Sight-Words: the Kudzu smothering K-12

“How do you phonetically pronounce ghost?”

Fist, but only when you’re trying to be a wise guy.

Phonetics pertains to the **sounds** of the letters, and the sounds of the syllables, which in turn are the building blocks of words which have **meanings** representing things and ideas.
But phonetics is not the study of the **meanings** of the words. Phonetics is the study of the ** sounds** of the hieroglyphics on the page.
I learned to read the sounds by learning phonetics. Sound it out, I was told.
I learned the meaning of ‘Mama’ when she pointed to herself; and how to read the word two years later. Sounding it out makes it immediately clear that the word is one syllable spoken twice.

As I did say, first you learn the rules of how the letters (and combinations) sound : p is puh, h is huh; then you learn the exceptions to the rules: ph together makes the f-sound, fuh, not puh-huh.
All I meant is that it’s a whole lot easier to memorize few sounds and exceptions, than trying to memorize all the words in the freakin’ language by looking at flash cards.

“I did not fully grasp English comprehension until I was taught Latin and Greek word formations (root words, prefixes, and suffixes) and the difference between Teutonic and Latinate contributions to our language.”

Well of course I learned these things too. My study of Latin and a little bit of Greek in high school still, 4 decades later, enables me to pick apart words and discern their **meanings** without always needing a dictionary. I can break down the word and figure it out. Phonetics in reverse, as it were. Complementary, not contradictory, as you seem to imply.
But before I could parse prefixes, roots, suffixes, and discern the **meanings**of multisyllabic words, first I learned the letters and their sounds; I learned to READ and was taught how to look up words in a dictionary, events and concepts in an encyclopedia.
And my point, rather belabored, I’m afraid, is that these building-block break-it-down analytical **processes** aren’t being taught in most American schools anymore.
Do you even realize the average college freshman has no clue how to look up a word in a dictionary? No clue about root words, prefixes, suffixes, antonyms, hominems, synonyms, diacritical marks.

Guten—who? Did he know phonics?? He must have known some rudimentary fore runner of phonics. He certainly knew the alphabet and the sounds the letters were supposed to make. Otherwise that whole moveable type thing would have turned out badly, methinks.
Shakespeare? Chaucer? Students of Greek and Latin, not of American schools. Did they know phonetics? On some unpracticed, instinctive level, I think they did.
Latinate? Teutonic? Whuh? Ohhhh, some kinda European stuff.That’s racist. Elitist. Not.

We need to return to phonetics and Latin and Greek and reading and critical thinking. And no, it’s not brash or simplistic to say this country is in deep trouble because our putative educational system is turning out a nation of nitwits.

You know that I almost agree 100 percent. Whether the method is sight-words or phonics though, the stress must be on the teaching.

My mother was a school teacher and was most upset by the meddlesome administrators and edicts from on high, that hampered the ability to teach.

My problem in school was a backward very rural community in Georgia that still employed teachers hired during WWII, without four-year degrees, in a small, grade one through twelve, school that had exempted them from certification requirements.

I will never forget the day that, as a third grader, I tried to explain to my Sunday school teacher who was also the fifth grade teacher at my school, what a footnote was. One of the children asked what a word in our lesson meant and she did not know. I told her that it was explained in the footnote (Mom had taught me about footnotes). She looked at me like I was from the moon. I could not make a fifth grade teacher understand what a footnote was.

That is part of the reason my mother was motivated to go back to school to become a teacher. She got her degree the year I graduated from high school. She got her M.Ed. on the same day two of my brothers got their bachelor's degrees. My mother later taught there at my old school, after some of those older teachers had already retired. I learned firsthand at an early age about incompetent or unqualified teachers. The method matters not at all if the teacher does not teach.

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