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 )
Kids love to learn! And they love the attention from their parents. It’s a win-win all around! I spent hours with them teaching them to write their letters and simple words, reading books and even doing simple math. I have coloring books with all the pages filled with letters they wrote. No coloring of the pictures, just letters all over the page.
They speak of those times with such love.
You have given your grandkids a gift they will treasure for all of their lives. What a blessing for you all.
I use the Megawords series at the high school level. It’s a multisensory and systematic approach for decoding and encoding multisyllabic words. At first, students think I’m treating them like babies, but eventually they look forward to Word Study Wednesday. When I teach the “ible” and “able” rule, they never forget! Kids need explicit instruction when they are struggling readers.
When I teach the “ible” and “able” rule, they never forget!
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Okay, I’m intrigued. I didn’t realize there was a rule for that.
Got it. If you remove the ending and you’re left with a real word, you use “able.” If removing the ending leaves a broken stump, it’s “ible.”
https://grammarist.com/usage/able-ible/
You’re a high school teacher, you should be able to make a difference.
If you’d like to write a tell-all so people know what’s going on, i’ll fix it so your identity is hidden and I’ll publish it somewhere.
Bruce Deitrick Price
Getting rid of phonics is an important step to eventual enslavement. Slaves aren’t supposed to be literate.
I retired from teaching last summer. I taught high school biology and chemistry. Low literacy was a serious problem, even among AP students. Average students couldn't extract meaning from their textbooks and mostly ignored reading assignments. Kids are being cheated of their future.
I have a notion of where things have gone off track in the last several decades. It starts at primary then secondary and continues into higher education. There are exceptions to this but they are infrequent.
Our education method is at its root teaching what to think as opposed to how to think. These are not the same thing. There’s a baseline needed of course on the what side bit the failure is neglecting the how to think side. Myself as an example, I came out of college filled to overflowing with the what to think. Then I was thrown into an unstructured R&D environment where there were no text books or higher mentors to fill in the blanks and further stuff my noggin. Virtually nothing I came out of college with have I used exactly as was crammed into me. I was successful though although my career breadth has certainly not been typical.
It took me years to realize it but I had one prof my last 2 semesters that opened the door into how to solve things that are outside the comfort zone. From the persons I have crossed paths with, probably the ones that are consistently at higher on the how to think scale are those with classical educations i.e. philosophy, languages, theology and such. Blend this with a science or other such fields and you have something powerful. For me though, i am not at that level although I have two STEM degrees (geek) but had the good fortune to grow up on a ranch so have always had an appreciation for bailing wire, duct tape and a big hammer.
Key thought... How to think is for working through the unknown and what to think is punching a time clock.
I have a McGuffeys Eclectic Readers Series, Primer to Fourth.
THE primary English books of the late 1800’s into the 1900’s. What a fourth grader was exposed to then versus now...we’ve lost so much.
A1912 eighth grade exam: https://www.bullittcountyhistory.com/bchistory/schoolexam1912.html
“Our education method is at its root teaching what to think as opposed to how to think.”
Yep. That is critical thinking skill, and it is not taught and certainly NOT welcomed in today’s pubic schools and colleges.
Our schools are now full-blown cultural Marxism indoctrination centers.
Critically thinking students would ask logical questions of their indoctrinators that would expose their lies. Can’t have that!
Whew! I just looked at that exit exam. I’m no flea-scratching, mouth breathing primate, but that would take me a while. Admittedly, the English and the math would be fine.
Whe have lost SO much, you are right.
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