Yes, I forgot about that.
Obama's mentor.
Posted on 03/24/2017 11:21:34 PM PDT by MarvinStinson
Parents can start reading to children age 2-3. They start reading on their own at age 4.
Thanks for posting this article. You got a lot of interesting comments, some of them really terrifying.
A friend of mine, who is in the Mensa IQ league, once told me that she is not smarter than anyone else, she just reads more than anyone else.
Well yes. Practice. That was obvious.
But I mean if some teacher wanted to make English learning look like Japanese (delaying phonics involvement) this could work. Early age is crucial to a lot of these Asian successes. That goes not just for reading, but for musical prodigies and the like. The kid’s mind at that age is like a sponge and can absorb an amazing amount of seemingly arbitrary stuff. I’m just floored when I see a 5 year old (generally Asian) girl dashing through piano compositions that would take me a year to prepare the conventional way from a score. The music teacher taught her to imitate it.
A cruel joke of the gods to make such music the privilege of the professional.
Their school system is modeled after ours as ours once was but most who are 50 years old now did not see that system. School districts in some parts of the south kept the traditional learning somewhat longer than in the NE or California. That is an advantage, I guess, to always being slow to catch up. I saw some of the last of it, think.
Yes, I know. But that is not the conception of hieroglyphics that is generally held. Archaeology was an obsession of mine all through school and beyond. Comparing teaching reading as a form of hieroglyphics is a generally understood trope.
I have always admired the various East Asian school systems. They work as if teaching the children to actually function as rational actors in society is the goal.
I taught my own to read and all were reading well before age 4. An interview with a first grade teacher convinced me and my wife that public school was not the way to go. If your kid already reads and can “sound out” unfamiliar words he is going to have a very difficult time in school everywhere but a very few elite public schools. Such a child is a felt reproach to the teacher and to the system and is by his existence an offense to the other kids in the class.
I taught my four to read at age 3 and got rid of the TV in ‘88. They all read and none of them watch TV.
Yes, I should have written “as ours once was”. I started school in the early 50s but my parents pulled me out of public school because I wasn’t learning to read. The private (military) school fixed that, so the downward trend was in California (at least) fairly early.
My career was teaching in the public schools. I taught history, but the major part of my job was getting the kids to actually read the text. I was a real jerk about it and got textbooks that were challenging for them. I told them (and their parents) that I was going to drag them kicking and screaming into high school. They now thank me for my efforts.
But things are not going in the right direction. I have a set of juvenile books from the 1870s—that most college readers would have difficulty with. My mother got a better 8th grade education in 1932 ( I’ve seen some of her textbooks) than I got in 1960 and my education was miles ahead of what 8th graders are getting today. Even current teachers acknowledge that their education in the 90s was better than what is happening today.
I used an old McGuffey set for my own kids as well as whatever came to hand. Wife was in UF teachers’ college and I was working catch as catch can so we didn’t have much resources for it but we made it work.
I think the military schools stayed serious some time after the public schools had refocused away from education.
an old McGuffey
I have taught many children to read, years ago, and realized even then that standard textbooks and teaching methods seemed designed to make children stupid and hate reading. I used phonetics and did a lot of reading out loud, and other methods.
I am 100% convinced that text books and teaching methods are absolutely designed to create fools who cannot read well, think or learn.
Ayers was very involved in developing textbooks for public schools.
Not so about Chinese and Japanese. In both cases most children learn to read with a phonetic alphabet (pinyin for Chinese, hiragana for Japanese) and then gradually acquire knowledge of the Chinese-style characters. Also, many Chinese characters are compositional, in that they are made up of combinations of simpler characters that hint at the meaning of the composite character. It's not all just memorization of random symbols.
TO REPEAT:
This article is about teaching ENGLISH in the USA schools.
Excellent article~thanks for posting!
Yes, I forgot about that.
Obama's mentor.
Neither of my kids own a TV either.
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