Posted on 10/07/2020 3:03:49 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Summary: It's better for everyone if teachers understand what they're doing wrong, especially where reading is concerned..
In an article explaining why children can't read, a teacher made this extraordinary statement: "I still struggle with a lot of guilt.”
You almost never see this sort of confession. Teachers rarely acknowledge responsibility. Typically they are cocooned inside official policies. They're expected to agree with administrators, principals, superintendents, bureaucrats, and professors who preside godlike above them.
Teachers may be using inferior methods. They may be dispensing hokum all day long. In their dealings with parents they may be lying. But they don't know this. The Education Establishment does not leave much to chance. Teachers are trained and indoctrinated; that is, they are given The Truth.
This particular teacher stumbled into a higher reality because she worked in a school district that believed in Balanced Literacy. That's where you give the children a dose of phonics and a dose of Whole Language (i.e., sight-words). The guiding mantra for this schizophrenic approach is to repeat endlessly: all children are different; each learns in a different way.
This teacher had a decade of experience in various schools and had seen different ideas in action. She decided to teach both main theories to separate groups in the same class for a side-by-side comparison. She found that one group of children far surpassed the other. Guess which group.
She thinks the students who learned the non-phonetic approaches (such as picture reading, guessing, and three-cueing) were harmed. "I did lasting damage to these kids. It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be. It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of knowing that you predict what you read before you read it.”
Think about that. One of the official doctrines in American education for 60 years proclaims that children can predict what they will read next. And people wonder why we have 50 million functional illiterates.
By the way, the article discussed here is by Emily Hanford, who is a saint of patience. She carefully explains all the weird science that our professors have come up with. (I tend to want to sum things up by saying "Quacks hurt children with nonsense.” I think of my audience as parents who welcome a good wake-up call. But if you're a confused teacher who wants to be treated gently, read Emily Hanford's patient presentation of all things phonics.)
Please note, phonics is a simple concept simply explained. Kids learn that each letter stands for a sound. That's it. For example, B stands for buh as in beach. All the phonics experts claim that children will learn to read in the first half of first grade (because, as this video explains, Reading Is Easy).
The striking thing about the anti-phonics theories is how scatterbrained they are, how disruptive, how irrational. They make children do many other things besides read. Here we encounter the dark genius of our Education Establishment. They concoct Ponzi schemes that seduce teachers and parents into believing that they actually work. They don't. They create semi-readers, functional illiterates, and millions of teenagers who insist, "I never read. I hate books." Translation: I'm illiterate because nobody taught me how to read properly.
If we have to pick one gimmick that is more egregious than all the others, it might be encouraging children to guess what a word is by looking at a picture somewhere on the page.
The whole idea that children can look at pictures and figure out words is absurd from the beginning. It only works in the first grade when you have short sentences with an obvious mystery word, e.g., “horse.” And what do you know, there's a picture of a horse nearby. So the child says “horse” and thinks he can read. Obviously this scheme won't work in later grades when the sentences are longer.
But by that the time the child is hopelessly hooked. Guessing becomes the first tactic used in all circumstances. To save a bad reader, the first step is to eliminate guessing.
The easiest way to understand the folly of the official methods is to realize that the reader looks away from the text, searching for clues in the pictures, the semantics, or the broader context. This searching takes time and is disorienting. But real reading with phonics moves relentlessly left-to-right and is extraordinarily fast— roughly three, four, or five words a second! Studying a picture can take several seconds at least. So the reading, even if correct, will be painfully slow.
If the people at the top had all the best ideas, we would now be in education heaven. Unfortunately, American K-12 has embraced dozens of really bad ideas. Teachers are forced to learn them and to inflict them on their students.
If teachers take the time to learn just the basics about phonics, they would quickly be able to judge whether they have been hurting their students or helping them.
(More info about phonics.-- link www.renewamerica.com/columns/bprice/200518 )
I swear we became good readers because of comic books. It doesn’t matter WHAT you read....it’s just the practice of reading.
OK!
Now that these stinking communist-indoctrinators admit their guilt, line them up at the neighborhood gallows and make’em dance...
KDramas!! some real good movies, with no sex in your face, and you have to read subtitles!! had my kids hooked on them by the time they wewr 10!!
were*
I was reading before I started school..
My mom taught me.
What a concept.
My dad read comic books to me very night when I was 3-5. After that, I read to him until I was about 8. I graduated from “Sad Sack” to “Classics Illustrated” on to “Phantom Stranger” in that time and my reading comprehension (which was tested every semester) was off the charts. Teachers were actually borrowing my comics to teach other kids. You’re right; it’s just the practice and those gave us plenty of practice that we enjoyed.
The state of New York recently passed a law requiring prospective school teachers to take a literacy test to get their license, but repealed it the following year because 36 percent of whites, 54 percent of Hispanics and 59 percent of blacks failed on the first try.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/nyregion/ny-regents-teacher-exams-alst.html
Sure explains a lot.
Unbelievable!
26 letters, 44 sounds, and 144 ways to represent those sounds....once you crack the code, you can concentrate on comprehending the words on the page.
I started screaming about this about 30 years ago when my daughter entered K. I wound up pulling her out and teaching her myself. When I did a lot of research and discovered the theory behind “whole language”, I was stunned that teachers were foolish enough to not only believe this, but believe it with a religious fervor.
I fought with the system and finally got some phonetic teaching introduced, but the teachers really didn’t even know how it worked. They had also been so brainwashed that they had nothing but disdain for it.
I decided that the “whole language” method of NOT teaching reading, along with the disastrous “child-centered learning” was brought in INTENTIONALLY, for the purpose of dumbing down future generations. Even more so, I stand by that today.
Privatizing all education would be a minimum for a good start.
I’m a high school English teacher, and I am dismayed at the lack of literacy I see among my students. The majority don’t read, only the really smart ones do, and texting has dumbed them down so much it’s chilling. The gen pop kids have no idea just how stupid they are. The smart kids are in IB and AP.
What’s IB?
The cool thing about comic books was trading them. We always had a stack.
Taught both my kids before kindergarten as well. Both were leaders in groups helping others to learn. Was blessed to be home with them and not working outside the home.
Used phonetics to do so.
International Baccalaureate, its one step above AP. So think really high strung kids worrying about their gpa daily. I’d rather teach the hoodrats, honestly. When you reach one or two, you REALLY reach them and they never forget it.
And, I’m really on the downlow in my school. They are rabid leftists... and a few years ago, I turned one of my at risk kids into a conservative on the DL. So... I’m seriously a true subversive in enemy territory.
There are 2 sets of rules that have been forgotten since the mid 1800s.
The silent letter rules and the substitute letter rules.
I stuck them on one of my websites so anybody can take them for free, no click bait.
We used them when we homeschooled, very effective.
You might see a thing about t-shirts for sale.
I no longer do that.
One of my grandkids was struggling learning to read in 1st grade so I got involved to assist. So, first thing I did was to get a couple of large sets of flash cards. First set was phonics and second phased in words with the phonics. He had reading homework most days that would be a few sentences, usually a rhyme or something like that. He was a an inaudible mumbler so to break out of that, I turned the reading into a fun game instead of torture. Imagine a Shakespearean actor reading Hickory Dickory Dock or reading it to a rap beat. Hehehe... So, this was the first grader but included in the deal were his preK and third grade sisters, all of us at the kitchen table. The preK was soon able to phonically sound out then read simple words with no pictures and the 3 grader to up her game in reading.
I am so PO’d at how the teaching profession has screwed up several generations of K-12 students and more recently moved on to screwing up higher education.
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