Posted on 04/23/2017 5:18:05 AM PDT by Texas Fossil
I read a lot when I was a kid and ran into words that I took meaning for from context and figured I knew them thenceforward. One such was a word I assumed to be pronounced my-zld that obviously meant “confused.” I was long an adult before I figured out that the spoken word “misled” that I heard and used in speech was that other word that I only knew printed. I told my adult daughter that and she confessed to misreading the word idiot as idoit(eye-doit)as a young child and thought they were two different words for years. Now both of us sometimes refer to someone as a poor my-zld idoit.
At least you knew and know what the roots imply. That is not taught in public school now. That along with look-say reading gives America generations of inarticulate illiteracy. Wife is a just retired public school teacher. She talks about another teacher that used to educate her students to Latin roots and made them memorize times tables until she got told she would be terminated if she did not get with the modern program. Wife stayed with elementary Spec Ed which is pretty much ignored by principals and school boards so she was able to teach actual academic stuff to her k-3rd graders. The ones who had enough wit to eventually “mainstream” were light years ahead of their mainstream classmates in reading and calculation and wife got some flak for that.
That is stunning, and both easy (given the times) and hard (awww... c'mon, too ridiculous to be true) to believe at the same time.
On the math side... I remember that one of my kids was in 5th grade, and I went to a PTA meeting. The teacher was explaining to the parents how they were teaching division. It was quite complicated, with a whole lot of book-keeping. Of course, I could see the theory behind it, so I raised my hands and said to the teacher, “Your method is utilizing synthetic division rather than specific base-10 arithmetic, but the kids don’t understand polynomials, nor the positional notation for them that is implied in numbers.”
He wasn’t a bad sort, and said, “Well, if your kid can do the arithmetic by some other method you teach him, that’s OK, too.” Which, of course, I had done.
The funny part was after the meeting when several befuddled parents came up to me and said, “I know this method is screwed up, but I couldn’t put my finger on the explanation as to why it was so bad. I’m so glad you spoke up.” Well, their arithmetic instruction was good, and they remembered; but their algebra instruction and retention wasn’t. And, they probably taught their kids the old-fashioned way on the side, too.
I saw an explanation of looksay reading once. The reasoning is that adults who read do not sound out each word, they see the word and say it and it therefore made no sense to teach kids phonics since they would not use it as adults. Same with numbers. Adults don’t memorize things and it is better to teach kids to reason about things than to teach them all these datapoints to memorize. Biological reality , though, is that in the first 7 to 10 years for all but the very few prodigies, there is not reason but there is a huge capacity to memorize. It is far better to fill up those empty databanks with data so that they have something to reason about when their minds are a bit more developed. I taught all my kids starting as soon as they had a couple of dozen words to memorize a whole string of things starting with the Pythagorean Theorum as a series of questions and answers. What is the P- Theorum? The sum of the (or ‘Some of the’ as it may come out) etc- Who said that? ans. Pythagoras. Who was P- ans. a Greek mathematician etc. through Euclid and then branching to Archimedes and on and on. It impressed hell out of the grandparents and amazingly, when each was introduced to Geometry at the appropriate time, there was no intimidation. It sounded familiar. It was a great help in getting started and was far less irritating than memorization of Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs commercials.
Agree
Yes sir.
Like you said before, locals not excited about dieing to the last man for some virgins. smile.
They sure pushed back hard today. By all reports the SDF held against strong assaults on many points.
Lots of ISIS propaganda on Twitter. They are getting increasingly desperate.
Bye Bye black flag vermin.
That's Tabka.
Who’s map are you looking at?
Irack.
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