A few years ago, my sister was running a seasonal garden center. In her neighborhood, it was the go-to place for everything needed to create a beautiful yard. Needless to say, it was popular and busy, with most customers on a first-name basis.
They struggled to find help.
College students would be hired for the summer, and almost all of them quit on the first day—usually within the first hour.
What was the problem?
During orientation, the new hires were told they would need to leave their phones in a locker. Their work required both hands—all the time. They would also be expected to engage with customers, and carrying a phone while lifting plants and supplies increased the risk of dropping and breaking it.
Many refused to comply with the no-phone rule and quit on the spot.
Except for one young man.
He didn’t quit, but he didn’t put his phone in the locker, either. Instead, he slipped it into the oversized front pocket of his shirt.
Before lunch, reality bit.
As he bent over to pick up a plant for a customer, his phone fell from his pocket and disappeared into a parking lot storm drain. Looking through the grate, he could see it lying below—wet, broken, and covered in gunk.
Before that moment, he didn’t understand what it meant to need both hands all the time. He had never broken a phone, much less watched one disappear into a deep drain.
Because he had no experience to connect with the words he had been told, he dismissed the importance of leaving his phone in the locker.
Later he said, “I thought it was a rule made by old folks who didn’t understand tech. Now I know it was a rule for people who had never destroyed their phone.”
The young man learned the hard way: to truly understand language, we need meaningful experiences to connect to words. Otherwise, language can seem like so much gobbledygook.
The development of a rich vocabulary—not simply memorizing words for college entrance exams—begins with experience, and the earlier, the better.
The same principle applies to young children.
We can offer them a wide variety of sensory experiences. For example, we might bring in several fruits and invite children to hold them, examine them carefully, describe them, and taste them before introducing the names of the fruits.
Experience before language.
Reading to children—and our own personal reading—also gives us opportunities to discover words and ideas that we have not yet experienced firsthand.
When I read The Snowy Day to the three- to six-year-olds in my classroom, I discovered that some children had never seen snow. When I read If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, I found that some had never mixed a bowl of cookie dough.
What a wonderful reason to go outside after a snowfall or spend an afternoon making cookies: discovering words that call for experience, then providing that experience.
It is a rich and meaningful way to teach—and to learn.
And perhaps it may even save a few phones from disappearing down a storm drain on the first day of the job.
Join me for a complimentary workshop…
