[neverdem]

It's long but worthwhile. You won't believe what the fools in education have been doing.

[rockinqsranch]

Bookmark...It’s bedtime lol.

[luckystarmom]

One thing that irritated me with the article is that it states that kids from well to do families usually pick up reading naturally, and only poor kids can’t pick up reading naturally because they are not exposed to reading.

Some kids just plain ol’ need phonics instruction no matter what their economic or parental background.

My husband and I are well-to-do, college educated people, and we have a special needs daughter who needs phonics instruction.

Phonics is good for kids who are dyslexic, have auditory problems, etc. Those problems cross socio-economic lines.

One of my problems with the No Child Left Behind is that schools will spend 2 1/2 hours on reading, and will do away with science and history instruction.

I also have a gifted daughter who was so bored with the reading in 3rd grade. She was reading at a junior high level, and did not need that much reading instruction.

We switched my daughters to private school. My special needs daughter is in a multi-sensory reading program (Barton Reading) that teaches phonics/reading. My gifted daughter loves the private school because they actually have science & history (along with Spanish, Bible, Art, Music). My gifted daughter is getting stimulated, and my special needs daughter is getting targetted instruction.

The public schools could easily implement what the private school is doing. Classrooms could be divided up into different reading groups with each reading group being actually taught to their levels. If there are three 3rd grade classrooms, then each teacher teaches a different reading level. Each teacher could teach a different way also.

I’m just my daughters are not a part of it.

[neverdem]

Democrat blogger wants to shoot Rush Limbaugh He says someone should also target Ted Nugent.

Why Intellectuals Like Genocide You can't make this stuff up!

The Congressman from Ground Zero Jerry Wadler would rather you be dead.

From time to time, I’ll ping on noteworthy articles about politics, foreign and military affairs. FReepmail me if you want on or off my list.

[philman_36]

Both of my children were taught to read through the whole word method. They were taught very young and at the expense of a lot of time by me and my ex. It is a very good learning system but, IMO, it simply can't be taught in public schools because it is so time intensive.
The reward in this is seeing both kids reading at two to three grade levels above their peers throughout their school years and besting me in reading speed and reading comprehension during testing.
In a public school setting the "cookie cutter" method is about the only way to garner any success whatsoever. Teachers simply don't have the time to teach whole word reading on a one on one basis which is what is required. Only highly interested and dedicated parents seem successful in that learning technique. JMO.

[tioga]

This reminds me of when my daughter was in school. She was to be the last class to learn to print and write in cursive at the same time. Something the school district had deemed a failure, but they were continuing it for one more year, before they phased it out. WHY?

[ken5050]

Good read...thanks..

Anyone else here of an age who remembers being taught to "diagram" sentences?"

[bmwcyle]

ping

[bmwcyle]

Liberals are revolutionaries. They can only tear down. They can never build anything.

[Rutabega]

I teach 7th grade language arts (grr—I always hate that title for the class) and I can just say, anecdotally, that the kids who were taught to read with phonics are great spellers, and the whole language kids can’t seem to spell much beyond their names. Where we live, the “whole language” experiment seems to have run it’s course, but the kids who were the guinea pigs will always seem to be behind in their spelling skills. It drives me nuts, and I am thrilled that my kids are learning (and have been taught) to read and spell with phonics. It just makes much more sense.

[Amelia]

Y’all might find this interesting.

[AHerald]

It's long but worthwhile

You're right, a very worthwhile read. Thanks for the post.

Loved the following from the article:

According to an April 19 report from the Education Department, 97 percent of the school districts participating in Reading First reported gains from 2004 to 2006 of 16 percentage points for first-graders and 15 percentage points for third-graders in meeting fluency goals. Comparable gains were reported in reading comprehension: 15 percentage points on average for first-graders and 12 percentage points on average for third-graders. The progress was across the board: for African Americans, Hispanics, English-language learners, disabled students, and the economically disadvantaged, as well as for the white middle class. These results have confounded both the education-school types who hate the idea of intensive phonics, vocabulary drilling, and standardized testing, and also the many small-government conservatives who believe that the entire No Child Left Behind Act represents unprecedented federal intrusion into education, which has traditionally been strictly a state and local concern.

[nicmarlo]

Thanks for posting this; it’s VERY COMFORTING to me to know that I am being PROPERLY trained on how to teach reading, the right way, to elementary school children. Everything praised in this article as effective teaching methods is exactly what I’m being taught to do at the University where I am expecting to receive my Masters in Teaching!

[Cicero]

Different people think differently, and learn to read differently. I learned to read by having my parents read aloud to me, and then give me the books to read myself. My kids have learned the same way, because all of them could read before they went to school.

But there’s nothing wrong with learning about phonemes, even if you don’t personally need it. I never heard that word, but I vaguely remember someone pointing to the letter P and saying puh, puh, or the letter T and saying tuh, tuh. And I remember being told at some later point that the difference between D and T is that one is voiced and the other unvoiced. Even if you don’t learn to read that way, it should be a matter of interest to learn something new.

But I have to say that Bush seems to be absolutely obsessed with fixing things by imposing huge, expensive bureaucracies on them. He has imposed layer upon layer of bureaucracy on our security systems without doing a damned thing about fixing the CIA or the FBI, and now we have a guy at the top who talks about his stomach pains. Big help.

The same with teaching. The only way to get good teaching is to get good teachers, and the only way to get good teachers is to break the grip of the teaching unions and teaching colleges. How do you do that? I despair of answering, but you don’t do it by imposing a bureaucracy on them. It just makes them mad, not better. Maybe you could do it by writing books and shaming them.

In any case, it has to be done from the bottom up, with parents and school boards and teachers. Let’s abolish the Department of Education for a start. It is totally useless.

[woollyone]

Here is page 40 (picked at random) from an on-line version of McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader (circa 1800-1873).

Think our kids aren’t dumbed down?

...read it and weep...

http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?pageno=100&fk_files=169182

[Old Professer]

It’s worse than long, by being filled with phrases sifted through a “Thesaurian” sieve such as, “Reading First and the change in Richmond’s pedagogical culture over the past five years have had a galvanizing effect on the morale of Richmond teachers.”, even with a rich, juicy kernal of sweet truth this tediously written piece is like counting walnuts after they’ve been shelled.

[Leftism is Mentally Deranged]

Congress doesn’t want it to work, because it wants to keep blacks down and out of the mainstream of American life.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks neverdem.

[SALChamps03]

You are painting with a broad brush.