K–12: Sight-Words Are a Sick Joke

American Thinker.com ^ | October 8, 2020 | Bruce Deitrick Price

[Kaslin]

Whole Word (one of almost a dozen aliases) was first introduced into public schools circa 1931. The official goal required that students memorize at least 500 sight-words each year. Two insurmountable problems showed up immediately. For nearly all children, this goal is impossible to reach. Even if someone did reach 500, that's not nearly enough.

Wait, it gets much worse. Throughout the following decades, the official goal was reduced again and again. The typical goal now is about 100 sight-words per year. Even for good students, sight-words are hard, tedious work, like memorizing phone numbers and chemical compounds. Only children with near photographic memories can easily master 100 sight-words per year. However, even this low number rarely adds up to even 1,200 at the end of high school, because new words tend to overprint earlier words. So that's 12 years of hard work and struggle. But you still can't be called literate because you can't read the typical book or newspaper except in a slow, unpleasant way.

Another huge defect is that sight-word lists for grades 1 to 6 usually include only lowercase words, mostly short. How were children supposed to learn Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania, and Independence Day? Sight-words seem designed to undercut not just reading, but also the study of geography, history, and science.

So it's easy to see that sight-words, from the start, were hostile to traditional education. Why did the education commissars recommend a ride on this garbage scow? The simplest explanation is that Progressives prefer leveling and mediocrity, presumably because it facilitates their social engineering schemes.

[Kozak]

Monkey Reading.

They tried to force this on my kids in California in the 90’s.
Fortunately my son had a teacher who was about to retire and she told us she was going to teach them Phonics regardless of the curriculum.

We taught our daughter Phonics from home.

[Red Badger]

See Sally run.
Run, Sally, Run!
See Spot Run!
Run, Spot, run!..................

[Brian Griffin]

Spanish has standardized pronunciation, English doesn’t.

Phonics complimented by sight words is the way to go.

One can learn to read French or Spanish quite well in a year.

[Brian Griffin]

My reading vocabulary of French and Spanish is about two thousand and three thousand words each, excluding cognates.

[Starboard]

The simplest explanation is that Progressives prefer leveling and mediocrity, presumably because it facilitates their social engineering schemes.

**********

Free thinkers are harder for them to control and are a threat to groupthink.

[PUGACHEV]

This is how I was taught to read by the nuns in the early ‘50s. Despite what the article says, I quickly became an excellent reader with a larger than normal vocabulary. This has been a benefit to me throughout my entire life. The only drawback is that without phonetics, spelling becomes a separate discipline to be mastered, but the trade-off is well worth it.

I still remember the first word I was taught. The nun in her full black habit stood at the blackboard and drew two upright ovals, side by side. She made a dot in the center of each oval, and stepped back to let the effect of two eyes staring at us sink in. Then she placed an L in the front and a K at the back, and introduced us to our first word.

[Delta 21]

Math wasnt the first subject to deemed "more difficult" by its new literary students.

[Maine Mariner]

I remember that from my first grade reader, about 1955 or 1956.

[KarlInOhio]

I've heard that sight reading is how most people read after they've been doing it for a while. You don't sound out each letter as you read. The problem is that the “professionals” decided to throw out the first and necessary step of phonics to get to the end, much like going into drivers' education and teaching a student how to drive with his knee while eating a sandwich and playing with the radio.

[texas_mrs]

I began reading to my daughter when she was an infant. One day when she was 5 she correctly read the words on the side of a truck to me. Then another and another. I guess she learned to read by recognizing words that I read to her over and over from her storybooks each night. In the 6th grade, she was evaluated at a 12th grade reading level. And at 28, she’s still a spelling nazi who only texts whole words with correct punctuation.

[Bruce Campbells Chin]

I hugely prefer phonics (supplemented by some core sight words) to whole word reading, but the argument that kids were deliberately taught whole word as some leftist plot to create an uneducated population is just dumb.

[Oshkalaboomboom]

I went out of my way to find Dick and Jane books for my kids in the early 1990s, buying them off of Ebay, used bookstores, anywhere I could find them. I don’t know any reading method that has been more successful for more people.

[Red Badger]

1960 for me...................

[originalbuckeye]

I taught Phonics to my son at home, too. He was awarded ‘Best Reader’ in his 4 years olds pre-school class.
He is teaching Phonics to his daughter who just started Kindergarten. I have heard him say ‘that is a sight word’ and couldn’t figure out what he meant.
I sent him a link to an article yesterday explaining how ‘sight words’ aren’t the way to go. Unfortunately, that is what she in being taught at school.

[Red Badger]

[rarestia]

I learned on phonics and promote it as a learning method over anything else. Other people I know who learned on phonics consistently rank highest on cognitive language tests and linguistic comprehension. I informally polled my Toastmasters organization and all but one of them knew phonics as a language learning method. The other was a teacher in her 20s.

[AU72]

This is how I was taught to read by the nuns in the early ‘50s.

Me too. In fact I was taught so well that I was invited to read on the local radio's Children's Hour when I was in the 2nd grade.

[Delta 21]

Irregardless of what others are telling you, there is still help for her!

[Flick Lives]

Dr. Suess book,s with their rhyming words helps reinforce the phonetic components.