Posted on 06/25/2016 5:55:35 AM PDT by Kaslin
Herewith, a simple way to understand the destructive failure of most reading instruction in the United States.
Consider our eyes. Their purpose is to grasp quickly what objects are: food or predator, useful or irrelevant? This is often a matter of life and death. How do eyes do their job?
Eyes twitch, jerk, and flick rapidly from detail to detail in order to identify an object. There are no built-in sequences, no shortcuts. The eyes must twitch – perhaps dozens of times – until a positive identification is made. The technical term for these twitches is a saccade (which rhymes with façade).
Many such eye movements occur every time you see a car, painting, building, celebrity, insect, etc. Your eyes flick top-to-bottom, side-to-side, point-to-point, finding more and more details until the brain is certain.
Scientists can track these eye movements. It's remarkable how much activity is required to identify a single face – that is, to be sure it's not a similar face. The eye might go to the ears, then nose, then lips, back up to the hairline, and around again. There might be 10, 20, or 30 saccades before you confidently decide, "This is Mary in accounting."
When the first symbol languages were introduced, such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, nothing changed. A picture of a bird is the same as a real bird, from the point of view of the eyes making sense of it. Designs such as Chinese ideograms are again the same thing. Hieroglyphics were objects just like birds and flowers.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I am a high school teacher, of 26 years, in an urban area. The problem...no one fails. If you fail any student, you better have your ducks in a row, and in most cases, after the teacher is called on the carpet, the student mysteriously passes anyway, grade is magically changed, (guidance counselors, deans, administrators, etc.) No one fails, thus no one learns. Well, not really, but the feral type use school much like a shopping mall, a place to eat, socialize, play games, disrupt the public, create havoc, plan a party, have sex, do drugs, sleep, steal, and then use public transport to get back home.
Watch the head of a skater spinning. They keep the head pointing in one direction as the body turns. At the end of a turn the head snaps around to catch up to the body
One of these days I’m going to get around to reading Finnegan’s Wake.
Or so I’ve been saying the last 30 years or so :)
Thanks, you too!
Subvocalizing limits you to about 5000 words per minute—which is still ten times faster than a “fast” reader. In the speed reading course it was a wall that some could not get through. It was explained to us like this—when you see a stop sign, do you have to say “stop” to yourself before understanding it’s message? No your brain understands it without “hearing” it. I think subvocalizing is a remnant of how we first learned how to read—reading out loud. When we were taught to “read to ourselves” we just thought the words. If you hold your throat while you read, you can feel the muscles working away.
DING DING DING!!!
My brother is an elementary school teacher. Plenty of kids are being raised today in homes that own not a single book by parent(s) who believe the education of their children is the sole responsibility of professional teachers.
Grasping at thin air...? Poor teaching at home and at school. .....P.or P.?
Learning phonics provides a basis to learn multiple languages. The mechanics vary by language, but the principles are stable. Reading Kanji is a different process. You have to build a significant mental dictionary to be proficient. Sight words on steroids.
I read that the American literacy rate - the ability to read and write well - was 98% in 1890. Exactly. When we started homeschooling I realized this, since I have a complete collection of bound Harpers magazines from number 1 on the 1840s to 1900, when the magazine began its' slide into liberal trash.
From that magazine and other books and magazines I figured Americans were the most literate in the mid to late 1800s.
Realizing that the influence for this must have come in the early to mid 1800s I began collecting more school books from that era.
The reason for the success appeared quickly.
I was taught to read in a one room school in Vermont before the state was invaded by the NY, NJ and CT trust fund hippies.
We were taught by an excellent, old rogue teacher who used the phonics she knew. This consisted of the single letter sounds, dipthongs and tripthongs (2 and three letters sounded together).
She (and I) believed there were a lot of words in English you couldn't read using phonics.
There were two sets of phonics rules that fell by the wayside and have been forgotten since the 1840s to 1850s. Those are the silent letter rules and the substitute letter rules.
By using these rules, our younger daughter, who wasn't infected by the public school system was reading at above second year college level at 3rd grade.
This isn't unusual as once you know the rules and have a 1930s or earlier dictionary, you can read anything.
I've had many discussions with so called teachers who use this ridiculous "whole word" program to "teach" reading.
Except for the few rogue teachers, this is a waste of time.
Most are so completely indoctrinated with the propaganda from the colleges that there is no way they will even consider listening to anything a lay person has to say.
There are two books, by Rudolf Flesch, "Why Johnny Can't Read - and what You Can Do About It" in 1955, and "Why Johnny STILL Can't Read" in 1981 that document and explain the sordid money trail that keeps the farce of the whole word program going.
The Whole Word system has kids memorizing 20,000 words like Chinese characters. They are taught to guess at words they don't know by the surrounding context.
Few people are going to remember 20,000 of anything they try to memorize.
When these crippled students hit math, history and science, there are many words not included in the 20,000.
The ignorant reading teachers scoff at phonics as "rote learning". They just look at you like a deer in the headlights when you ask them, well, which would you rather memorize, 20,000 of ANYTHING or 120? There are roughly 120 phonics rules which enable you to read almost ANY word in the english language.
An older dictionary allows you to comprehend it.
I have posted the complete set of rules on one of my web sites in "cheat sheet" form to print out.
Who wants to bother memorizing even 120 of anything? You begin to remember the most used rules as you use them. When you hit a word with a seldom used rule, that's why you have a cheat sheet!
Eventually you pretty much forget you are using the rules, it's just automatic.
The speedy "sight reading" just comes naturally as time goes on.
Many people learn enough phonics from different sources such as Montessori, reading the Bible (an older copy), re-incarnation from a soul that was alive in the 1800s or just figure it out on their own. The rest are out of luck. The inability to read unknown words is what causes many people to have to go to classes to learn just about anything new.
They are unable to read the information they need to figure out things for themselves.
This was particularly obvious when computers were being introduced to our school system.
Almost all the teachers were saying they needed classes on how to operate and use computers.
Several of us asked why they didn't just read the manuals and figure it out like we did?
The reponse was that they couldn't learn that way. Translation, they were unable to read an comprehend the manuals because there were many words they couldn't read.
If enough folks bypass this mess by homeschooling and properly teaching reading, our country may survive.
If not, watch the movie, "Idiocracy". Don't rent it, buy it, you're going to want to watch it several times to catch all the nuances and to show to others.
I was a senior in high school... I had almost all my credits and needed to take some blow off classes.... I have always loved to read, and when I saw a course called “Improved Reading Skills” I figured I had a real blow off course....................... I could not have been farther from the truth.... it was a speed reading class, based upon Evelin wood... I barely passed it... but, I can read 1200 words a minute with a 92% comprehension rate... speed reading is how you flourish in the corporate world...
You’re absolutely right about subvocalization being a relic of voiced reading (reading aloud). I can overcome it if I really work for speed, but it makes a labor of a love. So unless I’m just trying to blaze through something ridiculous like “Ulysses,” I subvocalize and devil take it!
And how does that keep the fluid in the semi-circular canals of the inner ear from sloshing around?
my old tagline...
Why do you need a masters degree to teach 3rd grade math?
One child cracked the code of reading at age 2.5. One did it much later, at 5, and that one had a lot of delays in his intellect. A child will ask for a simple book read to him over and over. He will learn to say the words associated with each picture. He will notice the letters on the page, and most kids will have had exposure to singing the alphabet song and know that the letters have sounds. The famous letter factory video is INFALLIBLE at automatically teaching toddlers the sounds of letters.
So the child will then associate the words he sees with the words he says on that page. Bingo, the pattern starts to crack. And there isn't much sounding out. They just give the words names. If they aren't sure, they assign a different word it might be. When I was three, I remember reading a hilarious book. I had cracked the code a year earlier, so I was reading, but when I came upon a new word, I didn't sound it out, I assigned it a word. The book was called, "How the Squirrel Lost His Patience." I did not understand the word 'patience' so I assigned it the word 'panties.' Like I said, it was a hilarious book!
No harm at all comes from cracking the code. It is dumb to denigrate cracking a code with terms like "sight reading." Damn straight, we read with our sight. The third of my kids mentioned learned to read from school, sounding out words. All three are vitally fluent readers and writers. Don't let people like this author make formal education style learning to read so superior. It isn't.
A rich environment of books, words, and conversation is all your child needs to learn to read. Anything else is fine too, if you can't avoid it, like public school reading instruction or tutoring. No value judgements need be made.
Better is this video.
Every 2-4 year old (wherever the right stage of development is) loves it and automatically learns the sounds the letters make.
Highly recommended and worth every penny.
I like the simpler explanation - reading comprehension is detrimental to the growth of the welfare state.
You get it.
I have followed many kinds of alternative education.
I have experience with different kinds of unschooling families. The kind who let children learn to read on their own, and the kind (like Waldorf / Steiner) who DISCOURAGE learning to read until age 7 or the first adult teeth in.
Kids crack the code when they do. With some unschooling families, some kids will not have even the desire to learn to read until 13-14 years old, but then, because they really want to read something, will learn it fast and fluently. The Steiner discouraging early reading DOES NOT WORK on kids like mine, who cracked the code anyway, without anyone teaching them. Yes, two of my kids learned reading on their own without any input from anyone, other than being read to a lot.
Fascinating subject. I do wish we insisted on kids reading well around age 12, so that kids who do need to wait until,they are 7 or 8 to start will be able to start the age of dilettantism (5-10) feeling confident instead of broken. I hate that about our current pushy, destructive education system. Play is a child’s work. Until age 10, children should be playing and trying activities. They need to be guided to try everything and see what sticks. When they get an interest they should be guided to go as far as they can with it.
My four year old girl plays dinosaur, and tells you that the Spinosauruses are fishing but prefer to eat a yummy Ouranosaurus, but they have to worry about the Rugops attacking. She is also learning to flip and skate. She knows letter sounds and she is starting to pick out words and write some words. No hurry. Every child should be allowed to learn at their own pace but the Education System won’t let them, and parents are forced to use it as their daycare so the kids’ individual needs and desires are ignored.
We both love homeschooling but I disagree with your post. If the people who can’t read manuals had read ENOUGH, for pleasure and interest, they would have been more fluent. You can easily look up words now. Especially if you read books on a kindle. If you spent from ages 13-23 (the education years! Put in that work!) looking up unfamiliar words you find, after 23 you might only do it once or twice a year. Reading a lot is essential to being able to read. Period.
I wouldn’t try to speed read Ulysses! Tough enough to read it nice and slow. Literature, per se doesn’t benefit from speed reading unless you are going to take a test on it. I found the high speed stuff very useful for reading for getting information. Also made reading students’ papers a bit easier—a whole page in a couple of seconds.
I checked out the video on YouTube, it looks great, so I ordered it. Thanks again.
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