bttt
Next, the phonics vs. whole word really only matters for beginners learning to say words. Phonics won't help you learning that a bat, cat and rat are different and what they mean, even though you can pronounce them.
Dyslexics of the world, UNTIE!
My husband and I saw some English practice books for sixth-graders, used in the 50s, in an antique store yesterday. After thumbing through them, I came to the conclusion that if we went back to that old style of teaching, our kids would be better off.
I remember struggling with my son, trying to get him to do the tons of homework the teachers piled up on him every night. The current philosophy seems to be to pile facts upon facts on kids, but teach them no context within which to place the facts. If only context, not quantity of facts, were stressed.
Victims of Dick and Jane? People stopped learning how to read when schools turned away from that method. When my kids were learning to read I went out of my way to go looking for Dick and Jane-style books to work with them. If I see them in a yard sale I still pick them up for Grandchildren.
My brother was a victim of some bizarre reading experiment in the 1970’s where they replaced the letters of the alphabet with a bunch of symbols. Those symbols made it easy to pronounce and read any word in their book and it made him a brilliant reader. Of course in the real world they didn’t use symbols and it took him many years of struggling to learn to read properly.
See Spot run. Run Spot run. See Spot get relpaced. See Dick turn into a semi-literate government dependent.
Let’s teach Leftists ‘whole word’ and Conservatives ‘phonics.’
I learned phonics in a little Calvert System American School in Istanbul in the 50s. When I was put into public school in the US after we came home I was reading “adult” level books in the 5th grade while the other kids were all struggling with their hieroglyphics. With all the historical advances in writing, cuneiform and glyphs from Sumer and Egypt to sound-representative alphabets we are trying to teach our kids hieroglyphics again. That’s progress to Lefties.
I’m hooked on phonics, and phonics is hooked on me.
The rationalization for teaching written English as hieroglyphics as presented to me many years ago is that scientists studied the way adults read and found that adults rarely “sound out” words, they “sight-read.” The obvious conclusion is that phonics is a waste of time and it would be much more efficient to teach children to read the way that adults read. They think they proved their theory when it was demonstrated that the average 1st grader who learned the hieroglyphic method could recognize more words by mid year than the student who was learning phonics. Results for subsequent years are deemed unnecessary. When it is pointed out that high schoolers no longer read very well on average the demon is always “underfunding.”
Another reason for the separation of school and state.
As background, “whole word” English instruction is an article of faith with socialists, and one of its primary inventors was Noam Chomsky.
At the time it was first foisted on students in the 1960s, black students were almost on a par with white students in their English language skills. But they turned out to be far more vulnerable to its ill effects, and their English language abilities plummeted. Within just a few years, black students ranked at the bottom of English language proficiency. And in schools where they teach “whole language”, black students remain at the bottom.
The “whole language” true believers were not unsettled by this in the least. They used the typical excuses that:
1) Whole language instruction had been underfunded.
2) Whole language had to be used universally to show its superiority.
3) Whole language had been sabotaged by those who supported phonics.
Which are pretty much the arguments they use for all other socialist schemes that don’t work.
Importantly, whole language had its most ardent believers among “ivory tower academics”, with no experience in teaching children English, only theories.
Tragically, even though they have clutched to their failed beliefs as ardently as Soviet communists embraced communism, and are now in their 40th+ years of failure without a single success, their efforts are now to *expand* the failure to other parts of the curriculum.
Especially mathematics. The latest project to ruin children’s education was innovated by the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project, and is called “Everyday Math”.
Advocated by the same kind of starry-eyed idealists, in short order, it has already caused widespread revulsion by parents, appalled that their children’s math skills had suddenly collapsed. They are having to purchase traditional mathematics tutoring to get their children back to the proficiency they should have had.
To show how profoundly awful “Everyday Math” has performed, its publisher provided 61 pieces of evidence of its effectiveness to the US Department of Education. 57 of these did not meet the minimum standards of scientific evidence, and only one of the remaining four showed any positive effect. Based on these four, the DoE rated it as having a “potentially positive effect.”
They determined that a student trained in “Everyday Math” could be expected to perform at or near the 56th percentile in mathematics. What everyone else could call “C-” or “D+”.
Probably because it hasn’t been given enough funding, needs to be required of all students to show how much better it is, and has been sabotaged by those who “cling” to traditional mathematics instruction.
Uh-huh. And a skunk is just a socialist house cat.
I grew up in New Jersey, where this story took place, and I can tell you that phonics was banned from the public schools at least 35 years ago. Kids were being taught how not to read using flash cards with words/pictures on them in the public schools. I went to catholic grade school and there phonics was still the approach. By high school you could easily pick out the kids who went to catholic school by the way they read aloud, fluidly and without interruption or assistance. The kids who went to public school read okay until they saw an unfamiliar word and their brains just shut down. The teacher would have to tell them the word.
It’s way past time to empty out the government indocrination centers.