Posted on 06/27/2013 6:07:55 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
In first grade the child comes home with lists of sight-words to be memorized. It’s a struggle. As fast as he memorizes new words, he forgets the previous words. Well before the end of the year, he is officially identified as a weak reader. The mother suffers more than the child does. The teacher says the school is is doing everything it can; the parents must do more.
In second grade, the child is a bad reader and is very conscious of it. If he memorize words in a list, he doesn’t recognize them in a story. The teacher mentions the need for intervention. This boy is miserable, but the teacher seems to think it’s perfectly normal that half the class should be “below proficient.”
In third grade the child is failing all subjects. He is depressed, anxious, belligerent. The school psychiatrist says he is suffering from ADHD and needs medications. He cannot read so he cannot do word problems in math. Of course, he cannot read history, science, current events, geography or anything else. He is a mess.
All of this failure falls with special weight on the mother. She must deal with the home work, and the conferences with teachers. She must live with the bad news. In the evening the parents stare at each other and wonder which one has the defective gene that now been passed to this child? The parents wonder which of their various relatives is the retarded one? For surely the boy is retarded. He can’t do the simplest thing: he can’t read.
The mood in the house is damaged. The marriage is subtly eroded. Nothing is as much as fun as it might be if all the children are more or less average in school. A kid who can’t read and can’t learn is like having an amputee or a leukemia victim, something that changes everything around it. Neighbors can’t immediately see a non-reader, of course, but the family knows. Oh, they know.
In fourth grade and fifth grade, the boy has mostly given up doing whatever it is they’re asking him to do. He just does not get it. Apparently he is supposed to memorize many hundreds of words as logos. He can’t. Many children cannot memorize even 100, even 50.
In fact, the parents themselves have never understood why the child is supposed to memorize sight-words, or what the teachers and principal mean when they say that reading is about guessing, reading from context, picture clues, phonemes, bringing meaning to the page, and lots of other mysterious jargon. Reading has become a sort of alchemy. But their boy remains lead.
Both parents remember reading as children, and loving it. Their friends could read. Maybe not in the first grade but certainly in the second, third and fourth grades. Reading was easy and fun, But now their child is finishing fifth grade and is a hopeless failure. Some days he’s the class clown. Some days, the class bully. He does not like what the world is doing to him and he is showing that in any way possible.
In sixth grade, the school announces that his RTI (response to intervention) is inadequate. The child now has dyslexia. More Ritalin is the only sensible solution. Mother is so upset she’s seeing a therapist and is taking some pills herself.
The reading methods that are used in most public schools seem almost perversely designed to hurt the health of children and families, and to create greater demand for pharmaceuticals. These methods, being ineffective, create a second, very lucrative educational system called remediation. Lots of people are making big bucks from damaged children.
Seventh grade, eighth grade, the child falls further behind. Ninth grade, tenth grade, more of the same. Nothing is learned. The boy is thoroughly humiliated and defeated. He drops out of school.
What, the parents wonder, will become of a child who can’t read? What kind of jobs can such children get? All those long, wasteful, embarrassing years spent in school, but they hardly seem to add up to a day’s worth of education. It’s a mystery, depressing, and beyond recourse, apparently.
Talk about a war on women? The Education Establishment knows all about that. There’s little going on in the public schools that isn’t a war on women. Do children learn to read fluently? No, it’s exceptional if they do. Do they learn to do arithmetic? No, they bring home the most absurd methods (partial quotients, lattice, etc.), all kinds of strange things the parents can’t understand or explain. Do children learn the most basic information? No, schools don’t seem to teach all that stuff about 1492 Columbus discovered the ocean blue and the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. Kids don’t know even elementary facts.
Parents find themselves wondering, what do their kids know? They look at the people that Jay Leno finds on Jaywalking? Our kid, they agree, has a good chance of being on Leno’s program in a few years. He’ll look foolish.
Their boy is a drop out. Unemployed and almost unemployable. Mother suffers every day for the luckless child. Why, she wonders again and again, did this happen to him?
CODA: the US is said to have 50,000,000 functional illiterates. Most could have learned to read if taught properly. Most, like this hypothetical boy, were not taught properly. It’s a national scandal, one that especially demoralizes women.
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Related article: "Reading Wars Still Damage Many Children"
http://www.examiner.com/article/reading-wars-still-damage-many-children
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I remember reading about a study that was conducted where they had volunteers work with children after school having the children read to them. And what they found was that the children’s reading improved rapidly, meaning that the main problem most children have is that they are learning to read, however they are not practicing enough to build solid skills.
At least she can write.......
Your kid taught himself phonics.
As I teacher I teach phonics exclusively. Working with Latin + Greek with grade 8s. Teaching them how to break down scientific terminology in order to understand it.
Public schools? What public schools.
Reading is simply teaching the kids to decode what they already know. They understand the sounds. They need to be able to attach the sounds to the words.
What kid? I don’t have one.
Exactly.
When my girls were little I bought a set of flashcards which were the 330 most common words. I sorted through them, picking out those which were phonetically spelled.
Only when the girls had mastered this did I begin introducing the words which were exceptional.
When my youngest started kindergarten, my wife and I suggested that she be transferred to a first grade class. The teachers and principal assured us that it was unlikely that this would be in her best interest, so we allowed them to have their way.
About four weeks later we got a call from the school. They recommended that our daughter be transferred to a first grade class. It seems that our daughter was distracting some of the class by reading to them during their play times.
As some have pointed out, there are people who have no trouble memorizing the words they need to read. Those who can't do this are being victimized by education charlatans who think one size fits all.
That was exactly my experience. I had no problems learning to read whole words. Once I discovered Hardy Boys novels there was no turning back.
Still, unlike some aggressive Phonics proselytizers, I am willing to accept that others may learn differently than I do.
This is one of the reasons why parents are leaving the public schools in droves. Home schooling is growing 7 times faster than public school enrollment.
We have a large home schooling population in my town (who knew?) and our schools are supposed to be “excellent.” The classical charter school in a neighboring county has poor, immigrant children who do better on their tests then our county’s wealthiest, top-rated town.
People are getting fed up and doing something about it, and the public schools are going to go begging.
As I said, I have nothing like a photographic memory,quite the opposite - so please stop repeating that meme. You are coming on like a fanatic.
I call what you say nonsense - bordering on lunacy - because not one person I grew up with ever had a reading problem. Not one. And some of them came into school not even speaking English, the children of Polish, Japanese Yugoslav and French diplomatic staff. They were all speaking and reading English within six months.
Don't I wish.
Sorry, but we don't all belong to your religion.
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