[Marie]

A friend asked me to tutor her son.

I found out that this high school kid could not read. He could not write. He’d never been exposed to phonics. He didn’t have the slightest clue as to what went into a five paragraph essay.

I needed to start him out in the most basic program to build him up and teach him the correct way to use the most basic English. I wanted to teach him phonics.

He complained to his mother and my friend came to me and told me that I was ‘demeaning’ her son.

So he was not taught.

He had a willing tutor. He had someone who was willing to nug out the hard stuff and get him up to snuff.

But his pride was hurt. That, his mother could not stand.

She pulled him away from me, to protect his ego.

I pray for this young man.

[GeronL]

The story of our culture today I would say

[fatima]

Well you tried Marie.

[fedupjohn]

She pulled him away from me, to protect his ego.

You mean you actually met an Obama Bimbo? LOL

[PUGACHEV]

I have mixed feelings about phonetics. I was educated by the nuns in the early ‘50, and, for some reason, they did not teach it. Instead, we learned to read “by sight”, that is, we were taught to recognize each word without analyzing it phonetically. To this day, I still remember the very first word we learned, “look”. See, the nun said, as she wrote it out on the blackboard, it has two eyes. The advantage was we mastered reading very quickly; the disadvantage was I have always had difficulty spelling.

[Veto!]

Amazing. But not really. A highschool teacher in Florida that I knew was afraid to actually push the kids to learn because the parents would file racial discrimination suits against him. Most of the kids in that HS were Blacks, and also pretty well-heeled. It was anything but a slum.