Posted on 01/16/2016 1:30:21 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 flawed ideas actually do work. In this way, you can manipulate your teachers into doing a bad job but they never know it.
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’ as ‘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 childs 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 have been taught by these flawed methods for many 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 – picture clues, pre-reads, context, 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.
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 another million teachers just like her.
Please dwell on the malfeasance 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. Teachers 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. (Think for a moment about that instant when another person says the word 'horse' to you. You hear the sound only; you do not see a picture or letters on the page. And that sound is sufficient. You know completely what the person is saying. Similarly, when your brain sounds out the word 'horse,' you know immediately what the writer is saying.)
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 YouTube video 'Reading Is Easy' which shows what phonics experts think should be the norm. Everybody is reading in the first or second grade, 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.
(Bruce Deitrick Price / Improve-Education.org)
As a parent and an avid reader, I wanted to share my love of books with my son. My husband and I read to him from the time he was an infant. It was an absolute joy to see him comprehend letters and words and begin reading at the age of three. I’m tearing up a bit just remembering those days. Today he is a college freshman that achieved a 4.0 this past semester. Being the emotional sort, I teared up again. :)
I truly believe it is the parent’s responsibility to teach reading and math early on in the child’s life. It’s the most rewarding and exciting thing I have ever done in my own life.
American Lit turned into English Language Arts?
Wouldn’t want anything to be too American, would we?
Today I was with my grandson at a science museum science presentation. The college educated presenter made a few mistatements of science that challenged common sense and experience.
Even worse, he invited little kids to answer questions whose answers he only knew because he had a cheat sheet. The little kids mostly answered incorrectly. He affirmed each kid that gave a wrong answer, thus placing the wrong answer in the heads of all the other kids. It obviously was confusing to some of the kids who knew the correct answer that the wrong answer was affirmed.
But the science museum presenter was obviously more concerned about embarrassing the kids and their parents and hurting their self-esteem than in science. But he was a fairly adequate entertainer.
Dr.
You make a valid point. Indeed, wintertime (often heard on this site) wants to throw teachers in jail, etc.
But I would ask you to be lenient for these reasons:
First of all, the teachers are not nearly as smart as doctors to begin with.
Second, the people running medical schools are actually trying to do a good job, whereas the ideologues in charge of training teachers are not trying to do a good job; they are trying to turn out an indoctrinated person. This is a huge divergence.
Third, being in education is a lot like being in the Catholic Church. You are expected to follow the creed. You are expected to do what your superiors tell you to do. You are not going to find young priests telling bishops when and where they are wrong.
Fourth, K-12 education is full of dense, complex sophistries. Even the smartest people get lost in these things for weeks and months. Do you think the average teacher has any idea what constructivism is or why sight-words don’t work? I write about this stuff all the time, and I can tell you it has taken me months sometimes to see to the other side of these things.
Being a doctor is a profession. In this country, being a teacher is joining a cult, an evil cult. It should not be that way. But to an overwhelming degree it is that way. So let’s feel sympathy for teachers even as we try to coax them out of this cult.
Maybe you could give me a few more details about your “functional illiterates.”
What sort of tasks can they typically do without a problem?
They’ve been in school 10 or 11 years when you get them. This is way after elementary school. What were the schools and teachers doing with them when they were in the fifth, sixth, and seventh grades?
When the kids reach you, do they know any phonics. Can they sound out words even if slowly?
Success for All, this is so typically wonderful in what it claims. But I’ve heard lots of bad things about it. Is it basically a sight word program?
You know, the idea that people can learn to read in groups is a fascinating one. Each brain has to do some work, or nothing is going to advance. Probably in practice it’s just another ruthless sophistry.
Any info is welcome.
I pulled my son out of second grade because he was guess reading and he was a terrible guesser. He knew phonics before he went to kindergarten. He forgot all that and was guessing the words - even the simple words I taught him to memorize!
He told me in college that home school rescued him.
At all levels we have high stakes testing, so if a teacher's students do poorly the teacher suffers. Therefore, teachers teach to the test and then pass them on to the next grade. They look at it as not their problem anymore. At my school failing is frowned upon. By that I mean the students aren't frowned upon for failing, but teachers who actually teach are frowned upon for assigning a failing grade to students who earn failing grades. Ironically, the worst teachers have the easiest schedules and few high stakes testing classes. They are rewarded for just passing students who may or may not have learned the prescribed curricula.
As for functional illiterates, the students will fumble through grade level literature and not know what they read. Additionally, they will mispronounce grade level words and not catch their mistakes. Finally, they will butcher a sentence badly and not even recognize that the sentence doesn't make sense. For example, a student would read, “I was the house across the street,” instead of, “I saw the house across the street,” and just keep going.
Excellent points!
A few decades ago, I became a certified teacher through studies at a Canadian university. For teaching reading skills; we learned to: diagnose, than prescribe. Some children learn better by sight words — others learn better through phonics — others require different interventions. The teacher is expected to use whatever approach works best for the individual student.
The way Americans have managed to politicize teaching readings skills has continually bemused, befuddled, and bewildered me. Apparently, the enlightened ones (i.e. Democrat-voting members of American Teachers’ unions, along with the elite of the public education establishment) will only sanction some form of sight-word method. Only knuckle-dragging, Republican-leaning illiterates, and their home-schooling fellow-travellers would even consider using phonics. That’s nonsense, of course. It’s also ironic; because the sight-word despots and their ilk usually claim that they (and only they) understand and believe in “science” — yet, the “science” says they’re wrong to insist on avoiding phonics in all cases.
Do students still have to submit book reports of books read?
With Common Core there is no time for novels. We now read excerpts of informational texts with a few short stories and literary text excerpts sprinkled in. For example, our text book has The Tempest’s first two acts only. We are supposed to do two of five acts and move on. Additionally, the content selection is extremely liberal. We read the Declaration, the Bill of Rights, and Federalist 51. The questions the text book present revolve around how the docs are “dated.” CC is about expose move on, expose move on, expose move on. Then CC has high stakes testing that requires higher level thinking skills. Neat little package Pearson, PARCC, AIR, and the Congress members’ campaigns they support have wrapped up for all the future voters, huh?
How sad. But how devious of the Libs to have CC used and limiting the ability to think, analyze and relate information as a whole. The analogy would be like news sound bites as opposed to in depth reporting. Or maybe I have your answer incorrect.
Your analogy is correct; however, libs aren’t the only ones responsible for this.
Want better teachers? Then pay them more.
Oh yes, there are more than just Libs at work. Evil is rampant in the world.
We teachers are paid quite well and have excellent benefits. When teacher pay stats are presented, they usually use first or second year teacher pay. After the first few years teacher pay jumps drastically. Plus, those teaching in impoverished or urban areas can get their student loans paid off by Big Gov. The other issue is teachers who rack up insane college debt to become teachers, knowing the pay isn’t that great in the beginning. I know people who’ve attended private universities and racked up $75K or more in loans, just to make $30K a year the first few years. With summers off there’s the added benefit of another job. Don’t let teachers fool you when they scream, “I work on my lessons and classroom all summer!” They’re either lying or doing it wrong. Only a first or second year teacher can claim this.
And yet no one here reading this article and the comments spent a single second sounding out a word. Phonic is absolutely necessary at the early elementary level, but by fourth or fifth grade words are learned by sight.
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