Posted on 08/15/2011 3:49:34 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
A reading coach in Missouri told me a revealing story.
A nine-year-old boy, unable to read; showed up for remedial help. Pointing at “bead,” the tutor explained, “When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking.”
The puzzled third-grader looked up and asked: “What’s a vowel?”
Which prompts the question: “Has the state of Missouri lost its mind?”
Specifically, the school board members, administrators, superintendents, principals, politicians, civic leaders, and all the other people in charge of public education, all the people who let a smart boy reach the third-grade without being able to read. What process of deliberate non-education allows this?
“What’s a vowel??” Isn’t that like asking what’s a number, what’s a street, what’s an hour?
I blame all these officials, these Hard Hearted Hannahs, who seem not to care that reading is the one essential skill. What are these officials afraid of, that American children might actually become literate? That they might become engineers or skilled workers, people who can build a TV or something else to help us compete against the Chinese. On the other hand, such kids might learn to think for themselves. Perhaps some officials don’t want to take that chance.
Of course, this anecdote indicts only a single school in one Missouri city. To be fair, literacy statistics suggest that tens of thousands of schools, all over the country, are equally indictable. Here is what must be the single most-repeated phrase in all of American journalism for the past 50 years: “One-third of fourth graders can’t read at grade level.” That’s the third that won’t finish high school, many ending up in jail after stealing your car.
To recap: this is a smart kid. He’s nine years old. He’s in the third grade. He can’t read. And he wants to know, “What’s a vowel?” He should’ve learned what a vowel is in the first-grade at the same time he was learning to read.
How does this happen? Because many schools refuse to teach reading in the common sense, practical way generally known as phonics. All phonics experts say that kids routinely learn to read in the first grade or, for sure, by the second. Who in their right mind would choose a method that’s slower, much slower? By third-grade children should be reading simple (but real) books that they select for themselves.
Some in the Education Establishment are still addicted to Whole Word, Sight-Words and Dolch Words (all the same). This rigamarole pushes phonics out of the schools, exactly the opposite of sane practice. When you’re talking about a phonetic language, phonics is just another word for common sense. Conversely, sight-words are the artificial, exotic, alien, weird, sophistical, more or less sociopathic plan. That’s not too strong a word. Whole Word does not work; second, it invariably creates psychological difficulties (e.g., ADHD, dyslexia). Hard Hearted Hannahs, indeed.
Around 1950 top educators were quite candid about their goals. They wanted to remove academic content from the schools. Instead, they wanted to stress “real needs” and “life adjustment”--practical things like filling out application forms. Literacy was not a priority. One principal famously said that his colleagues looked forward to a time when reading would not be considered any more valuable a skill than sewing or baking. This quack’s intellectual descendants are winning.
Learning to bake a cake leads to baking a cake. Reading opens up a universe of possibilities, including thousands of career options.
Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld summed up the whole sorry story in a few sentences: “The top educators took power over the education system by promoting their own disciples and excluding all others. They took control of the major colleges of education: Columbia, Chicago, Palo Alto, etc. They commissioned books to be written promoting whole-word instruction. And they got publishers to publish the new programs because the professors were in a position to get these new primers purchased by virtually every public school system in the country. Many whole-language advocates are simply the latest of the socialists who are willing to destroy this country in order to change it.”
Those are the people who run Missouri, evidently. And you can bet that huge sums of money are wasted on bad programs, even as the leaders of this state announce in speeches and on websites their deep devotion to education.
Kind of reminds you of a song, doesn’t it?
They got a gang there,
A mean old gang there,
With a heart just like a stone.
I saw them at the seashore with a great big pan.
There were Hannahs pouring water on a drowning man.
They call them Hard Hearted Hannahs,
These Scamps from Savannah,
The meanest gang in town.
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(Technical note: many schools brag that they teach “intrinsic phonics” or “embedded phonics,” both being examples of partial phonics. What’s needed is real phonics, that, is, children learn the alphabet, then the sounds of the letters, then the simple blends (ba-), then more complex blends (bat-), then they’re reading. If kids in your local schools aren’t learning to read by second grade, find out what bad program is being used and why.
Protect your children from bad reading programs. For a short description of the steps most people follow in learning to read, see “56: Preemptive Reading--Teach Your Child Early."
http://www.improve-education.org/id81.html )
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Your excerpt of my post makes it sound grammatically incorrect, lol.
I can’t remember if boa is an exception or if it is not an english word.
I didn’t work out the combinations myself. I got out my Spell to Write and Read phonogram cards. The program is genius. I used it to teach my children to read and spell. There are more advanced sounds for some of those combinations as well but I just stuck with the basics.
Here is Wanda Sanseri’s speech to the Senate. Excellent reading!
http://www.bhibooks.net/f/Senate_Speech.pdf
I just noticed the word ‘poem’ in your list. That isn’t an exception. It follows the rule. It says /O/. The rule is that it MAY be used at the end of a word. That doesn’t mean that it can’t be used in the word.
It’s just that “poem” isn’t “pome”, but “poe-em”. Not the same sound you have with “doe”, for instance. And that just made me think of “does”, “duhz” the verb that is, not the plural noun. I had better stop now. “Canoe.” Stopping NOW!
I thank God that I did get the education I did, because when I finally rebelled and said “I'm going to public high school!”, I was shocked at the number of dullards.
That was over 20 years ago; I shutter to think what things are like now in public school...”fag awareness month”, “white devils are the reason the world isn't fair month”...etc...
No thanks!!!
Lol. The ‘o’ in poem makes as /O/ sound. That was the point. ‘Does’ is irregular but ‘canoe’ is not an english word and wouldn’t follow an English rule.
Shoe?
The tutor sized up the kid as “smart.” That’s why the tutor thought the story was interesting.
Also, let me apologize to all the grammarians commenting on which vowel does or does not do the talking. Frankly, I don’t know. I’m not myself much of a grammarian and never learned or understood this generalization.
Right or wrong, the tutor used it; and it prompted the boy to say, “What’s a vowel?” The tutor and I had the same basic reaction: just three little words perfectly captured a huge national problem.
Lol. This is all I am going to get in my pings for the next several days, isn’t it?
I am from West Virginia, what is a shoe? ;)
No need to apologize. You are right about those words sizing up a problem. After years of frustration with whole words, some teachers will return to phonics, however rules like the “two vowels walking” cause many to think that phonics doesn’t work. When a child runs across words like ‘steak’, ‘fruit’ etc, they are confused and the teachers don’t know how to explain. They then throw out the phonics and go back to what they know best. That is why I recommend Wanda Sanseri’s speech. It addresses not only the illiteracy problem but a true solution to the problem. Fake phonics with bogus rules is not going to help.
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