<p>At the risk of sounding cynical, I fail to see what is new! After all, this situation is one that parents DO deserve, just as they deserve a political system that has failed for generations. Parents DO deserve this type of drama in education because of their indifference to the “system” when elections are held, ignorance about the issues presented to them, tacit and blind support to the group that has beheaded education as it was and IS ONLY interested in the well-being of its constituents, tacit approval of a system of education that overly political, and lastly …</p>
<p>a total disregard for the multiple alarms that sounded decades ago, and a moronic intent to reject all attempts at constructive but drastic changes. </p>
<p>For changes to happen, we first and foremost need to accept that our system is a failed one. And that does not jive well with the excessive pride and self-esteem of America. It will get worse, until it will be impossible to deny that our system educates (and that is a big word) a nation of imbeciles. Yes, we can do the right thing, but only after having exhausted all the other alternatives.</p>
<p>Sounds like a new thread–one which sounds beneficial. What is the best way to teach reading? To the masses? Phonics? School planned program? Parent at home program? what HAS worked and how would you consider implementing it in the school?
I taught my son to read BEFORE he entered kindergarten after suffering a flawed phonics course (which is how I was taught) with D. I found a book with straightforward lessons and although DS whined a bit (he was 4) it was only 15 minutes max for a lesson. For the most part it was good parent time–and he learned to read very quickly.<br>
If parents aren’t around–15 min/day x 30 kids can mean a lot of volunteers to accomplish the job. Good news is that it doesn’t last for YEARS–which seems to be what is happening nowadays.</p>
<p>My daughter taught English – i.e., reading and writing – to 10th and 12th graders in the South Bronx for several years. Her experience in general was that they were mostly all reading at the 7th grade level, and that they were intelligent, competent readers at the 7th grade level. They were well aware that the Daily News and New York Post were written for them (and those papers were read by them). The girls, especially, were enthusiastic readers of what amounted to soft-core porn series aimed at women of color. They could read plain-language contract terms. In other words, they could read what they needed to read to negotiate their lives and to entertain themselves, and were hard to convince that there was any payoff in becoming more sophisticated. (In large part, of course, that was because their horizons were very limited in terms of the jobs they thought they could get.)</p>
<p>It’s also true that for the jobs available to them, public presentation, speaking, teamwork, ability to deal with boredom and monotony, and (occasionally) leadership are far more important than reading (above the level they are at.</p>
<p>Jeanne S. Chall was one of the leading researchers on the teaching of reading, about which she wrote several books. Her conclusions differ from mini’s.</p>
<p>The same phonics stuff that has left hundreds of thousands if not millions of people functionally illiterate since she first started to write.</p>
<p>But forget method: the one thing that virtually all functionally illiterate people have in common is that they were all “taught to read” in school. If you do the same old same old, you get the same old same old.</p>
<p>Just an anecdote but my kids learned to read before 4 years old.</p>
<p>We read to them for at least an hour or two every night and they picked it up. We’ve had lots of parents ask us how to do what we did with our kids so we tell them to read for an hour or two every night to them.</p>
<p>We have yet for anyone including family and upper middle class parents to take our advice as far as we know.</p>
<p>We read to our kids at least an hour a night, often more (often a lot more), from the time the first one was tiny. They didn’t magically learn to read, though. The older one had a sense of it, but the penny didn’t drop until spring of her first-grade year. My sister taught my younger child to read over an extended visit he had with her and my parents the summer after first grade. They both became excellent readers, just not without a lot of formal help.</p>
<p>Same with me, actually. My parents and grandmother read to me plenty, but I learned to read in school, not at home, and not at a particularly early age. Lots of kids were able to read on their own long before I was.</p>
<p>* The only assertion I needed to make is the one incontrovertible fact you have experienced firsthand, namely, every functionally illiterate person you have ever met was “taught to read in school”. *</p>
<p>That’s not evidence, because also most of our functionally literate people in the U.S. were also taught to read in school - due to the fact that the vast majority of Americans attended regular public schools. Evidence is typically peer-reviewed research studies that have been conducted by researchers to make a point. In order to show that being taught to read actually decreases literacy for children, you’d need to cite some empirical articles (or at the very least, a book that cites empirical work, which Frank Smith’s book does not as it is largely a book about his psycholinguistic theory. Not that it’s not reputable, of course).</p>
<p>I also went to a Montessori school myself and the first rule is not “no teaching”; that’s a misinterpretation, IMO, of the Montessori mission. It’s more along the lines of guided discovery, emphasizing independence on the part of the child. However, the teacher is still an indirect instructor - she curates the list of activities that students can choose from; she leads group activities and play time. Montessori teachers also employ skills and techniques developed by Maria Montessori herself. They are, indeed, teaching - they are simply teaching in a more indirect manner than most public school teachers teach.</p>
<p>If you’re talking about Montessori’s Casa dei Bambini (Children’s House), I don’t see any evidence that she taught 100% of her students to read or that any significant percentage of them were homeless or children raising other children. The Children’s House was opened in 1907 and was specifically for the children of working parents in a low-income neighborhood. Most of these children had parents are were not homeless. Also, there’s no evidence that Montessori was uninterested in teaching reading until after World War I - in fact, Montessori began putting together a reading and writing curriculum in the fall of 1907. Her curriculum was extremely successful.</p>
<p>I also just want to mention that the research on phonics-based learning vs. whole word learning (which Smith proposes) is mixed. It actually seems that successfully learning to read requires using a variety of strategies - which may include phonics for some children, and both phonics and sight reading sometimes.</p>
<p>No one makes a living from reading alone, but reading is a required skill for virtually any job in our economy. Public speaking and leadership are important, but there are many jobs that don’t require either: however, virtually all jobs require you to have basic literacy.</p>
<p>I taught both of my children to read using phonics method. They were one of the best readers in their schools, when they were in elementary school. </p>
<p>My dad taught me how to read using phonics method. I was a star reader in my day care and elementary school.</p>
<p>I think that the one thing that virtually all functionally illiterate people have in common are parents who are not parenting.</p>
<p>I agree with lerkin. I taught my S to read learning a phonics method–but it was a ton better method and more structured than what my D had when she was in school. I do NOT think people learn to read by osmosis. I think reading takes some real one-on-one time that a lot of parents don’t (or can’t) give to their kids but a GOOD phonics program can go pretty far. It better, or we’re sunk…</p>
<p>Isn’t that great? Should that statement not be followed by the most important question, namely … why do we need schools and what do schools accomplish if the main reason children cannot read is because of a poor choice in parents? </p>
<p>The reality is that we keep on making excuses for a failing system, and prefer to blame the recipients of the service as opposed to the service providers. </p>
<p>Do we have the right to blame the schools, the teachers, and the organization of our education system? You betcha since they collectively bargained for having the exclusive right to provide publicly funded education. They bargained for that right, and that right comes with the obligation of educating everyone to a minimum level of competence. </p>
<p>That is why schools are for! Otherwise, the best alternative is to credit every child the expense and let the parents educate their kids at home. After all, don’t we blame the parents for the kids’ inability to read or write, let alone think!</p>
<p>I know some functionally illiterate children who are the products of failed homeschooling.
There are many ways to learn to read, many programs out there. I’m a former homeschooler who taught 3 of my children to read using a phonics-based book called “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons.”
It wasn’t perfect, (stories in the book are really idiotic) but after completing those 100 easy lessons, the kids could move on to regular books. I have also taught ESL, and tutored dyslexic students who were late readers (age 9-10). Different methods work better for different kids. Four of my children learned to read IN school using a combination of “Look, Say” (memorizing the most common sight words) and phonics. I think this method worked well for them–and also worked for dyslexic students with repetitive “Dick and Jane” style stories that incorporated phonics. I am now working with a 9yo who cannot read at all. The homeschool mom is “stuck” on a particular phonics program that she thinks is “the best”–because she used it for her two older kids. IMO the program is crazy–has kids memorize every single phonetic sound/spelling in the English language. Hold up a flashcard and recite all the sounds that letter or combination of letters can make?? It reminds me of a college linguistics class. Don’t ever say the alphabet or letter names because that confuses the child, the letter should be known only by its sound (??) When I told her that I’ve seen sight words and repetitive stories work for other late readers, the mom said the kid couldn’t memorize 30 sight words because her brain is too full (??full of what–useless linguistic facts from those flashcards?) The program requires a lot time, which the mom hasn’t had lately (because she has 4 younger children). There are plenty of books in the house. The child is not handicapped, not dyslexic. She has older sibs who can read, parents who are college graduates interested in education. She is read to. She wants to learn. Her problem is that no one has taken time to Teach her How to read. After seeing her kid NOT get it with this program, after 3 years, the mom doesn’t want to try something else. (Sorry for personal rant, but I’m really frustrated with this mom.) Kids can’t teach themselves to read without learning the connection between the symbols on the page and the sounds/words they make. Perhaps some kids can make that connection on their own after hearing/seeing a word/story repeated many times. But I don’t believe kids can just “teach themselves” to read. (My kid could read the word “Kroger” at age 1 )
Does anyone remember ITA (initial teaching alphabet–failed experiment of the 60’s)? I learned to read with that. (The 100 Easy Lessons book is somewhat similar to ITA) We have a lot of intelligent folks in the family, top students, 99%ers. All learned to read between age 5 and 6 1/2. I think of it like a “switch” in the brain. It turns on at different ages for different people. When I tried teaching at 5 and the kid wasn’t getting it, I put the reading book away for a few months. Most kids are not ready for reading at 4, and I think it is unreasonable for parents to expect kids to read at that age. Age 6 (first grade) is when it happens for most people.</p>
<p>In my state the failing schools are the ones that have the largest per student spending. </p>
<p>These are the schools where one of its students, 13 year old girl, got pregnant and the father was her step-brother, the nine year old brought a knife to school to threaten the teacher and second graders pinned the teacher down so that their class-mate can beat her up.</p>
<p>No wonder students cannot learn in these schools. You are right, schools are for teaching. However, you cannot teach those who do not want to be taught.</p>
<p>Please tell me what you want to change about the failing system. Obviously, spending the largest amount per student doesn’t do the trick.</p>
<p>When my D was 5, she was desperate to learn to read, and begged me to teach her. I got the 100 Easy Lessons book, and she cheerfully worked through a lesson every day, until we got to blending sounds, which she could not do. She could sound out each letter, but the sounds remained stubbornly independent of one another. C-A-T was three separate noises that did not form any recognizable word.</p>
<p>So we put the book away, and a few months later, she woke up one morning able to read nearly anything. Like someone earlier said, a switch flipped.</p>
<p>allyphoe–that’s interesting. In the system I used, the parent is first taught to do the letter sounds–not eff (like saying the letter) but f (as in pronouncing f-rog). In fact, they say do NOT teach the alphabet because the letter pronunciations mostly don’t match their true sounds. Then you play games in the car or anywhere where you very slowly say the word sounds as separate parts and your kid guesses the word you are saying. Like C-A-T. When your kid gets good at it–THEN and only then you start the program. It was learning to hear blended sounds first rather than learning the sounds of letters and then blending them.</p>
<p>Oh, she could do it when I made the sounds. Just not when she did.</p>
<p>(She’s always been a very all-or-nothing child. One day she absolutely did not have a skill - or any of the common precursors to that skill - and the next day she had the skill essentially mastered. Worked that way for walking, and then speaking, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when reading went the same way.)</p>
<p>My father grew up in slams and he started school at the age of 10, not knowing alphabet. He was not getting help from his parents, he was expected to do multiple house chores first, and homework in his spare time. His mom was sick, his dad was a gentle, educated person, who lost faith and became alcoholic. In 7 years dad finished school and got scholarship to attend university. It was not even celebrated in his school, it was expected. He was considered bright kid and teachers spend extra time with him (for free). Other thing amazes me - All slam kids who attended school - all of them - graduated and got HS diplomas. Not a single kid was considered uneducatable. (for fairness, most kids with disabilities were not in school). </p>
<p>My grandmother (mothers side) was an orphan living on the streets since very-very early age (theft, alcohol, prostitution, orphanages, gangs, guns, etc.). She was enrolled in school for one year only. Yet she learned to read and write. Later she joined army, married, made a very successful career and put <em>all</em> her children through college, including my mom, who was a teenage mother. Interestingly, she always considered herself blessed, lucky, and successful. Assertive, energetic, witty fighter. She was always proud of her street years and told us lots of funny stories of survival. </p>
<p>I mean, it is possible to build up your life. I really don’t understand the arguments about “parent involvement”. Schools are supposed to teach any kids, its their job.</p>
<p>BTW, in California schools for disadvantaged-urban-minority receive far batter funding than suburban schools. Yes, urban schools have more resources than suburban.</p>
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