Posted on 01/02/2012 7:18:49 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
GOOD INSIGHTS ON WHY MILLIONS OF KIDS CAN'T READ. (A FOLLOW-UP FOR ANYONE INTERESTED IN EARLIER POST TITLED "FAKE READING THEORY IS THE SLAVE TRADE OF OUR ERA.")
The country continues to be plagued by illiteracy. The reason is simple. The country continues to be under the heel of some of the most reckless and reprehensible “experts” imaginable.
They make little children memorize the SHAPES of words, which most little children simply can’t do. Ergo, these children experience major reading and cognitive problems.
Don Potter, the phonics guru and as well a teacher in Texas, recently sent me this illuminating note: “This has been a banner year for me. I have rescued dozens of students from the clutches of the sight-word monster. I am looking forward to rescuing more in the year to come. The parents marvel that I have been able to improve their children's reading with phonics in a very short time. They are also very upset to learn that their children were suffering, not genetic defects that screwed up neural pathways, but old fashioned artificially induced whole-word dyslexia caused by sight-word instruction. Every student coming to me has a copy of the Dolch Sight Vocabulary List in their Homework Folder.”
Note that the parents had embraced the idea that their kids were mentally impaired (dyslexic) but are now shocked to find that the kids are normal! (In fact, it’s the school that is mentally impaired.) There in a few dozen words is the whole story of dyslexia in our time. Parents and kids accept the school’s nutty diagnosis but in many cases will be angry with you if you tell them, sorry, you’re fine but you are the victim of a hoax. (I have a video on YouTube called "The Strange Truth About Dyslexia." People leave really violent comments on it.)
QED: the Dolch Sight Vocabulary List should be removed from every school.
Now, I want to give you a little more detail about the reading debate...but not too much! Reading theory quickly becomes murky; and I believe our Education Establishment uses the general confusion to keep their bad ideas in play.
Happily, I’ve found an excellent way to explore some of the subtleties. Raymond Laurita was a major crusader 40 years ago; in 1967 he published an article titled “Errors Children Make in Reading.” I’ve cut his article down to the best parts; and I promise you will be glad you read them. They explain how Sight-Words do their evil work:
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On hearing the errors of these unfortunate children, the first impulse is to attribute them to a lack of intelligence or even some form of mental aberration. The linguistic monstrosities these children perpetrate appear to be without semblance of logic or consistency...
The primary cause of reading difficulties in virtually all of the over 700 cases of reading disability I have treated over the years was related to difficulties the child encountered in attempting to cope with the problems imposed by whole configurations....
When a child is exposed to a whole word configuration such as “could” for example, without sufficient preparation, we are literally opening a Pandora’s Box of possible confusions....
To the immature child who hasn’t developed adequate visual and auditory identity and association between individual language symbols and the words they form, the word “could” will undoubtedly be confused later with a variety of configurations; among them: cold, called, cloud, canned, cooled, clawed, cord, would, should, etc....It isn’t difficult for the more than casual observer to understand why so many children become reading problems. They simply cannot cope fast enough with the need to learn numerous and unrelated whole word configurations on a purely visual basis.
It must be remembered that children who learn by the sight method, and this constitutes the majority of children in the United States, have been scientifically conditioned during the initial exposure period to a learning experience which by its very nature elicits a purely visual response to a configuration without assistance from auditory clues. No sincere educator can pretend that this initial exposure period hasn’t a most profound and enduring effect on the immature child, for by a series of carefully arranged stimulus-response activities, he has been literally conditioned to a visual, configurational attack on language. The result is inevitable.
The argument of those who persist in exposing all children indiscriminately to a visual configurational attack is usually based on post-facto reasoning, for they tend to cite the large numbers of children who have learned to read without first making auditory and visual associations with the individual letters of the alphabet. It is my belief and that of others that children who learn to read using a gestalt approach which exposes them to whole word configurations at the outset, are children who have had either prior preparation which prepared them for the experience or are those children gifted with better than average capacities of visual perception, discrimination and memory....
Alex Bannatyne writing in The Disabled Reader, states “This latter method, commonly called look-and-say, may be effective with those two thirds of first- and second-grade pupils who are sufficiently gifted in the realm of language to be able to learn to read quickly. I believe that these verbally capable children rapidly teach themselves to analyze words phonetically in spite of a deliberate non-phonetic approach on the part of the teacher. That this is so can easily be tested by asking children who have learned to read well using the look-and-say method to sound out difficult words; this they usually do quite competently....”
The subtlety and infinite diversity of the errors that the child becomes subject to in his developing confusion have to be seen to be believed....
Another example saw a child respond to the word “grab” with the response “drag.” This is an extremely common type of error for it has in addition to the visual confusion an overlay of confused auditory association. The consonant blends gr and dr are extremely difficult to differentiate for the child with inadequate auditory perception and discrimination. The two sounds are very similar as are the lip movements which are made to create them. In addition to the auditory confusion and the close configurational pattern of the two words, the child was also reversing the initial and final consonants. This child also referred to a “furry” animal as a “funny” animal and read about a character who went swimming in the “winter” instead of in the “water.” Both of these errors had a configurational base with the error involving the words furry and funny complicated by a discrimination confusion between the n and the r. This child also made the following progression in mistaking the word “Oh.” He went from oh to on to no and finally concluded the series with not.
These confusions are not extreme examples of severely disabled children but are instead rather common samples that every remedial teacher will meet on a given day if the time is taken to record the mistakes children make.
Often a child will read a sentence such as: “The little boy went into the jungle and saw a big giraffe.” and substitute for the last word: elephant, rhinoceros, hippopotamus or even dinosaur. Most adults fail to realize the subtle yet logical cause for this kind of mistake. It is really very logical for the child who has been conditioned to respond to visual stimuli. He isn’t thinking in terms of auditory clues, rather he is sure only that the little boy has seen some kind of large jungle animal. Unless he is a capable, linguistically talented child, his auditory associational training hasn’t prepared him for a total attack on the word, thus why shouldn’t it be a hippopotamus, elephant, rhinoceros or even a dinosaur. They are all “big” words in terms of size; they are all large animals and to the small child the possibility of a dinosaur residing in the depths of the jungle is a distinct possibility....
Observing a child who has lost some of this marvelous human capacity to respond with reasoning and logic, is a terribly depressing sight, and when one considers the number of times that human frailty in the form of faulty teaching and inadequate methodology has been the cause of this loss, the situation takes on the aspects of a tragedy....
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QED: the Dolch Sight Vocabulary List is the reason we have 50 million functional illiterates. It should be removed from every school. All the phonics experts say that children learn to read in the first grade. The Whole Word maniacs say that children will read some day, maybe, perhaps in middle school, but don’t be surprised if they experience ADHD, depression, dyslexia, and chronic illiteracy.
Don Potter publishes this article and many like it on donpotter.net. His site is an archive of historically important material.
My own focus is on providing artillery for parents to use in their daily battles with school administrators. Many of these officials may actually have no idea how far over to the dark side they have drifted. (They make the mistake of trusting the pronouncements coming down from on high.) So send them a copy of this post or the article titled: “Fake Reading Theory is the Slave Trade of Our Era.” (on RightSideNews)
(Improve-Education.org also has 10 articles about reading.)
The pictographs, being a high stylized "picture", does help clue the reader to the meaning of the word. This unlike whole word English where the jumble of letters give no clue whatsoever.
knowing that I don't have the perfect system that will always deliver 100% reading skill for every child all the time.....FateAmenableToChange/p>
From this sentence am I to conclude that you **are* government teacher on one of our nation's socialist-entitlement K-12 schools?
Where are the studies that separate out what is learned in the classroom ( due to the teacher's efforts) and what is learned well before the child enters school due private or home pre-schooling, or outside of school due to afterschooling by the parents and tutors.
Without careful studies, although you may be working very hard, It could be that you are teaching nothing at all.
Thanks for outing him. I guess to survive in that environment you really have to believe all that crap. The ones that don’t - leave.
We need to abolish DOE and Unions
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We need to abolish our nation's socialist-entitlement system of schooling and replace it with a completely private system.
Do that any Bill Ayers and his clones would be out of a job.
“The pictographs, being a high stylized “picture”, does help clue the reader to the meaning of the word.”
Only slightly, and not in many instances. Of course, teachers do try to connect the characters’ shapes with some sort of “story” relating to what they mean. But those connections are more a matter of imagination than any real resemblance.
The trick was to never let school get in the way of your education.
“Bill Honig”
I just discovered that Jerry Brown once again appointed that POS to the State Board of Education last January.
“Honig was convicted by a Sacramento Superior Court jury for using state Department of Education funds to finance a project his wife had created to urge parents to get involved in the education of their children. He had served as schools chief from 1983 until the conviction forced his resignation. He was sentenced to four years of probation and 1,000 hours of community service. The charges were later reduced from felonies to misdemeanor”
Yea, he was HORRIBLE. He took the absolute worst advice possible (i.e., Whole Language) and forced it on EVERY kid in the public schools there. That’s why the term “Whole Language” got so tarnished that they had to go to “Sight Words” to hide from it.
So true!!!! Parents don’t understand how these textbook twists the thinking and logic of their children. It is inserting lies and half-truths into their foundational thinking-—their worldview becomes that of a hedonist/atheist/Marxist. Works 80 % of the time-—only some kids’ parents are able to counter the psychology inserted into the books......it is immersed in BF Skinner techniques that are highly successful in “forming” “truth” which comes right out of the Communist Manifesto.
The media uses psychology also to inject the “correct” perceptions of the masses—they dress evil up with beautiful actors and glorify it. Evil becomes cool—and dysfunctional behavior becomes normal.
The MSM is dangerous. Schools are training children (Prussian system) to be conditioned and for mass conformity and dependence-—killing the individualism and the “thinking outside the box” which existed before Dewey—the Fabian Socialist destroyed our education system.
That POS is hired to force sodomy into the minds of 5 year old kids—to corrupt their sexual identity formation—to make the sex act meaningless—which makes morality in sex non-existent....and the Bible “hate speech”. They want to take God out of our Constitution-—so they can kill off babies and the old and sick—in their Marxist utopia. Can’t have some people matter more than others in the utopian state....got to be able to kill off useless eaters.
Comes right out of the Communist Manifesto—to destroy the Natural Family-—destroy all biological connections-—to make the State, mommy and people hate their own mothers and fathers and men and women.......No trust in communist nations.....so you have to turn to the nanny state.
And here we have your cult-like mentality showing its stripes. Alternatively, you've been brainwashed to the point that your system is good and all others are communist plots. Do you even read what you and your fellow travelers are saying? And as a last alternative, you're just practicing sales tactics. As I said at the beginning, the mentality you display is disturbing. You come off as a slick, Kevin Trudeau-like scammer with the false pity. This, in turn, makes you about as credible as the John Bircher buttonholing pregnant women into not vaccinating their babies because it's all a government mind control plot.
Dumbest thread ever.
We already know you have vested interest.
...but just what do I gain by supporting Phonics?
Interesting too that you never seem to provide ONE SINGLE BIT of evidence that Whole Language has any value...you just call anyone who opposes it an idiot.
Hell, why are you even on this site, if you’re that far to the left as far as education is concerned?
Yes. It is to prevent mindless drivel and kooky conspiracy theories mixed with otherwise valid scientific fact being passed off as truth. Obviously, since that's what you've been doing here, my agenda involves pointing out that your car-salesman tactics, like all good lies and indoctrination programs, contains just enough truth to make it palatable. The rest belongs with the folks who believe the moon landing was faked.
You do realize you’re looking like a jackass.
But then again, you are and have always been THE PROBLEM.
Fact: NO studies have ever been done to determine how much is learned in the classroom as compared to that learned **in the HOME** due to the afterschooling efforts of the parents and child.
Honestly...Without knowing where learning is happening and who ( parent teacher or child) is doing the teaching anything any government teacher has to say about science as applied to teaching methods has no more substance than a big ball of cotton candy.
Now you're just back to ad hominems, unfounded assertions, and guilt by association. I guess when you can't defend your blind faith that one, and only one system for teaching reading is the one true system, or that anyone daring to suggest that a pure phonics based system does not work for everyone in every case, then logical fallacies must be pretty comforting.
Here's my problem with what you're doing. Actually, it's several problems. One is that you don't have any facts about me or what I do, and yet you assert repeatedly that I must be a government school employee and that I have an "agenda". If you bothered to read, you would at least suspect that this is not true from the fact that I homeschool my kids. You know nothing else about me. You don't know the mixture of phonics and dolch card work that finally broke through with my youngest. You don't know the work or research I've put into reading, math, language, grammar, science, and other curricula. You just continually demonstrate your ignorance and inability to engage in civilized discourse time and again with every post you make in response to me. As a result, I'll be civil but I'm sure not going to have any respect for your arguments or your credibility.
Two is that you write like a Kevin Trudeau scammer. That's why I think you may be practicing your sales techniques. There are schools using primarily phonics-based curricula. And with respect to one of the more infamous phonics programs marketed to homeschoolers and unknowing parents, many are still wondering why their child still can't read and those 100 lessons were not "easy" in any sense of the word.
Three is an alternative to two. You and your fellow travelers have been deliberately implying throughout this thread that anyone who did not adopt your one true faith is a bad parent. Maybe that's how you get your jollies. That one really pisses me off. Achilles2000 had one good post in this entire thing that actually attempted to address many of the critiques asserted against the bald and rambling manifesto that started the thread. Besides that, anyone who disagrees with you gets a response that strongly resembles the way I've seen JWs or Mormons sadly and pityingly correct the unsure, insecure, or undecided. The false pity and the attacks on people who disagree with you are not convincing me of the rightness of your opinion.
Fourth is the worst. The devolution of this thread into communist plot conspiracy theory mongering gives people who actually are involved in bettering the system or opting out of it altogether a bad name. The thread reads like it was scripted by a bunch of kooks, again with Achilles2000's post and honest attempt at discourse excepted.
It's sad - looking at your tag line, we probably agree on many things.
“Now you’re just back to ad hominems, unfounded assertions, and guilt by association...Two is that you write like a Kevin Trudeau scammer. “
LOL - pretty much all I needed to read from your post. You are really whacked out. And yes, you are one hell of a crappy parent if you really believe the crap you spout. I feel for your kids.
Oh, my gosh. No, wait. I actually don't realize that. Nor do I accept the assumptions underlying your assertion. Perhaps you merely have a highly reflective and mirror-like computer monitor?
Let's keep recapping.
Your point (and that of your fellow travelers): Phonics-based systems are the only possible and true and correct way to teach reading. Everything else is a communist plot. (No, really. You guys really said that.).
My point: Not even the very bestest of the bestest pedagogical systems in the whole world will reach every child every time. Sometimes, some children benefit from approaching the problem of learning in a different way. (And I agree that John Dewey followed a political ideology indistinguishable from some forms of communism. But I just don't buy the communist plot thing.)
It's a pretty basic logical distinction. You all say all. I say some. All that it takes to show you're wrong is one null reader for whom a pure phonics system did not work but a different system or a mixture of phonics and a different system did work. I know from personal experience and my own studies that you're wrong. Probably not terribly wrong, and in a rational discussion we might even manage to agree that the demands of mass producing readers means that a phonics-only curriculum might be the most efficient means with the least spoilage. But we're not in that discussion; we're in this one, and you're wrong as a matter of logic.
That's it. And yet all you've done is call me names (that's called an ad hominem), assert -- with absolutely zero factual foundation (remember what they say when you "assume"!) -- that I am a left-winger, a stoolie for the educational establishment, a whole-words acolyte of the 9th order, and so on. And you deliberately make other people feel bad because they disagree with you. Finally, you (again without any foundation at all), throw in calumnies that I am associated with bad people like government educators or that I must actually be one of them evil, bad, communist plotting, George Sorosing public school educators. (That's guilt by association).
On top of that, your buddy, Wintertime is whinging out there about how I want to force everyone onto a whole words pedagogy. (That's a strawman argument). I think I've said previously in this eminently tiresome thread that I agree that a phonics-based system is the most important core around which language instruction should be based. Where we disagree is with your assertion that other methods cannot supplement phonics.
Your attacks are starting to just get silly. Now, come on. Call me names again.
Thanks, this is bizarre, on this site, having someone defend something with the history of Whole Language...and defending it to the point of near-insanity. I don’t know what’s happening to our site...but it’s a bummer for people trying to get reasonable information.
“pedagogy”
You realize that you’re giving yourself away with terms like that. No normal person uses it - only education insiders.
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