It is like working on a puzzle with many pieces. There is a great deal of satisfaction in find a piece that fits.
And...As the puzzle progresses to completion the picture becomes more recognizable and the quantity of remaining pieces is reduced and the picture is finished rapidly toward the end.
So we agree!
Yes, I—a person with little patience for rules— have been DELIGHTED to run into similar anecdotes about kids getting all excited because they grasped some rule.
My brother’s girl friend teaches 4-year-olds; she just told me how much the kids loved arranging themselves in ALPHABETICAL ORDER. Think about that!
Once you get it, you’ve got it forever.
That’s what was so insane about Whole Word. The kids never had anything certain. If you memorize “house” and the next day you see mouse, louse, douse, horse, houses, hound, housed, etc, you can’t be sure if it’s the same word or not. There are no rules, no tools, nothing fixed so you can DEDUCE your own answers. Nothing but memory and that is often unreliable.
Really, Whole Word is like memorizing hundreds of phone numbers. I read that Warren Beatty knew all the phone numbers of his many present and former girl friends. I don’t think I’ve ever known even 15-20 phone numbers at any time. For sure. Then there might be another 15-20 that you get but with one or two digits wrong. THAT is exactly like Whole Word....That’s what life is like for functional illiterates. There are several hundred words they see every day and know for sure (Burger King). But beyond that it’s increasingly a land of uncertainty and guessing.
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