Posted on 04/07/2014 5:14:33 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Thanks for posting.
Bttt
I agree that whole word sucks donkey dong, but I do have a serious question. How do chinese kids learn to read chinese?
Funny how they want kids to remember words, but not multiplication tables because to do that would be cheating.???
The pen is mightier than the sword.
So Big Ed has devised a way to neutralize the pen.
But Papa, I can't read!
But you do read, child, you read to me every day.
"But I can't!"
Why do you say that? Because there are words you don't know?
Uh-huh.
Child, you run across new words all the time. I even run across new words and I have been reading for a long long time.
"You do?"
Yes, but we have the tools to sound them out, and once we understand what they mean they are ours.
Near as I can recall, every single kid learned to read at a functional level.
Source?
SEE SPOT RUN. SEE THE DOG RUN.
OH OH OH SEE JANE RUN. SEE DICK RUN.
SEE DICK FALL DOWN. SEE JANE LAUGH.
Where I live, the schools teach phonetics.
Public education can’t teach johnny to read, but at least it costs a fortune.
Basically they took away the tools that enable one to be learned. The sounds, the math tables etc. When my kids were in school, they didn’t want them to memorize their multiplication tables because that would be rote instead of learning. It would be like cheating. Instead they wanted the kids to make equations and figure out how 3x3 became 9??? So they had to do something like 3x3=3+3+3=2+1+2+1+2+1 etc. I kept telling my kids memorizing the multiplication tables was learning how to use a tool that would make math easier for them. Fortunately, learning to read was a combination of methods at their school with me doing a lot of reading with them so I could teach them phonetics more strongly then the school was doing. I learned phonetics in first grade and I remember when it clicked in my brain that letters represented sounds. The first word that made sense was Tag, the name of the dog in the McMillan series. See Tag run. Run Tag run. Wow! God bless the teacher who taught me that. It opened a whole new world for me.
Nothing is more important than for a child to come from a family that reads.
Exactly what I was thinking. Maybe we don’t understand the Chinese pictograms or whatever they are or how they are taught or something, because it seems like a pretty obvious question.
I never understood why they didn’t teach some sort of universal shorthand instead of cursive. Cursive is faster than printing, but if that’s the point why not teach something that’s waaay faster than both? Instead of learning two very similar styles of writing the language you speak. Maybe this is the reason, short hand uses symbology of some sort for many common words and takes more time to learn?
Freegards
Only using sight words makes no sense. As soon as you come across an unknown and ‘teacher’ isn’t there to help, how do you figure it out? Phonetics gives you the tool to sounding out new words.
Too bad, so sad, evil dumbing-down people!
“How do chinese kids learn to read chinese?”
Every Chinese character has an elaborate story associated with it, including substories for various strokes in the character. Some of these stories are historical in nature, but many are based on fables and fairy tales that go back hundreds of years.
So, they don’t actually memorize whole words, but have an elaborate array of associations on which to pin the words.
One of the most basic and simplest words in Chinese is a squarish like symbol with a vertical line through it, with that word being the name of the Chinese country itself, and it symbolizes the fact that the Chinese have historically considered their country to be the center of the world.
We taught our kids phonetics before they started school. They are both excellent readers today. There is nothing in education (including math) that can be mastered if you do not read well.
I recently applied to tutor kids for the ACT / SAT (at one of the big name tutoring companies) - it seems like a good way to make a few extra bucks. Anyway, I had to take the ACT math and science exams (and get an acceptable score on them) to qualify to tutor. I have been out of school durn near 40 years and was able to pass - not because of subject knowledge (much of which is long gone) but because I am capable of reading and comprehending quickly and accurately. You will not score well on these exams if you cannot read well - and since college admissions and scholarship levels rely on how well you score (unless you are non-white or excel at sports), poor reading skills severely cramp your college prospects.
I hit early elementary school in the early 50s also. We learned phonics. This was in suburban New Jersey, just outside of Camden. And yes, we all learned to read, some better than others, but we all were reading by second grade.
I learned phonics in the first grade (1948 or 9). I loved phonics, as it was such a neat decoding trick. I loved the worksheets, too.
When my four children were little - in the 60s, I taught them all phonics (in a casual way, at the supermarket, reading children’s books, etc. as soon as they showed an interest in deciphering, long before they went to school.
All of them knew how to read before kindergarten, and all of them hated the “reading systems” that were being taught. They found them tedious as entrapping.
All are still avid readers, and figured out that self-learning was much more fun than “school learning”.
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