Posted on 09/28/2011 3:17:23 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
A special education teacher wrote to me about the abuse of Ritalin. The teacher said: “My students are on Ritalin. This is a brain shrinking, top tier heavily psychotropic drug, as you know. The authorities KNOW this is their weapon for the most intelligent boys... ”
The teacher believes this is a high-level NWO plot, which is not a road I like to go down. But the teacher got me thinking...
Here are the two parts I’m personally sure of:
1) The Education Establishment in this country, for 75 years, has used bogus methods (i.e., Whole Word) to teach reading. For many millions of children, the result is illiteracy and a COLLAPSE of each child’s confidence, with a concomitant increase in anxiety and misbehavior.
2) A separate set of experts (these are in the psychiatric community) diagnose millions of young children as having something called ADHD. The common treatment for this hyperactivity is Ritalin. Interestingly, according to a government site, “This pattern of behavior usually becomes evident in the preschool or early elementary years, and the median age of onset of ADHD symptoms is 7 years,” which just happens to be the age when children, taught with Whole Word, wake up to the fact that they are falling behind their friends and seem in some way to be damaged.
I would like to think that these two groups of experts are separate and sincere. The thought that the two groups are actually working together is almost too horrible to think about.
Here is my question: does anyone have solid evidence or personal anecdotes that can help illuminate this issue?
(Final thought: Inability to read will usually destroy a child’s sense that he is smart and in control. At the very least, shouldn’t all those highly-paid medical professionals assess the reading abilities of their patients, and then DEMAND that the education experts do more to make sure these children can actually read by the second grade? Even if these groups are separate and well-intentioned, it seems to me you still have a serious dereliction of duty if doctors are prescribing powerful drugs to children without understanding the actual cause of their anxiety and misbehavior.)
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(For more on why Whole Word causes illiteracy, see “42: Reading Resources” on Improve-Education.org.)
http://www.improve-education.org/id65.html
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Simple as compared to suffixes/affixes, grammar rules, etc.
“Whole word” reading is also known as “whole language” reading. I call it guess-reading and my youngest son was really bad at it. The eldest learned phonics and knew how to read before the first grade. I had to teach the youngest to read myself or he would not have learned.
When I got upset that he was not learning read in second grade they tried to push drugs on him and name him learning disabled. We cleared out and did homeschool for some years.
“I had to look it up, because I don’t have kids. “Whole Word” sounds like a horrible approach to me. Seems to me, and I am just going by my gut so perhaps I am no help at all to the question asked, but seems to me that teaching people phonics is the better approach. Whole Word will come once people know their phonics.”
Your “gut” is MUCH BETTER at judging educational materials than the nearly $1 Trillion educational establishment...unless they KNOW what you sense (which is what I strongly suspect), and why I’m so contemptuous about them).
So you taught her phonics. :)
Eventually, yes. It's necessary, IMO, to reading and writing.
Look, I'm not knocking phonics as a means of teaching reading. I'm just saying that those who say "whole word" reading (as I understand it) doesn't work are full of it.
I am arguing that your approach was not ‘whole word’.
Whole word takes away the audio and leaves you just the pictures.
Well thanks for that. I'm not quite sure that yours is an accurate description, but I'm always willing to learn. If you've got any helpful links explaining the differences I would appreciate it. It might help get this "sheepish grin 'cause I'm wrong" off of my face quicker.
Meanwhile, doing a little looking around shows me that what I was using is probably holistic word recognition instead of whole word reading. Even after all of this time I find that I'm still in need of refresher courses in some things.
“But perhaps I am off track for what this thread is about. Don’t mean to derail it.”
With your instincts, I wish you did have kids, it would have been a blessing to the country.
“BS! The first word I read was from a sign in a commercial! “
You’re cracking me up. I was having an argument with the wife, with me saying junior could read, and she saying he can’t (he was 3). So I pointed to a McDonald’s sign, and he read it perfectly. She didn’t buy it. LOL.
“Perhaps you should modify your statement. Maybe...Whole word does not work for my kids.
It does work, no matter what you say as my kids are living proof that it does. The problem is that it doesn’t work well in institutional settings.
I taught my kids to read, not the public schools. “
Your kids must have an AMAZING memory. As stated in the article, they can now recognize 100,000 words by sight (in all forms), assuming college level. And to think they could NEVER sound out a word...because that would show they learned PHONICS somewhere along the way...can’t do that, now can we.
A Shrink told me one time the easiest way he found to tell if Ritalin would in fact help was to give a kid suspected with having ADD ADHD a caffine pill and watch the child too see if symptoms changed. Now when I was a kid they thought I had it. I can drink 6 Cokes a night and it won't do nothing to me. But I can hear certain frenquency noises and I about go through the roof.
Actually I have seizures {strong upper torso spasms} but not in the form most persons recognize as being such. They are called Myoclonic. The thing about it except in very extreme cases like mine a C.A.P.D. diagnoses means $0 to the drug companies. I didn't have to start taking meds for this till I was in my mid thirties. The doctors tried antidepressants which was a huge disaster.
“Someone who knows phonics, will write down what I did. Unless they are taught that berd = bird, they aren’t going to be able to decode it. You have to start with the sounds.”
Wow, I never thought we’d find someone on this site arguing for whole word. You’re lucky to even find them on left-wing sites. I suspect the real supporters are the education establishment, and they have their own-password protected sights where they strategize on how to deal with trouble-making parents (similar to Journalist). This guy almost sounds like a troll, but I suspect he simply doesn’t understand the difference, and actually did teach his kids sounds (or someone else did). They certainly wouldn’t be reading by now otherwise.
Well thank you for those compliments. I may yet have kids, I’m not too old and neither is my bird!
“Well thank you for those compliments. I may yet have kids, I’m not too old and neither is my bird!”
You’re welcome and go for it...you’ll be happy you did so.
Having been on ADHD medications myself, (Adderall and/or Ritalin)for more then 15 years, I can tell you a few things about it categorically that may or may not be of interest to you.
First, While ADHD meds are commonly referred to as “speed” on the street by individuals who are not afflicted with ADHD, anyone suffering from it will attest to the fact that it has the opposite effect for us. It does not speed our thoughts or actions as it would for an individual without ADHD. It slows us down enough to be able to focus on a task long enough to see it through to completion. It enables us to resist impulsive bouts of word vomit at inappropriate times, often with irrelevant subject matter, and helps our brains slow down enough that we can respond intelligently to a post such as this one, without slipping into numerous side rants which have little to do with anything truly relevant to the topic.
For some, my daughters and myself included, it means the difference between a lifetime of fluttering from job to job never really understanding why nothing seems to really “fit” us, or being able to excel in positions befitting our often higher level of intelligence. None of which could, in even the most far reaching theories, be considered affects of a “top tier heavily psychotropic drug” by any stretch of imagination.
While I believe ADHD is often misdiagnosed, I believe your theory is profoundly off the mark. Your claim that medications like Ritalin and Adderall are “heavily psychotropic drugs” responsible for the growing illiteracy epidemic is, unfortunately typical of someone without first hand experience with either ADHD or the medications that treat it.
To those of us with ADHD, these medications are equally as essential, life saving, and relevant to our being productive members of society, as insulin is to a diabetic, or pain medications are to an individual suffering from rheumatoid arthritis, or fibromyalgia.
A more convincing argument to explain the lack of reading ability, and poor self esteem you describe might be the lack of parenting skills exhibited by many, the deliberate dumbing down of our children via academia, along with the fact that little, (if any) sense of personal responsibility, or accountability for ones own actions,(or lack there of) are currently being taught by many parents, or teachers.
We have become a society where, very often our kids are held to ridiculously low standards and expectations, and even with those lowered expectations, those same kids are provided any number of ready made excuses to fail. I.E “Janey can't be expected to turn her homework in on time because her mom makes her do chores at home, and watch her brothers and sisters.” Or “Jimmy's dad makes him mow the lawn, shovel snow, or sweep the garage, AND>>> GASP... clean his room too! On top of that, he had to spend three hours debating which is better, WII or Nintendo online last night, so he shouldn't be expected to turn in his homework on time, or at all for that matter!”
The fact is, children learn what they live. If they live with little or no expectations, they will deliver nothing, and probably expect others to spoon feed them all their lives.
If they live with reasonably high expectations of behavior, productivity, manners and morals, chances are pretty good they'll grow up to be productive, morally sound, capable members of society, who work, can read, add, subtract, multiply, divide, as well as speak and write in proper English.
Sorry, but the blame doesn't lie with the meds on this one.
" READING and RITALIN "
was misleading and did not match the source you linked. We have replaced it with the published title.
Please always just use the published title at whatever source you link.
You actually have physiological symptoms. In the case of ADD/ADHD the symptoms are are vague and subjective. Giving someone a pill and observing behavior change doesn’t establish anything. I can give anyone who is normal caffeine, amphetamines, or Xanax and change behavior. If the normal person is tired and takes caffeine, for example, he will feel and function better. Nevertheless, it would be absurd to conclude that the person had a mental illness that required treatment by caffeine or that indicated a caffeine deficiency. Instead, what you have is someone who needs more sleep. Similarly, changing behavior by drugging with Ritalin does not demonstrate that there is a mental illness or a Ritalin deficiency. ADD/ADHD is a bogus diagnosis that was concocted to persuade parents to medicate their children to maintain order in schools because traditional discipline has disappeared in many homes and all government schools.
This is a diagnosis that is simply a way to eliminate what the school deems bad behavior by medication. Critics point out that this so-called mental illness goes away in the summer.
This may explain why I have never met a homeschooler ( who has been homes schooled from the beginning) who has had ADHD or ADD.
“As I stated in reply #64 I did teach her (and my son, though not stated there) phonics. It was easier to teach them that aspect of language after they got a better grasp of words to begin with.”
Well then I consider your post now corrected, and while your kids played around looking at words, they wound up being taught reading properly - good job.
Here’s some light reading as to how California literally lost A GENERATION of kids to Whole Language. It is DESTRUCTIVE AS HELL and anyone who claims that reading can be learned that way is simply evil.
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/97nov/read.htm
A lot of people here have school-aged kids, and when they are told by the so-called teachers not to worry about whole language or sight words, I don’t want those teachers getting ANY support here.
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