All Sumerian teachers taught their students to read with lists of words on the small clay tables. It took a long time (many years) of studying in their "e-dubba" or "tablet house" schools. (E-dubba is referring to the Sumerian instruction: teachers write the cuneiform symbols on one side of a clay tablet and the students would copy the symbols on the reverse sde.)
"A major contribution of early Sumerian Writing is the way that teaching methods promoted conceptual development". (p. 38) The author broke things down into recent terms and defined the above as the teachers gave students very clear instruction on how to learn something and how to remember it.
How do people become literate?
It is amazing to me what the world has gone through to become literate. We are talking 8000 and 4000 BCE that is a long time ago. The writing systems that people came came up with to communicate, pictographs, hieroglyphic and few more. Simply amazing that people learned to read then and how we have evolved from drawing lines to the point America is today.
I am quite amazed to read how LONG people have been literate and far we have come really. It is really amazing to think that we have a history like that, where people were drawing pictures and hieroglyphics on cave walls. We have really come so far and we are only going to continue to move forward.
ReplyDeleteI also liked how you mentioned that Sumerian teachers taught their students by modeling for them. The teacher would write a symbol on ther clay tablet and the students would copy the symbol. Interesting to see that even back in those days, teachers were using the strategy of modeling to teach students.
I am enjoying your blog. You are really summarizing this book so well. I am always amazed at the capacities of the human brain! Oral history and the huge amount that was remembered, and then for someone to conceive of the whole idea of writing.
ReplyDeleteI think it is great that we can use history and other cultures as examples for teaching our students today. I also like that modeling has always been a beneficial teaching strategy, and I am sad that there are current teachers that do not use it.
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