This is a crisis we'd better get a handle on before it's too late -- if it isn't already!
Posted on 11/09/2015 1:46:19 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
If you want to create an illiteracy crisis such as the one we are living through, you have to do two things. First of all, adopt ideas that do not work. Second, you have to brainwash young teachers into thinking these ideas actually do work. In this way, you can manipulate your teachers into doing a bad job but they never know it. They remain gung-ho on the side of illiteracy.
A public school teacher sent me this brief history of her decades in the classroom:
'I began to notice students in the intermediate grades intermixing sight words. They would read words like is and the. If I think back to my time in the classroom, I spent way too much time trying to address comprehension. This is what was tested and this is what I thought was needed because all of my data pointed to deficits in these areas. I did not notice reading errors in the way I do now because I did not understand the nature of the well-hidden details of what I was looking for. If I could only go back. Now, I will fast-forward to the time I met a 70-year-old Montessori veteran who re-taught me what I thought I knew about literacy. I watch my children flourish and realize what my students whom I taught years before were missing, foundational skills needed for reading. Today, in my work, I check letter sounds and listen to a child read while tracking miscues on a running record. I have been shocked by what I have noticed. Overall, what I found is that as a child’s letter/sound knowledge increases, his/her reading accuracy increases. I thought this would help a student in the intermediate grades who was barely reading. I did not think it would be helpful for those who seem stuck but it has been helpful for those students as well.'
First of all, please note that she is talking about children who are 10 or 12 and cannot read the simplest words in the English language, kids that had been taught by these flawed methods for six years! Nothing captures the essential craziness of Whole Word than 12-year-olds who read 'is' for 'the,' or anything similar to that.
Now here is what this teacher is saying reduced to the basics. She was using the usual gimmicks such as picture clues, pre-reads, context clues, and many others to help the children guess what the words meant. But none of that is reading.
You need to have what she calls 'foundational skills.' You see a 'b' and you say buh. That is reading. (No guessing required or allowed.)
This woman is honestly telling something that she is deeply embarrassed about. Due to her inferior training, she knew very little about teaching children to read. She did not know what every phonics teacher knows. As a result, she was crippling hundreds of children over many years. And here is what is really horrible. There are many more teachers just like her.
Please dwell on the idiocy of an Education Establishment that creates failure by forcing teachers to use the wrong methods.
The funniest word in all of the discussion above is the word 'comprehension,' also known as 'finding meaning.' In this sophistry, if there is a picture at the top of the page of an animal and the child reads 'horse' but the actual word on the page is 'pony,' the teacher exclaims, 'Oh, you got the meaning. You comprehend the word. You are a good reader.'
Nothing could be more absurd but this is the essential sophistry of our Education Establishment. Teaches need to understand that reading is not first about meaning but about sounds. Once the word is spoken, even if silently, then the brain finds meaning in the sounds.
This teacher for many years was evaluating a child 's guessing skills, not the child 's reading skills. This is the great swindle that people like Frank Smith and Ken Goodman pulled off and the Education Establishment promotes to this day.
Please look at this short video which shows what phonics experts think should be the norm. Everybody is reading when they are six or seven years old, versus a system that has children illiterate in middle school.
The simplest way to save our K-12 schools is to eliminate all variations of Whole Word, and insist that children learn in the one way that always works: systematic phonics.
Video: Reading Is Easy -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-JV0tPGn-Ws
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This is a crisis we'd better get a handle on before it's too late -- if it isn't already!
Common sense is still powerful, and lacking.
Ping....pyng
I have a sweat shirt with that photo on it, and I wear it proudly!!
Got it, Moosie! Thanks! LOL!
I did it the old way for my homeschooled kids. True, reading by 5. B....buh!
Not idiocy. Deliberate, calculated sabotage of learning.
Evil.
Like everything else, some pointy headed retard comes along with a better idea to educate kids, but don’t ever take into consideration what actually works and has worked for years. And in the end the kids pay for their wrong headed ideas.
Foreign beer is more imported.
When my children were learning to read they were taught using “phonics”. It worked in the seventies and it will work today. I was always amazed how they could take a rather lengthy word that they had never seen before, and break it down by the sounds of the letters and eventually pronounce the word correctly.
When I was learning to read we were taught to memorize the words. If we had never seen the word, we didn’t stand a chance.
Not if you’re where they make it.
bkmk
Thanks!
In teaching Frank to read, I’m running into a variety of issues that would probably already have gotten him diagnosed “disabled,” in the first grade. He reverses letters both horizontally (b/d) and vertically (b/p, m/w). He attempts to read words and sentences from left to right.
As the author observed, he also reads one or two words in a sentence, “The cat ...” and then guesses at the rest.
Because I expect this and correct it every time, and because we don’t move on until he can do a page correctly, I have every reason to expect that he will be able to read fluently by the time we finish “Alpha-Phonics.”
i like Yuengling, the best of both.
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