Posted on 12/12/2015 4:43:44 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
[SUMMARY: K-12 schools force children to learn to read the hard way. Therefore, few children learn to read.]--In all reading theories, there is a fundamental concept known as automaticity. This means you know or can do something instantly, automatically. Reading happens fast. If you do not know something with automaticity, you might as well not know it at all.
So the question quickly becomes: what exactly are children supposed to learn (that is, memorize) with automaticity?
Traditionally, children memorized 26 English letters. Virtually the entire population can do this in a month or two, even at a young age. At the end of the process, people can look at a large group of letters and instantly identify each one, no matter the size, color, or typeface, no matter whether it is uppercase or lowercase, no matter whether it is tilted or slightly defaced, And humans can do this at a quite extraordinary speed (about 2 per second) and with no errors and no guessing. That is automaticity in action.
Focus on what an accomplishment this is. Flexibility is as dazzling as speed. Anybody who has looked at a book of typefaces knows that each letter can appear in thousands of different ways. There are scripts and novelty faces. I suspect that we can read letters upside-down almost as quickly as right-side-up. All this is possible because the symbols we are trying to memorize are simple and compact, with the minimum of strokes needed to create a distinctive design.
This set of 26 symbols, instantly identified, is the basis of phonetic reading, and the traditional starting point for all education. Children learn the symbols, and then the sounds that they represent......
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
In my experience as a college teacher, students cannot write either....because they won’t or can’t read. The excitement of reading has been replaced by visual stimulation. A whole new learning paradigm is up upon us (well maybe them because I read a lot and don’t plan to change anything in that department).
Why not post your whole piece?
Is it stolen and you don’t wish to advertise your theft?
He wrote the article and it was posted on American Thinker. He is doing us a favor by letting us know about the article. Do you need to be such an @$$?
Just an fyi - American Thinker is on the “must excerpt” list.
One of the PROOFS that “school” is a hoax, and is designed to keep children ignorant and without skills, is the fact that foreign languages are very carefully NOT TAUGHT until children are past the age where they learn language like a sponge.
And, of course, WHOLE-WORD, LOOK-SAY, and any other method of teaching reading that is not PHONICS, is a fraud, that is INTENDED to keep children illiterate.
ALL “school” is a hoax. When school is run by the government, it is a Communist hoax.
The problem is the teachers, and their problem is the administrators. Their problem collectively, is the people who taught them how to teach.
None of them know their asses from a hole in the ground. The schools a re a giant vaginocracy where the gynocrats run roughshod over solid learning.
I was very lucky. I was sick the second week of first grade so I was kept home, and my mother spent the time drilling me on phonics. From then on I was ahead of the game.
The saddest part is that teaching reading is not that hard. There is some individuality to it, but several roads can lead to the same place. Some roads will create better spellers and better vocabulary builders, but others will get the job done. In my opinion, the problem is that some kids are not getting even the minimal amount of individual attention. If they do not learn well with the one mass approach offered, they lose out. I am not saying it would take more teachers. It would just take different prioritizing, ditching the stupid, unnecessary stuff.
I would also recommend ditching most technology for the first several grades. They will get some of that at home, but at school it is an obstacle. We’ve become a nation of toy lovers who have mastered all sorts of gadgets but haven’t a drop of wisdom.
Teaching an alphabetically based language as if it were hieroglyphics makes no sense at all unless literacy is not the goal. For the method to seem sensible we must first determine just what the goal might actually be.
WHOLE-WORD, LOOK-SAY, and any other method of teaching reading that is not PHONICS is HIEROGLYPHICS.
I taught all four of mine to read at 3-4. Then my wife and I kept them out of Public School. We sure as hell couldnt afford to do that according to the calculating of our friends and relatives but it really is all a matter of priorities. We never have bought cars on time, for instance.
I taught my kids to read using phonics and they can read very well. I noticed the ones that are taught using sight words tend to be clueless on how to pronounce anything.. it’s sad.
Some kids can learn it that way just fine. The problem is that many cannot. It also does very little for building spelling and vocabulary. Back when kids learned some Latin in those early grades was probably best.
It is the same sort of issue with math. Curriculum writers have worked hard to undo the good system we used to have.
Kids memorize quickly, so the idea of sight words happens naturally whether it is the base plan or not. Failing to teach them phonics anyway is pure stupidity.
I learned Italian before I learned English. It is best to start with another language while they are young. I remember when I was in preschool teaching my teacher some Italian :)
Competing with the audiovisual circus is difficult, still.
Good for you.
Reading sounds like it is hard to teach, but really it isn’t. I think it would be hard to be such a gigantic failure at it, like happens in some public schools.
Toddlers can easily learn letters and phonics. People just don’t try to teach it to them. If you think about it, they are learning to name everything in their world. So why is it surprising that they could learn to name the 26 letters, their phonic sounds, and various combinations, too.
We were taught the alphabet, phonetics, syllables, root words, prefixes, suffixes, synonyms, homonyms, antonyms.
Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, participles.
We learned spelling rules and exceptions.
We learned to arrange words in alphabetical order, and how to look up words in a dictionary, and how diacritical marks determined pronounciation.
Then we learned to diagram sentences.
All of these skills are now filed under “white privilege” and are no longer permitted (IOW, getting an education = “acting white.”) The lack of these basic skills helps explain what is happening on college campuses.
Getting drunk and posting ugly gibberish on Free Republic is no way to go through life.
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