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.
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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)
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My eldest son learned to read by age 5. He just took to it.
The youngest was still not reading at the middle of second grade and had forgotten the phonics I had taught to him before he began herd school. I had to pull him out of the zoo and teach him to read.
Teachers are mostly highly educated. Nevertheless, on the whole, their work product quality declines year after year. This despite the dumbing down of requirements that has taken place in the last say 50 years.
The basic problem with teachers is not whether they are sufficiently educated or intelligent, it is that they are liberal and secular humanist in their worldview. They are collectivists, sheeple of the NEA.
Their main concern is money. Nevertheless on the whole, education spending has become inversely proportional to achievement.
The root problem is not teachers, per. se. It is that teachers are a reflection of part of us, our nation, our society. We, as members of this society have done this, we have forgotten God and taken the wide road. We think we know what to do, and how to do it. We seek to be educated, but the result is a lack of wisdom, virtue, self restraint, all the desired results of “education”.
Our representatives are a good example of this. All of them highly educated, yet nearly all of them turn out to be cretinous slaves to pride and are utter moral cowards.
Teachers are drawn from the society in which they exist. If that society is increasingly liberal, then the teachers drawn from that society would be as well. But teachers take their marching orders from their administration, and the administration now has to take THEIR marching orders from people far outside the paradigm of education, but very much within the paradigm of a lack of moral character---politicians and businessmen. Teachers do NOT take their values or marching orders from their unions unless they are a complete empty vessel. From what I heard from fellow teachers during the latest discussions of the new contract, plenty of them do not now or would ever qualify for a label of "sheeple," myself included, as the unions increasingly sell their members out and join hand in hand with the corrupt politicians against their own teacher constituents! You would have people believe that teacher unions snap their fingers and their teachers blindly obey. That is hardly the case!
It is also quite true that there has been a fundamental breakdown of the nuclear family, with moral values and character not being taught in the home. How else to account for teachers being told to "suck my di_k" by students, being told "f___ you", being told "I'm gonna find you after school and jump yo a__? Or being spit on, having objects thrown at them? No one in the previous generation would even have dreamt of doing these things.
For you to claim that the desired result of education is a "lack of wisdom, virtue, self restraint..." is ludicrous. These are the results of a lack of PARENTING. The onus of character training has been passed on by the heedless progenitors to the teachers, with the additional restriction that teachers are no longer allowed to discipline students lest they be put up on charges of corporal punishment, as simply raising one's voice or making students feel "nervous or afraid" now qualifies as corporal punishment. The teachers just have to stand there and take all this nonsense, and the rest of the class suffers as their learning time is decimated by the disruptive actions of the poorly-parented.
THERE is the root of your lower scores. Not the teachers.
I claimed no such thing. You misunderstood what I said. Wisdom, virtue, self restraint, etc, are the desired character traits that we want to follow from all this "education". They are exactly what we are NOT getting.
I specifically said that teachers are not the problem per.se. I will say this: Teachers that are members of AFT or NEA yet disagree with the positions of these unions are sheeple and are doing it for the money, simple as that. I don't see teachers protesting their union bosses, administrators, and whatever other PTB that apparently force them to teach sodomy, moral relativism, and secular humanism.
Nevertheless.
Teachers are not in a position to protest against their union bosses-—and then get hung out to dry when they need the union to represent them. Teachers are not in a position to protest against their administrators-—and then be brought up on charges of insubordination. Teachers, like other people, have mortgages to pay, children to support, and the other typical expenses of life. They need their jobs, the same as anyone else. I assure you I did not sign up to teach “sodomy, moral relativism and secular humanism”. I signed up to teach biology. I personally make it a point to present a good moral example, including my attire. I attempt to gently chide inappropriate dress or behavior, but there one is treading on thin ice, because the students have rights—and the teachers increasingly don’t. Students will tell you to your face, “I’m a gonna get you fired, b__ch!” Because they know they can. That is how screwed up things are now, at least in NYC’s public schools. The kids are running the schools and the teachers have to kowtow to them or lose their jobs.
Okay, blessings to you.
If a majority of teachers want to change this, they should band together and make the change happen.
If more than 50% of the union rank-and-file used that “protest” methods that liberals and teachers love to talk about, like, publicizing the problems, having demonstrations, walk-outs, starting “movements”, etc., well, they could “change the world”.
The union would collapse if more than 50% of its members went public on wanting to fix problems and threatened to walk.
If teachers all across the country did this at once, even 1/3 of them, it would start a massive movement that the union would look idiotic alongside if it did not support the movement to end the lack of permission for teachers to discipline students.
You can’t teach without first having students ready to learn, meaning, basic discipline.
All teachers know this; most everyone knows it.
Teachers, like all government employees - always - are looking at a retirement. That’s the big prize. The teacher and all town/city employees get Social Security when they retire PLUS a pension.
Those pensions are the grand prize that teachers keep in mind, why they “lay low” and just PUT IN THEIR TIME.
Yes, the legal system has established this idea that students are running the schools, but no one involved is starting any “MOVEMENT” to bring discipline back to schools.
Tells us all we need to know. The powers that be want this mess, and sheeple are convinced by the dynamics of trying to get by to go along to get along.
I appreciate all the thoughtful comments.
Here’s my up-to-the-minute newscast. On the one hand, there is much good news. Common Core is being rolled back in many places; I hope it will be rolled back until it falls in the ocean.
On the dark side, our Education Establishment, UNESCO, and all sorts of national and global meddlers are plotting every day for how to dumb down the schools even more.
Yes, the General Education Board, circa 1902, is where a lot of the worst nonsense started.
Here is the money quote, at the end of the Wikipedia article:
“In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply…The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are. So we will organize our children and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm.” - General Education Board, Occasional Papers, No. 1.
This is from 112 years ago. And these arrogant twerps are still going strong.
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