The making of a black underclass: Samuel Blumenfeld exposes policies leading to academic failure

WorldNetDaily.com ^ | Saturday, August 17, 2002 | Samuel Blumenfeld

[JohnHuang2]

Saturday, August 17, 2002

Quote of the Day by DWSUWF

[RightOnline]

Too true. Bump.

[abclily]

A lot of truth in this article. However, dyslexia is not created by teaching methods. It involves the amount of light admitted into a person's sight mechanisms.

[lonestar]

Bush beleevz n fonics. He lisenz to/too/two Laura, not sum Harvard professor. Laura nos how two/to/too teech reeding.

[FreedomPoster]

ping

[Congressman Billybob]

See post #6 to the preceeding thread by Kyle Williams about home schooling.

Thomas Sowell's suggestion for how to drastically improve public education was to spend $40 billion dollars, by paying $1 million each to all the leading professors of "edukashun" to retire immediately and never go near a classroom again. The professor quoted in this article would be a candidate for such early retirement.

Too many "edukation" programs for "teechurs" consist of the dumb teaching the dumber how create more of the dumbest. Some of these "teechurs," and perhaps some of their "perfessors," could not pass the standardized 12-grade tests now being given. And, having seen those tests, they are what a 9th-grade student in a good school would know as a matter of course.

Congressman Billybob

Click for latest column: "Good People, Naked People, People Who Are Wet and Wild."

Click for latest book: "to Restore Trust in America"

[YankeeReb]

Yup that's right it's all Bush's fault... It has NOTHING to do with the unholy alliance between the DNC and the teachers unions. Why don't you take this garbage back to Bartcop where it belongs.

[lonestar]

Hey! I'm on Dubya's side. I've listened to him preach about phoics for 8 years now. I'm only serious when I say Laura has more influence with him than any Harvard professor.

I'm also serious about no one method is going to work with every child. Children, not methods, have to be taught.

[aberaussie]

"Children, not methods, have to be taught."

Improper methods make it more difficult for children to learn. Phonics works for most kids.

[lonestar]

"phoics"= phonics

In college I had to take a course in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The IPA hasn't been the same since.

Growing up in East Texas I had trouble with vowels.

[uncbob]

Yup that's right it's all Bush's fault... It has NOTHING to do with the unholy alliance between the DNC and the teachers unions. Why don't you take this garbage back to Bartcop where it belongs.

And Bush has done what to combat it

[Mamzelle]

IPA. This really has little to do with reading education, but is a means to try to standardize the representation of a wide variety of pronunciations among the many languages. Very useful if you don't have the opportunity to hear the sounds made by a speaker of a rare language, useless for teaching reading. Phonetics is not phonics.

My experience as a reading teacher is that the decoding mechanism (traditional phonics) MUST be taught , and MUST be taught at the beginning (although the advocates of phonics education need to be aware that many English words do not follow the rules). However, the goal ought to be to transcend the decoding process, ^once mastered^, quickly, or no speed or comprehension can be built. When confronted with an unfamiliar word, the reader then has the skills to break it down for pronunciation.

Also, it is useful to draw a distinction between a natural reader and the rest of us. One of my children was reading when he was three, having mastered phonics in a subconscious way and was on to reading not only words, but phrases and sentences in a single "glance of the eye." Truly excellent readers need to learn to "bite" larger and larger chunks of discourse with their eyes...part of the philosphy of speed-reading, but adaptable for regular readers. My other two kids learned to read in a more conventional fashion, with me to make sure they had the decoding skills. One child distressed me with her struggles and disdain for reading, until I happened upon collections of books tailored for her taste in stories. Parents, expect to spend some money on books. Libraries will not do the complete job.

I contend that this decoding (phonics) is a very easy thing for a reasonably competent child to master quickly. It is tragic that so many children are not ALLOWED to master it, get it over with, and go on to faster and more comprehensive reading.

[philman_36]

But every parent who puts a child in a public school expects that school to teach their child to read in the traditional sense.
Bull pucky! My children were both taught to read by me well before they entered the indoctrination centers schools because I knew they might not be taught how to do so. I went to school with kids who graduated high school with fourth or fifth grade reading levels. Am I to not believe my own eyes and experiences? I don't expect diddly from public schools as long as they are agenda driven by organizations such as the NEA and others.
I tell my kids that if the teacher tells you it is raining look out the window yourself to find out for sure! Question everything you are "taught"!
Every parent who puts a child in a public school should expect that schools will not teach their child to read in the traditional sense and tend to it theirselves.
If they don't take that step then I have little sympathy for them, no matter their race or nationality. Our schools have been deteriorating for years and any decent parent knows this and should make accommodations for that deficiency.

[jackbill]

Do we, for example, really want to teach people to do a lot of sums or write in "a fine round hand" when they have a $5 hand-held calculator or a word processor to work with?

And what happens when the battery runs out, or the power fails?

I was in a major drugstore several months ago. The computerized cashregister went up and the clerks stopped making sales. The damned store shut down.

Needless to say, I've never gone back.

[lonestar]

Phonics works for most kids.

But what if you're one of those who isn't "most?"

I was not "most"--was taught by sight and it was a good thing because I had an auditory discrimination problem. I memorized spelling lists and if the teacher called the words out of order I was up a creek.

I've seen kids who knew all the letter/sound associations but couldn't read because they either had an auditory sequencing or auditory memory problem.

I'm a visual learner and always have been. The method of choice in my day taught to my strength. All I had to do was learn "Sally, run, Dick, Jane, and Spot" and I read a book. I met success early in school; I think it would have been different if I had been taught phonics.

No method works for all kids. But if the method doesn't work, the kid is "learning disabled."

I had good visual memory and was taught sight so I was "smart."

[Guillermo]

Don't you just love it when a plan comes together?

[philman_36]

Or, do we really have to have everybody literate – writing and reading in the traditional sense – when we have the means through our technology to achieve a new flowering of oral communication? Professor Anthony Oettinger
Hey Anthony, is Ebonics part of that new flowering oral communication? If so, we're in big trouble.
Sweep da flow wit dat broom der Brer Rabbit.
No offense meant to anyone. I'm just trying to be illustrative of my point.

[Bob]

I was in a major drugstore several months ago. The computerized cashregister went up and the clerks stopped making sales. The damned store shut down.

You want a real kick? Buy something for $4.77 and give the clerk $5.02 to pay for it. Watch in amazement as the clerk is initially confused by the two cents and then realizes (after the cash register does the math) that you magically get a quarter back. Just how are people able to do that?

[lonestar]

IPA. This really has little to do with reading education

I used the IPA as an example that if one cannot auditorially discriminate sounds, one will have difficulty learning to read with phonics.

Do you use "Flash cards" or "Sound out" cards?