I'll alert the media.
Posted on 12/13/2014 5:20:29 PM PST by BruceDeitrickPrice
A funny thing happened in school today. Not funny ha-ha but funny as in bizarre and unexpected. Funny as in funny money.
And not just today. Yesterday. Tomorrow. Every day. Every time a school teaches reading in a way that doesn't work.
That's funny, right? You teach reading but somehow nobody learns to read? How funny can you get?
And not just in any one school. No, this epic lack of progress is happening everywhere. Point to a school and you're probably looking at a dead zone literacy-wise. That's funny, right?
A school's first job is to teach kids to read. But somehow our schools have figured out sure-fire ways to make sure children never master this essential skill. Now that's funny, like a guy slipping on a banana peel and breaking his leg.
So here we are with 50 million functional illiterates and every day our schools turn out more. How funny is that?
Kids have been learning to read English for hundreds of years. This used to be routine. It's as easy as A is for Apple.
Somehow we've got a new kind of "educator" and these people have a knack for non-education. They can take a bunch of ordinary kids and fix it so those kids never learn to read. You know what's really funny? These "educators" get paid for this.
How do you recognize these phonies? Easy. They'll tell you that every kid is different and you have to be willing to try a whole range of approaches. Phonics doesn't always work, they say, and isn't right for all kids. So here's their inane solution. Start teaching all these different approaches more or less simultaneously to all the kids, which guarantees confusion and more confusion.
Truth is, kids are essentially the same. The differences are minor. You need to teach all children the letters and sounds of the English language ASAP. There's a lot of consistency and logic. This is reassuring for children. B always stands for the same sound; and every B-word starts with that sound, e.g., beach, bingo, ball, brother, body, etc.
Our Education Establishment often wails, "English is weird and unpredictable." That's their excuse for promoting sight-words. "Oh, alas," they whine, "if only English were perfectly phonetic like Spanish and Italian."
Now let me tell you a really funny story. On the Internet you can find lists of Spanish sight-words, which makes no sense in any logical universe.
Furthermore, a group in Italy contacted me because the schools there were pushing sight-words into the classroom. To teach Italian? Again, this makes no sense unless we're dealing with con artists and fraudsters.
Just last week a teacher in Bosnia, of all places, informed me that they were teaching Serbian with sight-words (and literacy was falling). The teacher explained that Serbian has 30 letters that represent 30 sounds and is thus perfectly phonetic. Again, this development in Bosnia makes no sense unless you have (let's be frank) criminal educators intent on sabotaging literacy.
So you see, the bit about English not being perfectly phonetic is just a trick. They don't care what English is. All they care about is concocting a pretext for introducing methods that don't work. There are many, but sight-words are the preeminent example of a method that doesn't work.
The truth, and it's not funny at all, is that when you study reading theory and practice over the last 80 years, you see evil. You really do. You see teachers asking children to memorize the English language one graphic design at a time. It's not remotely possible except for that rare individual with a photographic memory. Memorizing even 500 sight-words is extremely difficult. But that's almost nothing against the vast multitude of the English language.
So here's the punchline. Children are being asked to put their elbows in their ears, to multiply five-digit numbers in their heads, to fly to the moon. It can't be done, and it's evil to pretend that it can be.
—————————————
If your children come home with lists of sight-words to be memorized, start teaching phonics immediately. (See "54: Preemptive Reading" — http://www.improve-education.org/id81.html)
..
Makes you kind of wonder how in our Founders days, kids learned how to read English and then Latin so that by the time they were 14 they were ready for college.
Public education is nothing more than a jobs program for illiterate dumb unemployable liberal arts majors. Sure there are good teachers. But good teachers can not overcome the idiocy that is the public education bureaucracy. Students are warehoused and indoctrinated to be good little political pawns.
I remember several years ago a football player from Oklahoma State University graduated and later admitted he could not read or write.
Big Education - guaranteeing children fail so that schools can whine, and always get from idiot voters, more money to prevent education failure, which keeps happening over and over no matter how much money they get.
My Daughter is a teacher. She is a good one too.
The one thing which strikes me as odd is she makes over $50,000 a year and thinks she is underpaid. Her husband makes even more and they think they are not wealthy.
How is that even remotely possible? There wasn't a federal Department of Education back then. /sarc
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peabody_Education_Fund
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Education_Board
I'll alert the media.
A school's first job is to teach kids to read. please, the first job of schools today is to sustain the teachers union...
And people like Ben Franklin only attended “schooling” for two years or so....and knew how to “read” before he ever entered “schooling” which never happened to ANYONE prior to the Age of Reason —8 years old. Parents are the first teachers along with older siblings. Pastor Bonhoeffer’s mother never allowed her children to attend the “Prussian” schools until after the age of 7 because the schools destroyed the Soul of German children where Kindergartens were invented-—to destroy loyalty to parents and to force into group think. She hired tutors to come into her home with her supervision. Her many children were all geniuses and never “group” thinkers.
To have a culture where we remove our little children from the Natural Family now, to be formed by strangers or inside artificial institutions of chaos, among immature peers, or sitting in front of a screen to embed Satanic ideas by the Satanic Hollywood......is bizarre and inhumane.
And people wonder why there is no Virtue in children when the Formative years are when Virtue is modeled and habituated by people who love them.
Without that ‘nurture’, children aren’t humanized—it is hard for them to ever be moral human beings....or be able to flourish in long term relationships. All behaviors are modeled and habituated-—as is moral character. And only in the loving (Christian) Natural Family can children understand the healthy interaction of people, and model themselves after their same sex parent and understand the opposite sex—and proper roles for all people and flourishing human interaction, which is embedded in early childhood from the intimate first years of childhood.
John Dewey and the Fabian Socialist knew they had to implement operant conditioning (pragmatism and eliminate God) and get children as young as possible (when the mind was plastic) so they could erase Christianity——so they could create conformists-—collectivists, easily managed, who were only “group thinkers”, incapable of critical thinking (like our Founders) since they would be denied true Wisdom (Classical Education/Bible)-—and all individualism, which is inculcated inside the family unit-—is erased-—so Worldview of Christianity is removed from culture and paganism/Satanism or islamic cultures are the only possible one’s imagined by these ignorant tribal minds, heads full of mush and artificial reality, and lies and misinformation.
The products of our school system are unable to process Truth-—they were never given any.....like D’Souza and many others have documented. Common Core is the total sexualization-—which will result in removal of ALL Christian Ethics-—and a return to the pagan, Satanic lifesyles of the irrational pagans, like Nero—who castrated the boys, married them, and his homosexual orgy buddies.
The Postmodernists wanted to flip Good and Evil in a few generations—to do that, they had to erase all Traditions, the Natural Family (no-fault divorce) and program the next generation-—control all their ideas/Worldview and embed paganism and Satanism when they are young (schooling away from parents/family, movies/TV/music).
Why? Power tends to corrupt and Absolute Power corrupts absolutely. It is the wicked nature of man without God. And it was Christianity which created the Age of Reason and the USA——Individualism-—Natural Rights from God—autonomy. We are made in the image of God. A little Blip in humanity’s history, where peasantry, class systems, serfdom and slavery were FINALLY reviled and rejected with Rule of Law (Higher Law)-—and the elites do not like people who will not take orders and be their slaves. They want total control over the masses....always did. The USA Worldview (Christianity) was the only problem.
As Socrates stated: Without Virtue, there is no Freedom. The Marxists knew to destroy Virtue in children was the easiest methodology to create Slavery, so Lukacs, et al, developed Sex Ed and got control of all media/schools/Laws to destroy the Natural Family and embed Vice in young children.
Remove your children from the government indoctrination centers ASAP.
Home school your children or enroll them in a quality, conservative private school.
Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, it’s time consuming. But these are your kids we’re talking about.
This ping list is for the “other” articles of interest to homeschoolers about education and public school. This can occasionally be a fairly high volume list. Articles pinged to the Another Reason to Homeschool List will be given the keyword of ARTH. (If I remember. If I forget, please feel free to add it yourself)
The main Homeschool Ping List handles the homeschool-specific articles. I hold both the Homeschool Ping List and the Another Reason to Homeschool Ping list. Please freepmail me to let me know if you would like to be added to or removed from either list, or both.
Curricula are no longer determined by teachers. They are dictated by the administration, who got them from the Powers On High. This is a result of politicians and businesspeople poking their noses where they don't belong, manipulating curricula to suit THEIR needs, not the needs of the kids. Teachers have no choice in the matter of what to teach and how to teach it. They must also now waste huge amounts of their time correlating data instead of writing good lesson plans and designing interesting activities for the kids.
Meanwhile, teachers are no longer allowed to discipline students. They are actually at the mercy of students and must curry favor with them, lest they falsely accuse the teacher of things the teacher never did or said, resulting in the teacher being up on charges and in danger of losing their job. Teachers who have the dean remove disruptive students can count on that student being sprung and returned to destroy their class before the ending bell, with the student smirking up a storm, knowing there are no consequences for the damage they did to the rest of the class, disrupting their learning time.
I seriously doubt that YOU would last more than a few minutes in a classroom, particularly an inner city classroom. You want to call people names? Look in the mirror.
My wife is a teacher of 35 years standing. She teaches Special Ed which is the red haired step child of Education and no one in supervisory positions wants to hear anything about it. She gets to actually teach stuff and some of her “learning disabled” kids read and cipher (remember that word?)better than the “mainstream” kids. She does lots of phonics and rote. Rote is what primary school kids’ brains are good for. They don’t figure and reason so well yet but their brains are empty and voracious databanks. A teacher who understands things knows to fill up those databanks with useful information so that when kids’ brains are developed enough to reason they have something to reason about. They actually know stuff.
My husband has been teaching for over twenty years and doesn’t make that much. Where does she teach?
She teaches at a Montessori School in Oklahoma.
LOL
For heaven’s sake! homeschool your children! If you absolutely can’t, take them through the book, TEACH YOUR CHILD TO READ IN 100 EASY LESSONS. The book tells you exactly what to say. A lesson take 10 minutes. There’s no reason not to do several a day. You can do it!
So in other words your complaints prove my point. Thanks!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.