Apprenticeship and Exploration: A New Approach to Literacy Instruction (Scholastic Literacy Research Paper, Volume 6)

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David Rose

I can still remember the rich mixture of excitement and terror as I perched on the wobbly seat of my big sister's red and white Schwinn bicycle, pointing down the lawn toward the driveway. My father firmly held me and the bike upright as he began to push gently forward. We were moving, gaining momentum, my legs still limp on the pedals. As he had carefully warned, he ran alongside, gradually letting go of the handlebar, then of the seat itself -- and I was solo, a bike rider at last!

Or sort of. Ten yards later, out of momentum and still not pedaling, I fell.

Nonetheless, I was soon a bike rider, and an expert at that. About a year later, at age seven or eight, I discovered the family record player. I don't remember being particularly interested in any of the music on our records, but I loved playing everything at the wrong speed.

Soon I discovered that I could drag my thumb on the side of the turntable and slow the speed to just about anything I wanted. A short step from that was placing my index finger on the center of the record and spinning faster and faster. None of this did much for music appreciation, but I learned a lot about the properties of speed, sound, rotation, relative pitch, acceleration, constancy, and fragility (of the record player, which finally wore out).

I learned, for example, that pitch was related to speed of rotation, that force applied at the center of the record had a much larger acceleration effect than at the edges, that relative pitches were a constant, that you could tell the loud parts of records just by looking at the grooves, and that candle wax spilled on the surface of the record had an effect on sound quality. I learned a lot from playing with the record player.