He sat on a think tank at Harvard dealing with the teaching of reading.
Our "professional educators" have a way of taking the simple and making it insanely complex.
We were discussing the method we used to teach reading, from school books from 1830 to 1850.
He couldn't believe we were seeing the results we were.
I brought in our daughter, who was in third grade of homeschooling.
He tested her and found her to be at least at 2nd year college level for reading and comprehension.
I told him we didn't just prove she was a good reader.
We just proved our nation in in deep crap if that was second year college level.
When you read the literature young people read in the 1800s, it’s really obvious. Jane Austen, for example... those were basically young adult novels, and she was writing the initial drafts when she was a teenager herself. Or look at the Bronte sisters. Even college kids today have a hard time following such writing.
I retired from teaching last year after teaching high school science for 7 years. I previously worked in business and raised our kids, so this was a mid-life career change. Going through the education course work for certification was eye opening. Education students are provided with many tools for teaching literacy. We were told to preview the material, relate it to the students' lives, scan section headings with students, read aloud, chunk it, and on and on and on . . . Not once was there a conversation or instruction relating to phonics or individual effort. It was all about how the teacher could make it easier for students who were presumed to be weak readers.
For someone like me who went to grade school in the 1960's, this was very convoluted. My mother taught me to read when I was four (in another language), and our sons learned to read at home before starting school as well. Today's educators seem to go in with the attitude that reading is a great hurdle that most children can't overcome. Indeed, it was my experience that most of my high school students were poor readers. They seemed unwilling to invest effort and didn't know that they could break down words into familiar prefixes, suffixes and roots. The concept of sounding out words was also foreign to them. Sight word instruction and lack of effort have contributed to a crippled generation of readers. Pedagogical malpractice.
“I told him we didn’t just prove she was a good reader...We just proved our nation in in deep crap if that was second year college level.”
I kind of say the same thing, in a demented way. Our kids are NOT geniuses, or even close to such, but they were YEARS ahead of their grade levels (generally 6 to 8 years). Why, because we did what you did (and what the schools USED TO do), and simply taught them phonics and math using a pencil and paper and NO CALCULATORS.
So my kids get all these great opportunities and are now making bank, not because they’re geniuses, but because the rest of the country is so far dumbed-down that they APPEAR to be brilliant.
...but I know, your* public school is just wonderful and would NEVER want to harm our precious children, they only want the best - it’s only those ‘other’ schools, the ones over ‘there’, on the other side of the tracks - yea, that’s where the problem is. Yep.
*obviously not you!