I don’t know why they had to fix what wasn’t broken. Phonics have worked to teach kids to read for literally centuries, but these people come along and they’re like, “What if we just let the kids GUESS what words mean, based on the pictures?” And while the rest of us (including long-time homeschoolers teaching their own many children to …
I don’t know why they had to fix what wasn’t broken. Phonics have worked to teach kids to read for literally centuries, but these people come along and they’re like, “What if we just let the kids GUESS what words mean, based on the pictures?” And while the rest of us (including long-time homeschoolers teaching their own many children to read) advocated for phonics, they dismissed us because we aren’t “professionals.” Well, guess whose kids are reading. And guess whose aren’t.
And entire generation of kids, failed by the people who, in the end, really only have ONE job (though they often forget that): make the kids literate.
This infuriates me. And it’s why with my own kids I stick with the methods that have passed the test of time: phonics, copy work, dictation, and traditional math instruction (don’t even get me started the tedium of Common Core math, which by the way, after more than a decade, hasn’t made a single difference in the math achievement/performance of America’s children).
It's interesting that phonics works as well as it apparently does in teaching reading, given that English is not a particularly phonetic language. As a native English speaker, when I studied Spanish in high school I was struck by how closely spelling matched pronunciation, with even the accented syllables strictly determined by a combination of rules and written accent marks.
Russian, which I studied in college, is also fairly phonetic. I thought the unfamiliar Cyrillic alphabet would be the hardest part of learning Russian, but in fact that was rather easy to master, and I soon learned to read and pronounce words whose meanings were still a mystery. I found Russian's complex grammar a considerably greater obstacle to becoming proficient.
100% agree. It infuriates me that we allow the education system to act like it is a big mystery and arduous task to teach children to read, when civilized societies have been doing it for centuries (millennia?)
The languages that use ideograms are much harder to learn to read in. It requires orders of magnitude more memorization. Phonetic alphabet systems revolutionized written languages and brought it to whole populations instead of "mandarin elites". Printing bibles in spoken languages (as opposed to Latin) in most of Europe was key to expanding education out to the masses. Requiring it to only be printed in Latin was a bit of gatekeeping crept back into the Church which ultimately worked against them and for the Protestants who insisted that everybody be able to read their own bibles. Meso-America had their own form of gate-keeping in that, while they didn't really have a written narrative language system, they had excellent mathematics which they apparently developed to keep track of tithes and taxation of subjugated populations. Only it was in base-60. That is, it had 60 different numerical digits. We think it's bad learning the times-tables in base-10. in order to master their times-tables they had to be able to multiply stuff like 51 x 59 and then carry. Only a few could master it and they probably did pretty well in terms of job security. Our time and angle systems is based on this though (60 minutes per hour, 60 seconds per minute, 360 degrees per circle. )
Very often, it isn't what the teachers want. It's imposed on them from the top down. They aren't allowed to depart from the orthodox lesson plan, even when they notice it failing.
I don’t know why they had to fix what wasn’t broken. Phonics have worked to teach kids to read for literally centuries, but these people come along and they’re like, “What if we just let the kids GUESS what words mean, based on the pictures?” And while the rest of us (including long-time homeschoolers teaching their own many children to read) advocated for phonics, they dismissed us because we aren’t “professionals.” Well, guess whose kids are reading. And guess whose aren’t.
And entire generation of kids, failed by the people who, in the end, really only have ONE job (though they often forget that): make the kids literate.
This infuriates me. And it’s why with my own kids I stick with the methods that have passed the test of time: phonics, copy work, dictation, and traditional math instruction (don’t even get me started the tedium of Common Core math, which by the way, after more than a decade, hasn’t made a single difference in the math achievement/performance of America’s children).
It's interesting that phonics works as well as it apparently does in teaching reading, given that English is not a particularly phonetic language. As a native English speaker, when I studied Spanish in high school I was struck by how closely spelling matched pronunciation, with even the accented syllables strictly determined by a combination of rules and written accent marks.
Russian, which I studied in college, is also fairly phonetic. I thought the unfamiliar Cyrillic alphabet would be the hardest part of learning Russian, but in fact that was rather easy to master, and I soon learned to read and pronounce words whose meanings were still a mystery. I found Russian's complex grammar a considerably greater obstacle to becoming proficient.
100% agree. It infuriates me that we allow the education system to act like it is a big mystery and arduous task to teach children to read, when civilized societies have been doing it for centuries (millennia?)
The languages that use ideograms are much harder to learn to read in. It requires orders of magnitude more memorization. Phonetic alphabet systems revolutionized written languages and brought it to whole populations instead of "mandarin elites". Printing bibles in spoken languages (as opposed to Latin) in most of Europe was key to expanding education out to the masses. Requiring it to only be printed in Latin was a bit of gatekeeping crept back into the Church which ultimately worked against them and for the Protestants who insisted that everybody be able to read their own bibles. Meso-America had their own form of gate-keeping in that, while they didn't really have a written narrative language system, they had excellent mathematics which they apparently developed to keep track of tithes and taxation of subjugated populations. Only it was in base-60. That is, it had 60 different numerical digits. We think it's bad learning the times-tables in base-10. in order to master their times-tables they had to be able to multiply stuff like 51 x 59 and then carry. Only a few could master it and they probably did pretty well in terms of job security. Our time and angle systems is based on this though (60 minutes per hour, 60 seconds per minute, 360 degrees per circle. )
I thank my lucky stars that I was taught phonics. It has served me well as a reader for decades.
They always have to fix what isn't broken. That's what they do.
Very often, it isn't what the teachers want. It's imposed on them from the top down. They aren't allowed to depart from the orthodox lesson plan, even when they notice it failing.
Otherwise they would have to work for a living.