Posted on 03/19/2010 12:17:20 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
As a teenager, I heard rumors that the Russians put flouride in drinking water, presumably to wreck our minds and make us easier to control. I heard this only a few times; and I never heard of evidence. As I said, rumors.
But as I’ve researched and written about education a great deal, those rumors have come back into my thoughts. And here is what I want to report to you today: the Russians had absolutely no need to put flouride or anything else in the water. Ever since 1932, they had look-say in our public schools!
As subtle poisons go, as devices that will wreck minds and make people easier to control, look-say (also known as sight-words or Dolch words) is primo.
I was trying to figure out a way of explaining all this in a few words, and I came up with the phrase “education as neurotoxin.” It’s hard to invent a new phrase these days; but Google didn’t find it. So I wrote a column with that title (and later put it on other sites as “Bad Education Considered as Neurotoxin”).
I’m sure that mental dysfunction is a helpful way to discuss what is done to children in American public schools. But is this only a literary metaphor or more substantial than that? Well, we do have 50,000,000 functional illiterates and a million dyslexics. That’s a fact. Many of these people sincerely believe they were born “learning disabled” or “cognitively impaired.” Schools inspected them and said, “You are defective.” Many millions lived their whole lives believing this.
Of all the sins committed by the Education Establishment, forcing bogus reading methods into the public schools has to be the worst. And the first thing that needs to be fixed.
Here’s the summary with the article: “Much of American education is counter-productive and actually works to stunt and retard students. That's because progressive educators view the school as a factory for producing little cookie-cutter socialists. These educators have ended up favoring some of the worst ideas in the history of education, ideas that are best described as neurotoxic. Montessori knew better. No matter whether kids are gifted or slow, they are best served by Montessori's insight that all children develop most quickly in a challenging, cognitively enriched environment.”
“Education as Neurotoxin” http://www.californiachronicle.com/articles/view/129985
Hah! I use SWR too. (If you are on the yahoo loop, I reposted this article there today)
I have that graphic blown up in my classroom. It’s an illustration of why a: you need to understand grammar and b: why you need a good copy editor for EVERYTHING!!
We misunderstand one another obviously. When I say phonics, I mean sounds and rules. Although a majority of the sight words list need no rules just an understanding of all the sounds the letters make.
However, you did say in your first post that they can’t be sounded out using basic phonics RULES. When I said phonetically I meant sounds and rules.
to
go
we
she
he
and most of the others are sounded out with just sounds and no rules.
I abhor whole word too. Our town has a very high illiteracy rate because of whole word.
Lol! How embarrassing!
I am on the yahoo group! I will look for it.
We may have been saying the same thing from two different angles - you from a layman point of view, me from the pedagogical point of view.
Actually, sight words are considered sight words because they do not "follow" any rules according to most whole word programs. They are sight words because they are considered exceptions to the rules.
Pedagogical can be read phonetically but it is still hard to pronounce. ;)
I looked up the definition of sight words and that is the exact definition I found as well. The funny thing is that almost all the sight words that I came across can be sounded out using the phonograms and spelling rules from SWR. There are very few exception (said, of etc). I love that program! Do your kids like the spelling markings? I thought mine would hate that but they don’t. Do you use Cursive First as well?
With very few exceptions, English words do follow rules, but rules that are out of common use now. For instance, no English word ends with a ‘v.’ This dates back to an ancient Norman French rule that the monks followed. Vowels doubled with an e or an i as the second vowel date from 1500’s Italian. Even the Italians no longer follow some of these rules! But they are part of our lexicon.
However, most of this knowledge is learned in linguistic courses, not in high school or basic English classes at the Freshman or Sophomore level.
I LOVE linguistics and am taking a graduate level class this summer just for the fun of it!
Lol! I found this gem on a site selling Dolch flash cards.
“The child who can recognize on sight 8 of the 10 words in the sentence before him can read that sentence and, generally, decode the remaining words by means of context, phonics, or illustrations. Most importantly, he can understand its meaning!”
Basically you memorize eight words and guess the other two! Oh my. And what if he recognizes NONE of the words? What does he do then? What if there are no pictures?
This was also on the site.
“When kids hooked on phonics programs have just learned to read “A fat cat sat on a mat,” or “A big pig did a jig,” “Picture Me Reading!” students already are happily and fluently reading such books as Ten Apples Up On Top, Green Eggs and Ham, and The Cat in the Hat, and other Dr. Seuss favorites, often making 6 MONTHS of reading progress in 6 WEEKS or less!”
And when they can’t memorize big words they are stuck at this reading level. I would rather do it slower and lay a better foundation than to give the child the idea that they can guess their way through reading. My ten year old daughter loves the Elsie Dinsmore series written in the 1850’s. She wouldn’t be reading those with sight words.
Source http://picturemereading.com/the_importance_of_dolch_words.html
The program that we uses teaches those rules.
The reason that illiteracy is such a problem is because the rules aren’t commonly used. That is the point of the whole article. Whole word/sight words have destroyed the understanding of phonics and rules. Most programs that say they teach phonics do so with faulty phonics and faulty rules like “when two vowels go walking the first one does the talking” Hooked on Phonics is a blend of faulty phonics and sight words.
These rules need to be used. They make sense of our language.
If schools would get back to teaching these rules and the letter sounds, illiteracy wouldn’t be such a problem.
I taught my son these rules while he was learning to spell/read and he can use the rules to mark the words. It is a slower process than memorization but it lays a much better foundation and they can use this knowledge to decode anything they want to read. They don’t get stuck at a lower reading level.
You should take a look at The Writing Road to Reading (WRR) or Spell to Write and Read (SWR). Another one that is popular is The Latin Road to Reading. I think you'd enjoy what they say about teaching English. With WRR and SWR specifically, the goal is spelling - not reading. Reading is a byproduct of the program. Good spellers are good readers, but good readers are not always good spellers. I came to both programs years ago while looking for a writing program. My son is dysgraphic and I needed something to help him translate what he heard and saw to what he wrote.
My daughter isn’t writing yet, but my son enjoyed them. He has since graduated to IEW and Wordly Wise 3000. For literature.. well I really do not have separate literature instruction because we use the Charlotte Mason approach and almost all of our schoolday is reading quality literature.
“One way of estimating a primary student’s reading level is by having the student identify the 220 Dolch Basic Sight Words. The number of words recognized is the basis for assigning his/her equivalent reading level. ... A sight word is any word that is known by a reader automatically. Sight words are pronounced without decoding the word’s spelling. A common first sight word is a child’s given name. Beginning readers are at an advantage when they learn to read sight words that occur frequently in print such as those included on the Dolch and Fry word lists. It is possible to read a word on sight but not know the meaning of the word. For example, a child might be able to read on sight “there, their and they’re” but not understand the differences in meaning.”
But that was NEVER my point. As I keep saying, the writer’s leap to a nonlogical conclusion was my biggest gripe.
And again I stress, I was not posting to srgue teaching methodlogies.
I was griping about the ill-logic of the conclusion that the writer drew.
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