I found the button!
January 3rd, 2006My recent post on home education has gotten more response in a shorter time and from a much more varied readership than anything I’ve done in months. Before you start chuckling to yourself, I’m way ahead of you. I haven’t given y’all much to work with lately. I apologize for that. That will be changing.
Anyway, there were a number of great comments on that post. I suggest you read them all.
Difster did a pretty good job responding to Jason, but I think I can sum up what he said more concisely (or at least add to it): You can’t comprehend what you cannot read. Without phonics or assistance, you cannot read any word you’ve never seen before. What Jason has heard about that concept is some of the propaganda they use to batter phonics. (deputyheadmistress made the point better than I can with a link that’s worth clicking.)
Everyone should read The Underground History of American Education. You have no excuse now. I have a signed pre-publication copy but I had to con a friend into buying it for me. You can read it for free if you’re a good enough student to scroll, investigate and clickety-click. I suggest you check out a little more about the author first because it would be very easy to be skeptical about the outrageous charges he makes if you haven’t read his bio and credentials. (And by “credentials,” I mean accomplishments. In Texas we have a saying, “It ain’t boastin’ if ya done it.” He’s done it. Belly of the beast and all that.) In fact, unless someone here will do it for me, I’ll have to dig up the link to his acceptance speech when he won the New York State Teacher of the Year Award. He told them the truth in his acceptance speech and, though the material is sad on it’s face, I’ve read it more than once and laughed out loud each time. He knew he was on the way out and had the balls to tell them the truth.
I’m getting sidetracked but you have to read that book to understand. It changed my life because for the first time I understood specifically why I hated school so much and why I wanted to spare my kids that horror. Back to the point, the “teachers” are mostly ignorant pawns and the people creating the curriculum don’t want children to know how to read. The propaganda is just that. Propaganda.
My only possible disagreement with Athor Pel’s comments is that he implies (at least the way I read it) that phonics doesn’t work for some kids and that for some kids, something else may work instead of phonics. If you don’t understand phonics, you don’t know how to read. Period. It would be like saying that you can learn multiplication and division without understanding addition or subtraction. More precisely, it would be like saying that you could understand any kind of advanced math without ever learning to count.
Maybe I read too much into what Athor typed there, but learning phonics (as Dif said) is essential to understanding the English language. The understanding of phonics is a building block that is required to ever get beyond “functionally literate.” Most of what I know that matters in the real world, I’ve learned reading things I don’t understand. I’m thirty-five and I still will sit for hours reading something that I don’t understand at all. By definition, those things are usually filled with words I’ve never seen before. (I don’t even think about this consciously anymore, but…) I look at the letters, sound out the word and, with rare exception, I recognize it as a word I heard but have never seen. (You have to listen too! Especially when you’re around smart people. That’s far less often than you think.) Having done that for thirty of my thirty-five years, my experience has been that if I put the time in, reading something that I don’t understand at all, within a year I’ll know it well enough to teach it or write the article.
See, I still love learning. I do it every day. It’s not a discipline. It’s not a habit. I didn’t train myself to do this. It’s a passion. It’s like air to me. If I didn’t stretch my mind yet today, I can’t go to bed yet. The day’s not yet done. I have to find something that baffles me and (hopefully) figure it out.
People used to think it was cute when I was a little kid and they would say, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I would reply…
“I don’t care what I am when I grow up. I just want to KNOW EVERYTHING!” (“Isn’t that adorable? *chuckle* He wants to know EVERYTHING! You’re smart enough to do it too!”)
I’m thirty-five and nobody finds it cute when I say that now. I don’t understand. I didn’t say I do know everything, though I’m often accused of that crime. I know what I don’t know – most everything. I’m just saying that’s my goal. I understand ignorance of a topic and I’m quick to admit it.
Just when you thought I was rambling…. I had a point once and I think I remember where I left it.
I loved Athor Pel’s comment:
Kids want to learn. It takes a teacher to make them want to stop learning.
My sister bought my daughters “workbooks” for Christmas. Among other things. I think she bought the educational stuff to keep Daddy happy. They’re HUGE. She bought them each one and a third one for them to share. Each of the three has over 300 pages. You can’t pry that book out of Katie’s hands. Everything else she got for Christmas has been ignored.
(She’s my oldest – 7 – and the one that has been horribly subjected to government schools against my wishes and court orders. Her mother and others at her mothers’ disposal are “begging” – their word – me to put her in school now that she’s home in Texas because “she LOVES school SO much!” When I ask HER about it, totally objectively, she tells me that she likes seeing all her friends and she likes recess but she really hates school most of the time because you have to sit and be quiet a lot.)
So she’s working in this workbook and doing things she’s never seen before, with no help. She reads out loud (slowly of course, that’s why you can’t comprehend while sounding out words, I suppose.) “This is the story of the pil-gr-ims coming to America. From what you know about pil-gr-ims, put the pic-tures in order.” She pauses, looks up and says, “I don’t know anything about pilgrims. I don’t even know what that is. (Like I said, see the word, sound it out, hear it before or later and you just learned something without a “teacher.”) My sister simply says to her, “Well, let’s see if we can figure it out, anyway.” (Tells her nothing about the pilgrims.) While my sister is pointing at the first picture on the page, the pilgrims landing, and saying, “What’s happening here?” Katie’s already numbered all the pictures correctly and is turning the page.
My sister says, “How did you know that?” and Katie, says, “Duh! You can’t be on the ocean unless you got in the boat and you can’t get out of the boat until you find land and then you plant food!”
Duh, indeed. That’s common sense to her and she not only handled the challenge of something she knew nothing about, she learned a basic version of the story of the pilgrims in the process. Because she knows how to think.
There are many things I would like to teach my children, but the only ones that matter are reading (and a love for it) and how to learn (and a love for that, too).
If my daughters never learn anything else but a love for learning and how to read, I’ve been a success. I have much higher goals than that, but they’re unlikely to learn the latter in a government school these days and the reason is because the government school was designed to, and works very efficiently at, completely obliterating the former.
Learning is fun. Unless Mommy and Daddy make you go to school.
Getting more directly back to Athor’s point:
I was praising Katie for figuring out the thing with the pilgrims when she didn’t even know the story and she said very matter-of-factly, “That’s because I’m a learner.”
I said, “You’re a good learner, too.”
She immediately, and emphatically replied, “That’s because I LOVE learning. It’s fun!” With that she went right back to the next page in her book.
I said, “I know. I can see that. That’s why I don’t ever want you to go back to school.”
At that, my mother and sister laughed as if I was making a joke. (They really are supportive, they’re just not de-programmed yet.)
Thankfully, Katie never looked up. She was burning through another page of stuff she had never seen. It’s a voracious appetite she has. My responsibility is just to guide her. She needs little help.
And I won’t be the one to tell her she can’t know EVERYTHING. Because I’m not convinced it’s impossible and if anyone can do it….
More than men’s knowledge, I’m charged with making sure she knows the Word. I John 2:20 reads, “But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things.”
I’m certainly not there yet, but you’re a liar if you tell someone it’s not possible.
I gotta explain something.
I think what you call phonics and what I call phonics may be slightly different things.
What you call phonics I just call reading, even if it is being practiced by a total beginner.
And reading is done differently by everyone that practises it.
I see phonics as a system that contains some truths about learning to read but it is still as much about the system as it is about learning to read. Did that make sense? I haven’t put this idea into written words before.
My idea of what phonics is could easily be wrong for I have not studied any particular method of learning to read. I only know how I did it and some anecdotal stories from various people.
I am just averse to “systems” of almost any kind for they seem like tyranny of the mind.
I am just averse to “systems” of almost any kind for they seem like tyranny of the mind.
Like the ‘system’ you’re using to post to blogs? Most of life is just intertwined systems. Language is certainly a system. There are agreed upon protocols, methods for correction and even rules for creating new information. It’s a system and the building block of that system is the sounds that the letters represent. If we could only read and write and not speak, I have no doubt our language would vastly different and far more efficient. In fact, Hebrew is one of the most efficient written languages there is (from what I understand).
In short, because we speak first, then read, phonics is most certainly the key to reading.
DC is right on target. If you don’t know phonics, you’re trapped within the vocabulary your keepers want you to have. You cannot learn new words unless somebody tells them to you.
Now, some kids figure out phonics without knowing what it is (I was one of those). They just notice that almost everytime they see ‘ph’ it makes the ‘f’ sound, and they notice that when g is followed by i or e it makes the /j/ sound (or soft g). They don’t know those *terms* but they know those facts.
But lots of kids never will figure it out.
The English language is just sounds put together. dismissing phonics because it’s a system is like asking somebody for a recipe and then telling them, “Oh, ingredients. That’s just a system, and I don’t hold with that.”
The individual sounds are the ingredients of our language and the building blocks of an open ended reading vocabulary.
English is not as simple as, say, Japanese, where the character for ‘ko’ is pronounced ‘ko’ and it never, ever makes any other sound but ‘ko.’
But it’s much, much simpler than we’ve been told. If you doubt this, I strongly recommend the book The ABC’s and All Their Tricks.
And thanks for the link, DC. I have more where that article came from. I’ve been building up a Big Mama of a post on reading and public schools are failing our kids, and it’s getting so long it’s going to have be to a series. I wish it were otherwise.
Glad you’re homeschooling your girlies, too- you sound like a great daddy. We’ve been hsing since 1988, and since my ‘baby’ is seven, I expect to be doing it until around 2017.=)
You folks are sounding like ‘true believers’ or zealots. Do you even realize how you sound?
Let me repeat two sentences from my previous posts.
“What you call phonics I just call reading…”
“My idea of what phonics is could easily be wrong for I have not studied any particular method of learning to read.”
Now, please attack me again for my ignorance.
After reading the Thank You Whole Language column, the part about your daughter knowing how to think cheered me up. Yaaay.
… I have no doubt our language would vastly different and far more efficient.
Well, there go, it far more efficient already.
Sorry Difster. Just mess with you.
Sorry Difster. Just mess with you.
That was funny Richard.
AThor, I’m not sure if you’re upset with what I said, what Difster said, or both, but I am sorry if I came across as attacking you. It is not my intention to attack you, but I do mean to correct ignorance.
I am passionate, and angry, about the horrible job the education establishment has done promoting literacy over the last few decades. Illiteracy is increasing in this country, even among high school graduates, and we do know how to fix this, but we don’t do it.
Being upset about this makes me sound like a ‘true believer,’ and that’s a bigger problem that the sabotage of our educational system by those who shoved phonics out and brainwashed an entire population into believing that phonics didn’t really work? I guess I’m not clear on why it’s bad to care passionately that kids learn how to read and that the proven methods for teaching reading be used.
Please do read John Taylor Gatto’s book, or Samuel Blumenfeld’s Trojan Horse in AMerican Education, or the much older Why Johnny Can’t Read.
The last time I looked into it there had never yet been a reading study done that didn’t show that phonics worked and other methods failed to teach too many kids how to read. Not one. Yet still the education establishment promotes anything but phonics, and they have convinced far too many people to believe something that is not true.
You say your idea of phonics could easily be wrong, but that didn’t stop you from voicing an opinion on it and questioning DC as to why he would use it. Might it be profitable to stop and think why you had the assumptions you had? where did they come from?
You’ve been given several sources to remedy the misinformation you’ve been given. You can check it out, or you can complain that being told where to find the aspirin is attacking you for having a head-ache.
I’ve read lots of Gatto, and several books by John Holt. Gatto is great for generating indignation. Holt tells the reader what really works and doesn’t work when it comes to getting children educated.
I have Iserbyt’s and Blumenfeld’s books but haven’t gotten to them yet. I have a stack of about twenty books waiting to be read. They aren’t high on the list. After Gatto and Holt I don’t need to be convinced further of the functional and moral bankruptcy of the american public education system.
The only thing I knew about phonics was that it was a system for learning to read that was sold on television like something from Ronco or Ktel.
How much confidence would it instill in someone to see those commercials with no other input?
Still, I do not think we are of two minds on this topic. I will quote myself again, “What you call phonics I just call reading…”. I am an advocate for what works, nothing more, nothing less. I never said phonics do not work. The thing is, everyone learns in different ways and at different speeds. Part of my vocabulary was learned phonetically, a larger part of it was learned by sight. Meaning that I heard the word spoken by other people and was pointed to the word on paper and I instantly memorized that word as a symbol representing the spoken word. There was nothing phonetic about the initial learning. But that’s just me.
There is bound to be a published version of phonics and within that system are bound to be guidelines for what pronunciation rules to teach and what rules not to teach until much much later. Not everybody wants or needs those guidelines. Thing is, the English language is so full of exceptions to spelling and pronunciation that having supposed hard and fast rules is in some cases frustrating for a new reader. It’s what we get for having several other languages provide our expanding vocabulary over the centuries.
It’s my guess that 90 percent of phonics is universally useful and the rest is ‘system’ and, further that DC uses that 90 percent and doesn’t even bother to worry about the rest.
I never said that learning to read by sounding out the words doesn’t work for new learners or for learning new words. I only offered a caution to following a system blindly. I did say, “What you call phonics I just call reading…”
I offer one note of small insight. Once a large vocabulary is built in the mind and reading becomes automatic what begins to happen in the process of reading isn’t the continual sounding out of each individual word but the instant recognition of each word as a symbol. Further, those words that often occur together get read as a block. Both of these phenomena speed up reading tremendously and they have nothing whatsoever to do with phonics. Phonetically sounding out a word is a tool for learning new words, that’s all. After the word is learned and made a part of the person it ceases to be simply a string of sounds and is from then on stored as a whole in that person’s mind. It becomes a symbol for that idea or thing.
I should of said, After the WRITTEN word is learned and made a part of the person it ceases to be simply a string of sounds and is from then on stored as a whole in that person’s mind. It becomes a symbol for that idea or thing, a symbol for the spoken word.
Athor Pel: Maybe you should view ‘phonics’ like the training wheels on a bicycle. The wheels(sounding out words) hold you up until you are able to maintain balance(read by sight).
Isn’t that what I said?
Based on your most recent comments Athor, I’d say we’re pretty much all in agreement.
I didn’t use any packaged phonics program to teach my daughter to read. I sat with her and wrote out letters, taught her the potential sounds, and gradually started stringing the letters together to make words. No other ‘program’ was necessary.
I didn’t get that from your posts. I think I said it more clearly than you did. I was getting the idea you thought phonics was useful but that you had a problem with the way it is/was used.
I find it ironic that in a discussion about language, we are witnessing misunderstandings based on different people saying the same thing different ways. Dif’s right, everyone here is in agreement.
Athor, I can understand your possible misconception about phonics based on it being sold in TV commercials. But you have to understand that it’s sold that way because the supposed educators have abandoned it and left most of an entire generation illiterate. Unfortunately, for many, purchasing Hooked on Phonics is the best option available to them to learn to read.
I’m just not a big fan of hard and fast pronunciation rules when it comes to English. You shouldn’t load a beginner down with lots of rule exceptions but damn, there are just so many words that are exceptional in one way or another.
There are many words with rule exceptions in them but also many different types of exceptions; silent letters, multiple possible pronunciations of a letter depending on placement, letter sequences that sound one way in this word and another way in that word, a certain sound being spelled one way in this word and another way in that word, words that sound the same but mean different things and are spelled differently, but then there are the words that have the same spelling but different meanings and different pronunciations.
Very few other languages have this kind of crap to deal with.
Most people learning English as a second language marvel that we are literate at all for our language is so needlessly complex. Professional linguists have told me that English is one of the hardest languages to learn as an adult, like in the top five.
I was unaware of the true magnitude of the problem until I started learning Korean. In Korean I could count the number of spelling and pronunciation exceptions on my fingers, there are that few. Wonderfully consistent language Korean. The Korean phonetic alphabet was designed in the 1500′s in response to a decree by the King so we should expect things to be neat and tidy. Unlike English which has grown organically over centuries with loan words from several languages. Funny thing about the experience, I learned more English while learning Korean than I ever did in English class. We had to, so as to be able to make direct comparisons and to talk intelligently about what we were learning.
A game I play with my best friend consists of finding words that when spoken phonetically using the normal pronunciation rules sound nothing like their correct dictionary pronunciation. And for us the more different the better and the more bizarre sounding the better. If we make a conscious effort we can find several a day, everyday, just in normal conversation.
The extended rules of the game involve us coming up with alternate definitions for the strictly phonetic pronunciations that somehow fit the new odd pronunciation. We’ll even come up with alternate etymologies.
That’s all.
I’m done now.
Really.
I don’t have anything else to say.
I never learned phonics. I learned to read silently, just after my fifth birthday, and I read faster than anyone else I know except trained speed readers. No one knows exactly how I learned to read because I wasn’t taught. I was just read to. (The optimolegist told my mom my eyes would be damaged if she taught me to read that young, I had a wandering eye. Ironicly, reading cured it.) I never ‘sounded out’ words, or did any ‘this letter makes this sound’ drills. My spelling was always atrocious until I had spell check, and still isn’t all that great. Being compelled to look the word up to figure out how to spell it really helped. Prior to that I didn’t know whether I’d spelled words right or not. Phonics probably wouldn’t have helped with that because of all the exception words.
I don’t know anyone else who learned this way. Yet. I hope my children will. It’s really a blessing to be able to read fast and retain information, and after watching my phonetics-trained husband spend hours with textbooks that I could finish in less than one, I realize how valuable this skill of mine is.
Can I put in another plug for The ABC’s and All Their Tricks?
It is certainly true that English is harder than many other languages and full of more exceptions to the rules than most (largely because we drag in nearly every other language and put it to work in our language).
But…. many of the exceptions are not quite so exceptional as we think, and ABC’s and All Their Tricks is a very useful tool for seeing that. IT was fascinating to me to look up all the words I’d thought made no sense and see that there actually was a phonetic reason they were pronounced the way they were.
And definitely, phonics is for beginning and for figuring out new words- good readers quickly progress to sight reading. in fact, according to Blumenfeld, that reality is what brought us whole language- educators thought, hey, competent readers sight read, so let’s skip phonics and go straight to sight reading.
INcidentally, somewhere I read a review of all the phonics programs out there (I forget where) and Hooked on PHonics was one of the worst, which is kind of sad.
And if I might add some heresy to my true believer status- I think reading needs to be taught through phonics (some kids do pick it up without it, and I’d let those kids loose on the books, but more kids don’t figure it out on their own). But spelling- spelling is some phonics but mostly by sight. How many times do we right a word down and then say, “That doesn’t look right…”=)
How many times do we right a word down and then say, “That doesn’t look right…”=)
You mean words like “right?” hehe
I before E except after C. Weird.