Posted on 10/08/2020 6:13:55 AM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
That what I was doing one afternoon in 7th grade when the interomeinterrupted us ith the news that President Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.``
Phonics complimented by sight words, eh?
“Hey, phonics, you’re looking good. And I love your shoes!”
“Why, thanks, sight words. That’s very kind.”
“To protect sight-words, the professors continually tried to discredit phonics, from 1931 to now. For one example, some clever, diabolical people invented “barking at print,” a gimmick that claims that a child might read words phonetically but have no idea what they mean.”
There is some validity to that, at least with my kids. We started them reading at 3 years old (phonics, of course), and within a year they were fluent. But ask them the meaning of what they read and often they were clueless.
For a while, with my first kid, that bothered me - then it occurred to me that if they can easily read, they’ll fill in the blanks as they got older. To put it another way, the meanings would come later, and they wouldn’t have to be dealing with trying to read the words at the same time as trying to understand them. And, yes, worked out great - not a problem!
I remember diagramming sentences in sixth grade or so, but never encountered it in English classes after that. I’ve pretty much forgotten how over the last 50+ years, though it’s something I’d like to relearn in retirement.
“You want to raise a genius, start by not using baby talk with exaggerated facial features. That koochie koo and goo goo talk is destructive to a brain struggling to find first meaning.”
Heck, I did that with my dog growing up. I’d tell him that I was doing an oil change on my car because its been 3000 miles. He’d tilt his head and look at me like I was from another planet. But the thing was, he understood far more than he was getting credit for, and when we had 10 people in a room, we’d call out a name, and he ran to that person.
Obviously same for my kids - no baby talk, ever. I remember one case when one of the kids was six or so years old, he’d talk to my mom on the phone and she then said to me “I feel like I’m talking to an adult”. So, totally agree!
The people promoting sight words are trying to damage the kids.//.
I have a very good friend who tells me this teaching technique kept him from being able to read very well.
That it was why he had never read the Bible.
I told him if he asked God with an honest heart God would heal this sight word wound and help him read the Bible.
It worked , cuz God is faithful.
He now reads as fast and as well as I do.
( Praise God from whom all blessings flow.! )
I started reading Dr Seuss to my son when he was a toddler. He's now 21 and working on his masters in college and already has a job working for the government. English is a phonetic language and if you know what sounds the letters make you can read almost anything. "Sight words" is a crime against humanity, preventing millions of people from achieving their potential.
I’d have thought, titties - look.
Hey, Chinese kids have to learn sight words from day one. But they’re smarter than us, right?
My daughter (now a college professor) had a learning disability that meant that she could not “memerize” things in the same way that most kids could.
Things like learning how to tell time or memorize “times tables” were virtually impossible.
Clearly, she overcame this.
However, when they were trying to teach her to read using this “sight word” bull crap, she was quickly falling behind. They called in a “specialist.” This specialist—whom the school department was paying more than six figures a year—taught her: Phonics.
We had a good laugh with the specialist. By the time my daughter was in 6th grade, she was reading at college level. The rest of her classmates were pretty much illiterate.
(Her classmates ALWAYS kicker her ass in math though. When she was able to use computers...she caught up.)
Phonics with context. It worked since people learned to write.
Irregardless is not a word. But you knew that.
I’ll teach my dog 100 words...
That’s the way my Mom taught us. We were all reading quite well before Kindergarten.
Spanish has standardized pronunciation, English doesn’t.
Phonics complimented by sight words is the way to go.
And if you’ve ever seen toddlers or preschoolers crack the code of written English language, as two of my own kids did (and I did), they do it by memorizing the shapes of the words and associating that form with the thing it represents.
An example I remember clearly: my toddler was in my arms to choose an ice cream flavor. I showed him the word chocolate written under the tub of chocolate ice cream, and told him, “That says chocolate.” Later he saw the word somewhere else, and said “chocolate!” Often the little one will be read a short picture book and memorize which words the parent says on each page. He might look at them and say a version of the remembered phrase. After a while he will notice the patterns and be able to read the book, not just recite from memory but looking at the words, will get them right. And then be able to read a similar book, with help with any new words.
It is crazy on a scientific level to discount that pure learning. All three of my older kids are great readers and students: the two that cracked the code and the one who learned to read in kindergarten with little phonics books.
Run
Run away
Run and play
Run away and play, etc.
I went to school in Germany and there was one girl in class whose mother always baked a cake for the second or third grade teacher, who I couldn’t stand. Naturally she gave the girl always good grades. In the 6th or 7th grade the girl had to read aloud and she had a hard time. We found out she couldn’t read.
Teaching words with irregular spelling is quite different from teaching “sight words”, which retards chidren’s ability to learn and progress in reading.
It would have been a useless hyperbole without it.
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