Posted on 08/03/2017 1:41:47 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Hundreds of websites broadcast the same misguided message: children must memorize Sight-Words.
This message is false. Probably the most aggressive falsehood is that such memorization is easy to do.
One popular site proclaims this malarkey: “Because many Sight-Words are phonetically irregular, tend to be abstract, have limited visual correspondence, or even easily understood definitions, students must memorize them to read quickly and fluently.”
Note the casual tone: “Students must memorize them.” The school certainly wouldn’t ask children to do something difficult or impossible, would it? Yes, it would! And therein lies the essence of the hoax. In the context of reading, “memorize” means instant recall or automaticity. Achieving this sort of mastery is tedious and difficult. Many children never reach 500 or even 200 Sight-Words, a piddling amount in a language with a large vocabulary.
After years of work, many students are still illiterate, and often suffering from depression, ADHD and/or dyslexia. Why? Because the task—far from easy—is most accurately described as hopeless and humanly impossible.
Consider carefully what English Sight-Words look like to first-graders:
kdkr fmc ntfh dxv fhwp pbx qrnx yhl njk
The children do not typically know the alphabet, which is considered irrelevant. Children are not pronouncing the letters. They are memorizing whole shapes. That’s why this method is called Whole Word. They try to memorize complex graphic designs made up of weird scratchings. There is no logic to any of it. (Another problem is that every English word closely resembles another 10 English words.)
Memorizing Sight-Words is not easy: that is more than half of the hoax right there. How many such designs do you think a child can memorize in a week? The actual goal in many curricula is tiny, a testament to the difficulty of the project.
The goal is typically: three (to five) per week. Obviously the schools know from experience that more than that is not feasible. Three a week means only about 100 in a school year.
Even if the child, presumably with a near-photographic memory, has mastered the words perfectly, the child can read only paragraphs made up entirely of these words. It’s almost a sick joke. (Were the children taught phonics, they would be reading – really reading – before the end of the school year.)
Memorizing Sight-Words is not easy: that is more than half of the hoax right there. The second part of the hoax is that this slow, tedious process rarely leads to literacy.
Every bit of instruction seems to imply that the experts know that children can actually learn to read by memorizing Sight-Words. That is a lie. The experts know from decades of experience that most children will never learn to read with Sight-Words. So there is the complete hoax: first, the process is extremely difficult; second, it is usually doomed to failure.
Here is another way to know that this method is never intended to lead to literacy. Look at the Dolch words for fifth-grade; you will see that these are still fairly easy but essential words, for example, class, heart, grade, none, ocean, ice, train. What sort of reading were they doing in the previous years without access to such words? Not until they reach the sixth grade do they learn admire, love, ad, except, move, fright, light, sigh. The students are 12-years-old and still semi-literate. Except for a few very bright students, total vocabularies are well below 1000 words, often far below.
Sight-Words reduce schoolchildren to the level of American tourists managing to get along in an exotic foreign country. The tourists recognize the words for bar, restaurant, police station, bathroom, etc. They know the logos for nearby stores and products. But only a professor of education would argue that these tourists can “read” the foreign language.
Another fascinating aspect about Dolch words is that there are no proper names. Where, in the Dolch universe, do children learn George Washington, South Carolina, Napoleon and the thousand other proper names typically encountered in geography and history? They don’t!
Remember that Sight-Words, introduced in 1931, were essentially the law of the land for 70 years, without any phonics at all. Sight-Words guaranteed not only illiteracy but thoroughgoing ignorance. That is still a common result.
Nowadays, public schools tend to mix Sight-Words with phonics, often called Balanced Literacy. The child now has one technique for part of the language and another technique for the rest of the language. Both techniques present some difficulties, so the child remains in a schizophrenic dilemma: how do you read the next word? You have to make a decision on what type of word it is before you can decide which technique to use.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress routinely states that the majority (66%) of American fourth-graders and eighth-graders are below proficient. Now you know why.
Education officials claim that one in five students have a language-based learning disability such as dyslexia. Now you know why.
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Price’s next book is “Saving K-12, What happened to our public schools? How do we fix them?” (For information, see his literary site Lit4u.com.)
1) All of them are ( by law) godless in their worldview and curriculum.
2) All of them are a socialist entitlement. All the children who attend are at risk of learning to be comfortable with socialism. Gee! If the voting mob can give the child tuition-free schooling, why not use that same voting mob to get **lots** of “free” stuff?
3) A child in a godless classroom will learn to think and reason godlessly. They must just to cooperate in the godless classroom and do their godless assignments.
4) Children who attend government schools are in danger of being comfortable with the suppression of their First Amendment Rights. Why? Because all government schools strictly control speech, press, assembly, and all government schools establish the religious philosophy of atheism.
5) Children in government schools are in many ways treated like prisoners and are in danger of learning to be comfortable government prisoners. In all government schools, government functionaries control speech, press, and assembly. They even control when their captives ( oops! “students”) can move, what and when they can eat, and when use the rest room. Government school grounds look like prisons and their play areas look like prison exercise yards.
Prove me wrong.
Another Reason to Homeschool
Yea, but since public schools are free, why should I care what goes on there?\
Seriously?
You don’t think what goes on in Public Schools does not impact you and your family??
Some years ago when Ham Radio licenses required proficiency in Morse Code, there were three different levels of proficiency that could be demonstrated.
The lowest level was 5 words-per-minute, which is approximately one letter every two seconds. At this speed, a person can just about count the dots and dashes to determine which letters make up a word.
The next level of proficiency was 13 words-per-minute. At this speed, a person must recognize the pattern of dots and dashes which make up a particular letter without having the time to count the dots and dashes.
Finally, at 20 words-per-minute, a person must hear the sound of complete words or syllables. There isn't time to recognize each and every letter.
Those levels of proficiency described above are a natural progression in skill levels. I can't even imagine the frustration that a person might feel if they were required to attempt understanding Morse Code at 20 words-per-minute if they have not passed through the lower skill levels.
I believe that reading English is similar. One starts by recognizing individual letters and sounds. One then progresses to learning the appearance of whole words, including some which are only slightly phonetic. Mature readers will recognize whole words and phrases and the more advanced readers will not even hear themselves thinking of the sounds of the words. Such a reader simply understands the meaning of the words and phrases withou any attention to the sounds.
I’ve had that discussion with my wife repeatedly. I wanted them to attend a private school...I lost.
I always hated Dick, Jane and Sally, even as a first grader. I mean, who talks like that????
Even worse was doctor Suesse. Those were so insanely stupid, and it always felt like children were being mocked as stupid, like they were incapable of rational talk.
I was always an advanced reader, taught myself to read years before I ever stepped into my first class room. They tried to teach us sight reading in first grade so when the teacher pointed at a word I never really knew if she wanted the word or the letter. I wasn’t going to risk the wrath or mocking of the teacher since her mind was unidirectional and mine wasn’t so I refused to open my mouth and answer her questions.
Thank God I only had to put up with that nonsense for one year. One day the principle had to fill in for the teacher and he taught us words like surprise, and vacation..letters, sounds and all. I actually learned something that day other than “oh, see Sally run”
It’s amazing how so many adults just don’t get kids. But then again, education isn’t the purpose of school. Developing a work force (indoctrination) is. Howuch does a hamburger flipper really need to know, anyway?
Dick and Jane were readers based on phonics. So wasn’t Suess. (I used to live next to Mulberry Street—where he lived for years.)
My daughter had a learning disability where she could not memorize things well...and what did they do? The taught her phonics. She never looked back and graduated from college with Honors.
She still cant do multiplication tables.
Those books are primers. They use common words and they reinforce sounding out. They are not novels! Ha Ha.
I remember when my kids were in elementary school, I had the hardest time getting them to read.
And then we discovered the “Captain Underpants” books. Hey, whatever it takes.
It was the same with me and “Mad Magazine” back when I was that age.
Read to your kids when they're toddlers, I did. My son is now 18, graduated HS with honors and will be starting college in a few weeks. His education started with me reading Dr Seuss books when he was a baby and that gave him a huge head start. Dr Seuss's ABC's defeats "sight words" and "whole language" by introducing the child to the concept that the letters represent sounds, and from there they go on to sounding out words.
Variations of this look say method of teaching reading have been used for 70 years and have always failed. Phonics works yet the education elite keep going back to this failed look say method. No wonder public schools are failure factories
What they describe as sight words is not what the kids are taught in our little local public school.
The sight words they are given are for words like *the*, and *said*, and *are*, words that are in common usage in books and, yes, do not follow the phonics rules.
Our school still teaches phonics starting in kindergarten.
Although, it seems by the time they are in 5th or 6th grade, it has made little difference in their literacy. But I do know the teachers really do try.
In our district they do as much Common Core as is demanded of them, the minimum amount, and supplement a great deal with their own stuff. And the teachers *HATE* Common Core.
Thanks so much. And congratulations on your success.
The thing that people should realize, because it is especially horrible, is that when a school creates students like your sons, they get money from the government under Title I. So they have a very perverse, sick incentive to continue doing a bad job. Of all the bad things in our country, I think this is one of the worst; and you never see it discussed in the newspapers.
Please understand it’s a huge country with lots of local variations. I have to generalize in order to write an article. In fact, Flesch’s book “Why Johnny Can’t Read” came out in 1955, when the damage had become sufficiently bad that millions of people bought the book because they knew there was a serious problem.
QED: You were one of the lucky ones who lived in a district where people resisted Dick and Jane.
Yes, what is motivating them? More and more, I am convinced they know exactly what they’re doing. They want leveling. They want enforced equality, we can put it that way. I believe that John Dewey and all of his gang are best described as Fabian Socialists, carefully undermining things but never talking about it. I’m convinced that the top people are pursuing a brave new world where everybody will be happy and equal and more or less like everyone else. So they’re perfectly willing to sacrifice individualism and individual academic success, in order to create what they consider a more fair society. This is more or less standard socialist thinking. But the dirty trick that occurred in America was that no one was allowed to vote on these matters. The Education Establishment simply schemed in the dark of night and gave us the crummy schools that we now have.
“Prove me wrong.”
Why on earth would I want to do that?
You can believe anything that you want.
.
If we ever have socialized medicine I expect the same.
I had that in school as well, yet still learned to read on my own, mostly out of curiosity. When I was in the third grade, tested reading comprehension was way ahead, and that was considered a problem. This was back in the 1960’s.
I agree! There is definitely an agenda that has been in play for years.
http://www.agendadocumentary.com
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