Posted on 03/26/2010 12:49:54 PM PDT by BruceDeitrickPrice
Last week I posted background on FreeRepublic about a column published elsewhere titled “Education as Neurotoxin.”
This column tries to explain why the US has 50 million functional illiterates and 1 million dyslexics. Were these people born this way? Or had bad education methods produced the impairments?
Someone left a half-dozen irate comments insisting I was “delusional,” “illogical,” “irrational,” “nonsensical,” etc. I’m not sure which part offended him most, 1) that sight-words cause mental problems; 2) or that the far-left could knowingly promote the use of destructive educational methods.
This commenter embraced the Dolch Dogma that kids must memorize 300 Dolch words in order to start reading. My belief is that it’s precisely the memorizing of the sight-words that causes mental impairment. English words are phonetic objects; and all of them, even the irregular ones, should be learned as such. Flesch explained all this in his 1955 book “Why Johnny Can’t Read.” Anyone interested in this part of the discussion, please see my analysis of what happens to children in sight-word classrooms: “41: Sight Words--The Big Stupid.”
http://www.improve-education.org/id66.html
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The other side of the discussion deals with a very different question: would ideologues put poison in the water supply, so to speak? Specifically, what prompted our educators in the depths of the Depression (ca. 1932) to discard all the phonics books, and to waste vast sums on Dick and Jane books? My sense is that their actions are irrational or subversive. For an analysis of these questions, please see “Stalinists?? Or They Walked That Way?”
http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/12738
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Being called “delusional” inspired me to invent a new way to describe what sight-words do to kids: School-Induced Mental Impairment or SIMI. The starting point for all my work in this area is the 50,000,000 functional illiterates and one million dyslexics. Either our gene pool has experienced a mysteriously swift decline or SIMI is a very real problem.
Huh? I don’t understand.
That could begin to explain the mental disorder known as liberalism.
I never liked the word-recognition method. It doesn’t tell you why certain words sound as they do. To me, you have to learn the parts that make up the whole. Phonics is the way.
do you think this was all done by accident??
i don’t
So, does spending hours and hours watching tv cause brain damage?
.
ping
Best thing we can do for any younf parents we’re related to is either get a copy of or point them to “Your Baby Can Read” DVD and kit.
This stuff will get them reading right and able to learn new words by sounding them out.
For at least 4000 years we’d been successfully teaching children to read using phonics.
Suddenly in the middle of the 20th this became passe and had to be changed.
I doubt there’s anything more sinister here than theorists who want to make a name for themselves by developing “improved, modern” methods.
It obviously does...people voted for Obama...
Apparently, attending Cornell Ag School (and pretending you went to Cornell University) can turn you into a raving lunatic like Keith Olbermann.
I’ve seen the “Your Baby Can Read” commercials, but can you explain what the program is, please?
Those “Baby Einstein” video things have been pretty well dismissed though.
Sorry. You are full of it. Sight is how children instinctively learn to read.
I have no problem with phonics teaching. It’s a great way to teach a child who doesn’t know how to read.
But I learned to read by myself very early, and now I have witnessed 2 of my 3 children do it on their own as well. One is a bit of a genius and, from reading books, learned all of the letters by 18 months. From hearing his favorite books read to him over and over, he cracked the code of the words by age 2, and by 2.5 could read a newspaper. Something I was actively trying NOT to let him do, because the front pages were full of details from the O.J. Simpson trial!
My 2nd child learned to read in kindergarten, using a wonderful phonics program. I saw the progression and it was painless and just as thrilling for him when it started clicking.
My 3rd child was behind in every developmental milestone so we were not pushing reading at home, just homeschooling him with a lovely and relaxed, old-fashioned and non-academic kindergarten curriculum. Of course he was being read to every day. And HE cracked the code too! Suddenly he was asking what this word said, and that one, and then he could read simple books by himself, BOOM. He’s still behind in a lot of things but he is a very good reader with NO formal reading instruction.
The humans brain is an amazing, G-d-given gift. Do not think that any way, under any life conditions*, that our beautiful children crack the code of reading is in some way HARMFUL. Just control what they are reading.
*Here I am thinking of children in abuse situations, or captivity like poor Jaycie Duggar’s two children of rape, or wartime, etc.
Brain damage on the part of teachers can inflict bad education on students!!!
Do you have an education degree?
I taught our kids how to read. It took a year and a half for one of my sons to learn to read fluently. I mean, he was sounding out the word “cat” after all that time. (He’s been homeschooled since halfway through 1st grade because, among other better reasons, his reading recovery teacher thought he could read when all he’d done was memorize the books.)
I eventually used the Dolch word lists, figuring it would encourage him if he could easily read a few of the words in his books.
By June 1st after his 2nd grade year, he was reading at a 2nd grade, month 1, level. I didn’t teach him to read during the summer because he needed a break.
In mid-August, he read the first Harry Potter book to himself. I had him read parts of it out loud, and he was reading fluently!
This kid was persistence personified. Every day for 2 years (with breaks in summer and at Christmas) he patiently and cooperatively had reading lessons for at least an hour. Frequently he would ask to spend 2 hours or more on this. (My experience was that after every 2-week or more break, he returned to reading lessons with an inexplicable improvement in his ability.)
I am sure that he was developmentally delayed — not a stretch because he weighed only 1 lb. 7 oz. when he was born 13 weeks early.
Anyway, he’s been a reading whiz since then, and scores off the charts on comprehension, reading speed, and reading ability.
It took a lot of one-on-one time with me for him to learn to read. I tried different methods and ditched them when they did not work. I am convinced that having him learn the Dolch sight words was the breakthrough event, in addition to his further brain development over time.
You are so very right ! A good place to learn more about the Left’s involvement in “dumbing down” our children is Samuel Blumenfeld’s works, including “N.E.A.: Trojan Horse in American Education” and “The New Illiterates and How You Can Keep Your Child from Becoming One”, and also
“Is Public Education Necessary?”.
Sam Blumenfeld is a former teacher for the New York Public School system, who saw the problems of the system early in his career, (the kids weren’t learning to read correctly, using the Look and Say Method (for instance, remember Dick and Jane? Yep.. Dick and Jane used the Whole Language method, which is more commonly known as the LOOK SAY teaching method.)
Sam has since worked tirelessly to awake the public to the dangers of Public Education..his books are well researched, (with footnotes galore!)..the HISTORY of the modern Educational system is an eye-opener, for sure.
Most of the men who were involved in the formation of the modern public educational system were PROGRESSIVES (SOCIALISTS, in other words) who had an AGENDA. Even though they started as far back as the 1890’s, they didn’t see the achievement of the fruits of their labors until the people were sufficiently Dumbed Down to the point of electing a Socialist to the Presidency, in 2008. And, it WILL get worse - it will never get better, under the Liberal leadership of the N.E.A.(teachers unions) Conservatives have to abandon the Public School system altogether. The Public School system is broken and cannot be fixed.
I personally taught my daugter how to read when she was four years old, using Blumenfeld’s “ALPHAPHONICS” - the book costs 25 dollars, and took less than 6 months to teach her how to read ANYTHING.. Teaching True Phonics WORKS! Teaching The Whole Language Method (Look Say) will continue to produce Functional Illiterates who can’t THINK for themselves..which was the GOAL of the PROGRESSIVES who developed the Whole Language Methodology.
Sam Blumenfeld has produced a number of lectures on the History of the Modern Educational system; and the disaster of haveing an entire nation filled with functional illiterates, which is the result of teaching the WHOLE LANGUAGE methodology.. also, how to teach phonics correctly.. if any of ya’ll are interested in hearing these lectures, let me know, I’ll post them on mediafire, the, I’ll post the link here, so anyone can download them in Mp3 format to listen to them..
ping for later
I taught high school English for many years. It is my firm belief that different kids learn differently. Some learn to read using phonics, some by sight, some look-say. There are probably methods used we have no name for.
While I agree that much harm has been done to our public school students (and even some parochial and private school children) by poor teaching methods, I believe that the fault lies primarily in the “teacher training” conducted by colleges and universities.
Part of the problem seems to arise from sheer boredom on the part of teachers who believe that how and what they teach is more important than who they teach. If one concentrates on each individual student’s abilities, likes and dislikes, teaching becomes an ever new experience, year after year. Teaching like this is also very intensive and time consuming, something that many teachers are never made aware of.
This happens because the importance of knowing subject matter and understanding the most useful methods to teach it seems to be mind-numbingly dull. Elementary and high school teachers need to be reminded that their students are better served by learning the basics and leaving analyzing and interpretation to later in their educational careers.
It’s like learning to use a calculator without understanding how to add or subtract. The same situations exist in all subjects and levels of schools these day.
It’s a huge problem, but one that could be fixed fairly easily. Just re-educate the educators.
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