuitive instruction for me. Based on gender, shouldn’t her mother be the primary role model in this area? No, he said. Her image of her physical health was up to me.
I don’t have the data to back that up. Anecdotally though, I’m starting to get the picture. When I try to do homework with her – it’s a grind. Disagreements. Do I have to’s. Grunting. When I ask her if she wants to go build snow forts, toboggan, ski or even do a few chores, it is typically a prompt affirmative and a quick trip out the door.
Maybe her brain is benefiting from the extra oxygen. Maybe the physical activity is bringing the dendrites and the synapses closer together. Maybe we are both just having more fun when we spend time together. I really don’t know if the time outside and the improved reading skills are even remotely related.
Here’s the thing: our modern society is ridiculously skewed towards academic achievement. But what if all that desk time really is depriving us of something? What if our predecessor animal selves got hard-wired for reading, counting and thinking because we were constantly immersed in a highly stimulating, ever-changing, full-of-spectacle place called “outside”? What if the reason we can reason is because we grew up in an environment where we had to learn how to make sense of things in the world of cause and effect?
All I know is that when we were out snowshoeing this weekend, my daughter correctly distinguished a rabbit track from a squirrel track – and if that’s not reading, I don’t know what is.
Drew Gulyas is the Camp Director at Camp Mansfield, drew@mansfieldoutdoorcentre.ca.
Pictured on home page (left to right): Ruby Gulyas, Maggie Armstrong, Drew Gulyas, Sam Armstrong and Charlotte Gulyas.