Teach The Children Well

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Sometime ago, in the aftermath of plagiarism scandals at the ivies, I said this was happening because the people entering the ivies are functionally illiterate.

I don’t mean to say they can’t read simple messages, or sign their names, or even read and answer multiple choice questions. I mean I think they’re incapable of reading for pleasure, or reading to acquire information. There is a difference. Many people can read, but get bogged down in reading a long text and keeping information from it in their heads.

My main reasons to say that were two fold:

a) the plagiarism cases in modus operandi reminded me exactly of what happens when a partly proficient foreign language learner tries to cobble together a complex essay. (Or even a simple one.) You go out and take paragraphs from various things, that seem to say what you want said in that paragraph of your essay. You might make small changes, or not, because the problem with that level of proficiency in a foreign language is that you mostly understand it, but you’re not confident enough with the structures of the language to write a full paragraph without falling on your face. (I remember agonizing over things like who/whom sometimes for an hour. Yes, I knew the rule. I also knew informal speech often broke it, and I’d diagram the sentences and still be hoplessly confused.)

b) I’d seen exactly this type of thing while teaching entry level college English in the early oughts. You could not assign a complex text and expect them to get the meaning, and for about half or three fourths of the class, asking them to write an essay was a bridge too far. You could ask. They just couldn’t do it. The essays turned in read like someone who couldn’t carry a thought to the end of a simple sentence. If I only knew people by their essays I’d think I was teaching the special ed class in some elementary school. But I knew them as people, and talked to them. Most of them were smart, had a decent vocabulary and could make a cogent argument in speech. It was only when trying to read or write that the wheels came off.

Because I’d taught foreign languages before, I knew precisely what this was a symptom of: bizarrely incompetent teaching. The kind of teaching that, if it were being done by a 16 year old in a one-room school house somewhere in the American prairie in the nineteenth century would have got her lynched, because it’s designed to NOT teach people while taking up maximum time and effort. Only the sixteen year old would never have done that, because after lesson three she’d have realized the kids weren’t learning (or even paying attention) and tried something else.

To turn out “well educated” (this is a misnomer. They’re well trained. To sit and listen and parrot back. They’ve no acquired any of the tools of civilization though) people who can’t read takes the might of the department of education, the cumulative apparatus of the schools of education and state licensing. Only people who have the basic instincts of humanity pounded out of them by a lot of nonsense are stupid enough to continue following the herd off the cliff.

Frankly, they follow the rules and what they were taught, because then they’re covered. They can’t be sued for malpractice if they’re doing what the manual taught them were best practices. (Yes, also, a lot of them are dumber than cheese. But not all. A lot are normal or high intelligence people rendered dumb by education dogma.)

My misgivings were given some backing by this: At Harvard, a student thought A Clockwork Orange was written in “Old English” and used AI to “translate” it. Others “view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge” and think professors who ask them to do it are “arbitrarily withholding information.”

Now, yes, I am aware that A Clockwork Orange is written in a weird style. But that is the problem. These people are not illiterate-illiterate, but they are functionally illiterate in any way that counts.

If it were written normally, a student might struggle through it, a page or two at a time. But you throw in a weird style and they come aground, because reading a book normally written is already so much effort the weird style makes it impossible.

How did we get here? Well, remember what I said above about weird education theories? It’s mostly, really, whole word. Yes, I know your schools will tell you they don’t use whole word. That’s because they keep changing the name every few years, as it acquires a bad odor. But the method is always the same.

When my kids were little, 20 some years ago, it was “whole language” and the teacher could wax poetic for hours on how this enhanced learning and blah, blah, blah. But what I can tell you is that they took my 5 year old second son, who was reading quite well on his own, and made him non-functional at reading. Instead of sounding out the word “We’re not supposed to do that” he was supposed to “guess” which for a kid (and an adult. Sometime in private ask me how I heard an attending physician call something by the name of a death camp by accident.) means if it starts and ends with the same letter it’s functionally the same word.

When you’re reading a simple text, like instructions on how to brew coffee, you can realize you have the wrong word and go back and correct until you get the right one. But a whole novel? Even a long short story? It doesn’t even have to be written in a difficult style. You’re not going to go back and second guess every single word.

Now, sure, in defense of this “just guess” the establishment brings out that English isn’t phonetic. This is wrong. English is not non-phonetic. English is bizarre and takes some very weird turns around the block of language, but it is still largely phonetic. When I look at “phonetic” for instance, I’m not going to read it as pyrotechnic. I’m not going to do that, because I know ph makes an f sound, and the only thing that makes a c sound, however weird, is at the end.

Look, I came from a highly phonetic language, and while I did and sometimes still do read a word or the other very weirdly in English, it’s not that bad. It’s mostly pronunciation issues which can be remedied.

What I mean is however difficult English might be to shove into the Latin alphabet, that doesn’t make it a language written in pictographs. If it were, there would be much higher variation between the shape of the words to facilitate that. And the teaching method would be different.

When I went to the school in one of my “Rain fire upon their heads” expeditions on the subject, the teacher told me that yeah, sure, with phonics they would read everything, BUT THEY WOULDN’T KNOW THE MEANING OF WHAT THEY READ.

This level of stupidity, again, cannot be natural, you have to be indoctrinated into it. They are treating the language exactly like a language written in pictographs. If you don’t learn the arbitrary meaning that goes with the shape, you’ll never learn the meaning, and will just have useless shape cluttering your mind.

Of course English isn’t like that. In fact, the way I became fluent in English (because I was tired of not being, is the short answer) was to sit down with The Door Into Summer (because someone had given it to me in unabridged English) a pencil and an English-Portuguese dictionary. Every time I read a word I didn’t know I looked it up in the dictionary and wrote the meaning above it in pencil. When I got to the end of a page, I went back and re-read that page. When I got to the end of the chapter, I re-read the chapter. And when I got to the end of the book I started from the beginning again. The first pass took six months, the third took a week. And by the end of the third I was near-fluent and could start on other books in unabridged English (mostly by doing a walk through of hotel lobbies where American or British tourists stayed, because they tended to ditch books they had read rather than take them back on the plane.)

But the point here is I sure learned the meaning of those weird words, most of which I was pronouncing very badly. Normal kids can too. Heck, when I got younger son to stop guessing, he bugged me so much for “what does this word mean” that I bought him an electronic dictionary. (Mostly because like most kids who taught themselves to read, he never got the order of the alphabet. not at the internalized level that makes looking up things easy.) And he learned meanings.

No, the nonsense with whole word/whole language/whole and entire insanity is that it is the theory trying to run the world, when the theory is demonstrably not fit for the world. And they keep bringing it back for the same idea they keep trying communism. The theory seems so shiny to them that it has to work. HAS to for sure.

It doesn’t work. What it does is produce people who think they’re literate, think they’re educated, but can’t read anything more difficult than a picture book or instructions on how to lock their bikes without missing important information.

Now you can say what you will about the usefulness of making people read “literature” but the fact is that while technology can compensate for the inability to read anything complicated, it doesn’t work as well as an auxiliary to memory.

Look, forget the “one day the internet goes down forever”. Sure, it can happen, and then these people will be left alone with books rendered largely useless. BUT there’s more to it. If I want information say on Elizabethan London, I know which book to grab off my shelves and exactly where to look.

Okay, fine, AI, but as we know AI does indeed hallucinate. Often on things that have nothing to do with politics, just some glitch. if you can’t verify the information, you’re lost.

And I posit that the rot, the inability to read fluently goes a lot deeper than that. I’d estimate a good 75% of people have trouble reading and absorbing information from the text.

This leads to all sorts of things, from a love of ‘procedure’ — you deviate, and you’re in unknown territory. Just do the form you’ve memorized — to not fully reading important information (Why even do I fill in my history on forms before an appointment?) to being unable to understand a story that’s longer than a few hundred words.

Since our world is built on stories, which is how news and information are even delivered, this is not just pathetic, it’s civilization-endangering.

So what do you do about it? It’s not too late. The best time to start would be 50 years ago, but the second best time to start is today.

If you have the problem I described, you can teach yourself phonics. Grab a program off the shelf. You’ll feel stupid as heck, but it will rebuild what you lack and you’ll find yourself understanding complex texts much more easily. Which will unlock new horizons both of work and pleasure.

And if your kids are in school and you’ve been assured they’re not learning whole word? Have them read a text with a lot of new words. If they’re either “guessing” or think that cremation and crucifixion are the same word, it’s whole word whatever they call it. Get yourself a phonics program (hooked on phonics is how I retaught the kid to read) and teach the kid. He’ll kick and scream, but that only builds character.

Right now, it would be easier to become literate by standing on a street corner than by attending public school. That is because public school is designed wholly to NOT teach people the basics.

There is a rumor this is a clever plan to create a population that can’t verify information. Maybe. I’d suspect for the left it’s merely a happy side effect. The plan is to allow people to “teach” with no effort at all and without involving in fact with the kids.

It’s time to reverse that. And since the education system is patently unable to do so, it’s up to us.

Build under, build over, build around. And make sure people can read the way to the future.

According to Hoyt 2026 Fundraiser, Day 9

(I will keep this up through day 16, because people have asked due to pay schedules.)

If you wish to donate: There is a Give Send Go fundraiser for this specific fundraiser set up. Here is a Paypal Me Link if you prefer that. (Yes, I know. Paypal, but for now, they’re behaving.) If you have a monthly donation setup to the permanent Give Send Go, that is still working and thank you! There are also two substacks you can subscribe to. One is on the side bar of the blog, the other is supposed to be a newsletter, as well as giving you chapters of the current work in progress if you become a paid subscriber. It takes cards. For snail mail: Sarah Hoyt 304 S Jones Blvd #6771 Las Vegas, NV 89107

And if you want to read the whole appeal, it’s here: Toss A Coin To Your Blogger, Oh Readers of Plenty.

160 thoughts on “Teach The Children Well”

  1. The fun-and-games with phonics for me is “I think” that I never learned it in public school thus I have “interesting problems with” spelling.

    I can tell (in general) that that spelling is wrong but since I can’t “sound it out”, I have problems realizing what is the correct spelling.

    By the way, my spelling problem really annoyed my school-teacher mother. [Sad Smile]

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I, on the other hand, am….fairly unique. (Yeah, I know, unique is not supposed to be modified.) I learned to read by following along as books were read to me. The first book I could “read” in its entirety was The Night Before Christmas. The one with the flocking on the cover.

      THEN I went to school. And learned phonics. And the first-grade teacher (Mrs. Bush of unblest memory) scolded my mother for teaching me to read “too early.”

      I can now read at almost a thousand words a minute, full comprehension, as long as it’s light reading (fiction). Technical stuff and nonfiction slows me down a bit.

      I read as reflexively as I swallow after chewing. I simply cannot comprehend people who can glance at a short, large-print sign and NOT READ IT. “WRONG WAY,” “ABRUPT LANE EDGE,” that kind of thing. How do you NOT read such a short, simple sign?

      Liked by 7 people

      1. A thousand words a minute? Not sure I ever had my reading speed calculated (if I did, I forgot it). I’m fast, but dunno if I’m THAT fast. Well, no, maybe… I saw some sort of “can you keep up” test in an Instagram video that sent words across the screen at increasing rates, and I could keep up easily at its top speed of 900+ wpm, so maybe. If you can trust an Instagram video throwing random words at you. :)

        I was also one of those early readers. Just kind of grokked it at four years old, when I surprised my dad by haltingly reading the headlines in his morning newspaper at breakfast one day.

        First-grade teacher, Mrs. Ahlstrom. Old-school, and that is not a compliment; it was HER job to teach kids to read, and my ability was a violation of the natural order. (And yet she somehow completely failed to teach my cousin how to read in the very same class; my dad had to do catch-up tutoring for him in the summer, after which he became a very good reader.) I read every book on the shelves in her classroom in a matter of days, and she flat-out refused to let me read anything else. My dad was teaching fourth grade down the hall at the time, and she summoned him to her classroom one day, all aflutter, to observe his child’s aberrant behavior: having read everything in the classroom a dozen times already, I had taken to reading everything upside down for a little variety, even standing on my head for a different perspective on the stuff she had tacked to the wall.

        Dad laughed. “Is he able to read right-side up?”
        “Er…yes.”
        “Then upside-down is a choice. He’s just bored. You should get some new books.”

        It didn’t go over well, and I don’t remember any new books appearing, but she did at least stop trying to take the ones I did have out of my hands.

        Liked by 5 people

        1. Yeah, I’m slow, I think I only ever tested the max at like 650 or 700. :D

          I have to slow way down for technical, or else I need quite a few rereads before it really makes sense. Not sure how much slower, but I had an adjustment to make when I started trying to read that stuff again.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. For sure, needing to think along the way and retain info to apply later is going to slow anybody down a lot. Whatever my max speed might actually be, in practice I’m never reading that fast.

            I just did a little online test that gives you an informational article calibrated at 8th grade reading level; reading at a speed that ensures I won’t miss any important details, I got 650 wpm. Could have gone faster, but if you quizzed me afterward, I might have some information gaps. So maybe I can comprehend a string of words at a rate of 1k per minute, but that’s not reading in any practical form, and I likely wouldn’t retain all the information. 650 feels more accurate to how I usually do read.

            Teh googles says the adult average is 238 wpm, for whatever that’s worth.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. That….explains much. 238 is well within speaking speed. (I learned about speech-speed when I took dictation class. Most people can talk about four hundred words a minute in their fastest gabble. Average is MUCH less.) No wonder so many websites want to put info in a video instead of just text on a screen. Argh.

              Thanks, Inguz.

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              1. Well now, if we’re talking speech, you’ve just found one of those people that’s helping to bring the average down. :) If I really speed up, I might get up to about average.

                Man, I really do hate trying to get information out of videos. When your learning/retaining reading speed is 3x the average speaking speed and your easy/entertainment speed is pushing 5x, and even people who like getting info from videos wish most of them would hurry it up, that’s bordering on a minor form of torture. The only time I can put up with it is when it’s an inherently visual subject, like home improvement projects or car repair or something, where you do often need to see somebody doing the thing while they describe it.

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      2. Oh, I hear that. After more than 60 years of constant reading, I can’t see words in English and not read them instantly. Can be annoying when the words are stupid advertisements.

        I also find it intensely annoying when some Yoo-Toober puts text on the screen and then READS IT OUT LOUD, slowly and usually in an irritating voice. I CAN READ, DAMMIT! Just shut the @#!*&] UP!!

        Even more annoying is that Yoo-Toob’s ‘Show Transcript’ button stopped working last week. I was watching some of those LDM-generated ‘just-so’ stories and found it much faster and easier to read the transcript than listen to the artificial voice mispronounce simple words or say “five dollars million”. I could read the transcript of a 50 minute video in 20 minutes, or even 15. Now the transcript function is broke. BAH!!

        Liked by 4 people

        1. Thus my abhorrence of the audio/video medium for information – I can read MUCH faster than I can listen.

          I wasn’t high enough in the military that I got PowerPoint training (well, that wasn’t really there in the early to mid 70s) but I have had a college class where the instructor posted her PP deck on the Blackboard app and then read the slides to us in class.

          My own PP decks were telegraphic on the displays, and copious notes in the non-projected bits.

          I don’t recall when I learned to read, nor when my kids learned. But I was reading them Hobbit, LOTR and Lattimore’s translation of Iliad when they were 6 and 3, because I got tired of one fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish.

          I do remember the class chanting the phonics cards in 4th grade.

          Liked by 2 people

      3. Um. I was picking my daughter up just a few minutes ago – and a truck made a left hand turn on a RED light, and a RED arrow, from the traffic lane NEXT TO the left-hand turn lane.

        SOME people either can’t, or won’t, even “read” symbols…

        Liked by 3 people

      4. I might have that reading speed with fiction. I don’t know, because after so many years, I largely “gestalt” entire paragraphs at once. I couldn’t tell you the words, but I could give you the meaning.

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        1. Same.

          I read paragraphs. At least fiction. One of the reasons I can reread books and, depending on the book, discover missed gems.

          Technical comprehension, I have to slow it down and too often reread to retain. I comprehend first read, but to retain, reread. One of the reasons I did so much better (general grades) the second time around. Not just because the patterns made more sense, it did. But the technical words (mostly) came back easier.

          Mentioned a time or two that one of my reading aloud problems is my mouth can’t keep up with my eyes. That does not help the pronunciation problems.

          I have no excuse regarding pronunciation, or spelling. Pretty sure well immersed in phonics while in grade school learning to read.

          To ensure I’ve written what I intended, that I have to read word by word backwards, then read what I wrote. It slows down the reading.

          Liked by 1 person

      5. I’ve tried not to read things, as a mental exercise*, but if it is in English my brain immediately reads it.

        *Specifically supermarket tabloid headlines while in the checkout line.

        Liked by 2 people

    2. Thew point of the “whole word” method was to deliberately teach kids to be unable to read. An ignorant population is much easier to control.

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      1. And yeah, when they gave us the reading test in 6th grade they couldn’t place me because their scale didn’t go high enough. By that time I had read through the entire school library because my grade teachers were kind enough to send me to the library when I finished the classroom assignments too quickly.

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  2. I’ll have to remember that method for someone I’m trying to help learn English. Things like duolingo sadly are effectively ‘memorize the word if you see it enough times’ instead of ‘learn to read the word’. There’s places in the app to go to learn more, but they’re… hidden, instead of handy ‘click here to learn more about why that answer was right/wrong’ like a useful design would do.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. I wonder if this is part of why high schools and colleges are graduating people who can’t read their own diplomas? It is certainly true that those who are “functionally illiterate” are easier to control, at least politically. “Make your mark” is not accepted now but if all you really know is how to print your name (and they have remedial courses in handwriting in colleges and universities now), then not only are you functionally hampered, then you can’t read anything handwritten – including our Founding Documents.

    Liked by 5 people

    1. It really does make me wonder whether it’s genuine malice or if these teachers truly believe they’re doing the right thing.

      Liked by 1 person

        1. I cringe when I see jokes posted as memes for Escape Rooms:

          Rotary Telephone
          Directions written in cursive … (Implied the cursive is actually readable, which my hubby’s wouldn’t be. Mine is still legible, mostly; lack of ongoing practice is showing.)

          Liked by 2 people

          1. Rotary phone memes pisses me off.

            Seriously.

            I figured this out as a near infant.

            My children, with even less possible exposure, figured this out for a video game. No hints. In single digits.

            It was designed to be intuitive.

            And don’t get me started on manual shift.

            I got an “introduction” to the idiot class of that retard group when I admitted I could drive a stick, and found out that the guy who thought it was an obscure skill just owned a vehicle that was in dire need of basic maintenance.

            There was no way to drive his vehicle and not make any human with ears cringe.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Well-written cursive is just text in a fancy display font. Badly-written cursive (like mine, back when I still tried to write in cursive) is unreadable slop.

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  4. I made the mistake of trying to improve my German by reading the German translation of a Douglas Adam’s novel; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul if you must know. Simple language, I thought.

    Hah.

    Hilarious though. There is a section on the different types of snow, one of which translated as “der Schnee, auf den ein Hund gepinkelt hat” – had me in stitches.

    I eventually purchased fairytales for young children.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Oops – So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.

      The official translation is

      “…und Schnee, auf den trotz aller Bemühungen, sie zu trainieren, die Huskys gepinkelt haben.”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. For those (like me) that can barely struggle through technical German (of the chemical variety, in my case) – “and snow, on which, despite all efforts to train them, the huskies have peed”

        (Shows just how good the translation clankers have become. That actually makes sense!)

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  5. The educational fad for “whole word” hit the elementary school too late to impact my brother and I – we learned through sounding out, and Mom’s tutoring, and having books around the house – but my poor younger sister caught “whole word” in the neck, and never did enjoy reading to the extent that younger brother and I did.

    Alas, we did get slammed by “New Math” by the time I was in third grade or so – and it impacted me so badly that I never did enjoy anything to do with numbers. I scraped through algebra in high school just barely, because it was logical and I was a logical person, and scored high enough on the SAT that I didn’t have to take remedial math in college, but the damage that the “New Math” fad did to me meant that I didn’t figure out how to calculate percentages until I was in my 40s.

    At this point I honestly believe that public school education has the intention of keeping most people ignorant, gullible and easily led.

    Liked by 4 people

    1. The comments on this thread are starting to make me feel mainstream. I used to say that public school is child abuse. After Uvalde I changed it to child endangerment.

      Now I think it’s an existential threat to western civilization.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. I suspect son got the “whole word”. But hubby and I read to him, a lot. Had him read to us. Son correct my pronunciation, FWIW.

      Math? Once we learned about “guess and check”? Oh, Hell No. We backstopped the math. Went over homework with him. Taught him how to “show his work” doing the math. Been too long now to know which “methods” to put down. Got told we weren’t doing him a favor by tutoring him. Response to that was “tough”.

      Oh, hubby, before pivoting, was planning on being an HS math teacher. Pivoted after his first student teaching requirement (late ’60s).

      Which is weird. Because hubby is good with kids and teens. But guess coaching, scouts, etc., is different from a classroom.

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  6. Man, this is sad. At first I was going to pop into the comments with “there’s this nifty old system called the five-paragraph essay that teaches people how to construct a thesis and connect claims to support throughout a piece of expository writing, and it changed my life when a crusty old English teacher hammered it into our heads in 1986,” but then you went in the whole-word direction. That problem is much deeper. You can’t get to the level of fully coherent essays if you’re constantly stumbling over the words themselves.

    If it’s this bad, I wonder how my kids actually did manage not only to learn to read reasonably well, but to become very good writers in spite of it. And pleasure readers, too (well, son could but mostly doesn’t). One thing I did do that might have helped was to tutor them a bit in essay writing when they brought those assignments home, and the daughter unit wrote some bang-up academic papers in college…but I never got the feeling that they were struggling with their foundational word-using ability.

    Except… Son absolutely refused to write anything in school (was a puzzlement to everyone) until he was in an online capstone course that required a substantial essay, which he needed to graduate (long story as to how he got there), and still can’t spell to save his life, which could be a product of that. I coached him on the essay structure, and he took to it like a duck to water. Later, the anti-writing dam burst when I convinced him to join me’n his sister in doing NaNoWriMo (may it rest in peace) to get some of his stories out of his head. He did 274,000 words. And hasn’t stopped since. Natural storyteller, and very (very, very) good at using words to evoke images and feeling.

    Maybe they did nerf my kids, the bastards…

    Liked by 3 people

    1. I learned to read via phonics (thanks, mostly, to my mother and the old Calvert correspondence school material that the state of Alaska was still using when I was too far from the nearest school bus stop to attend first grade). Then I taught my two older girls to read with phonics, homeschooling them. But what I theorize is that some children are smart enough to make the connection between the written letters and the sounds that those letters represent even if they are being taught whole-word reading. Some children. A few. Most, unfortunately, don’t. But if you have a child who got whole-word reading in school, and yet somehow seems to have learned at least some phonics, that’s probably what happened. You’ve got a kid who is a little smarter than the average bear, and their brain made that connection. The whole thing is beyond sad, when you consider that 250 years ago, we had somewhere around a 99% literacy rate (without ANY public schools), and most of those people could not only read, they could read at a level to comprehend things like Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, and the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers.

      Liked by 4 people

      1. Gram was a one-room-schoolhouse teacher before marriage – I learned to read with her. I don’t think she called it “phonics,” but I could figure out almost any word (that was in my vocabulary) by the time I entered school. BUT – the one thing that I learned in first grade was about diphthongs, which had been a mystery to me until then. (Thank you, you old bat, wherever you are now. Yes, I got in trouble for calling her that, and my father had the task of explaining to me that though she WAS an old bat, I couldn’t CALL her that.)

        Oh, by the way, my vocabulary was rather odd by that time – with a veterinarian for a father and a mother with a degree in microbiology, and the books being right there in the living room…

        Liked by 2 people

    2. I almost didn’t graduate from High School – had an incomplete in English Composition for failing to turn in some essays as homework. I made it out by essentially kidnapping the teacher, Mr. Borgerding (may he R.I.P.), by planting myself in the doorway to his office and not letting him go home until I fulfilled the requirement. I cleared the incomplete, but the sad thing is that he said if I’d turned them in on schedule I would have gotten As on most of them.

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    3. I did not– formally– teach my children the “Five Paragraph Essay.”

      I gave them the idea, and pointed it out when it showed up in real life writing or especially speaking, and even complain a bit because for simple things it can be really annoying. State what you’re going to state, do at least three sections about it, tell them what you told them.

      My daughter is now writing five paragraph essays about her favorite anime. For a fanfic site.

      And reading classic books because that’s what the magnika (…?spelling?!?!) built them off of.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. That’s similar to what I did with my kids. Explained the pattern, showed how it could reorganize some of what they had already written, and then started asking them questions about the rest. “How would you summarize this? How are these things connected? Does this thing support that?” They got it pretty darn quick, maybe quicker than I would have. Smart cookies, if I do say so myself.

        Back in the day, we were doing literally five paragraphs, with exactly five sentences in each. Hand written, typed if you had access to a typewriter, dot-matrix printout if your class had computer lab time that week. Very mechanical, but it did work; probably the only way you could do it with a class of 35 ill-educated teenagers whose abilities ranged from near-prodigy to borderline moron. Jeri Craner. That old lady was a real-world hero.

        Mangaka! That’s your word. :)

        Liked by 1 person

  7. “What I mean is however difficult English might be to shove into the Latin alphabet, that doesn’t make it a language written in pictographs.”Though the truth is, we could bring back letters that make sense in English. Like Þþ.Yes, I am a curmudgeon. Sorry.

    Liked by 3 people

      1. The “other one” we dropped (since Old English) is also a “th” but it’s the other “th” sound. That’s “eth” (ð) sounded as in this, not “thorn” (þ) as in third. They were used in Norse, too, and are still used in Icelandic, same sounds (pretty-much, more or less) as in English.

        Icelandic has dropped letters, though. Like, a few decades(?) ago, z. Which was used from foreign loanwords, rarely, and for an ‘s’ sound in native Icelandic. Allegedly (I think there was a vote in their Parliament) because “z was too rare to bother with” or something.

        Except, for example:

        ‘Icelandic’ in Icelandic, pre-reform: Íslenzka

        ‘Icelandic’ in Icelandic, post-reform: Íslenska

        Hmmm… something does not quite add up right, there. Like the dropped letters in Russian right after the Revolution, like the (rare but helpful) accents that “went the other way” (old mór vs. new mòr) in Scottish, pre-reform — is any of this “reform” stuff ever actually useful?

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Most “pictograph” languages were actually phonetic syllabaries or alphabets of some nature.

      If “wa” means water, and you draw a water picture to mean the sound “wa,” but the sound “wa” is in all the compound words that include the word “wa”, it might look like using a water pictogram. But it isn’t.

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  8. Not hard to be dumber than cheese. You just have to deliberately not study.

    Weird style? Can you imagine an exercise where you have to write a story that each paragraph uses a different style of poetry? Start with haiku, then next paragraph iambic pentameter, then switch to rhyming couplets, and then just for grins, throw in one of standard prose. I already have a headache just thinking about it.

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    1. Totally unrelated (almost) but at one point I was in a dance class with a bunch of more advanced dancers. We’d entertain ourselves by having two or more partnerships, each doing a different dance to the same music. And we’d switch partners at random.

      So going from swing, to cha-cha, to salsa, or whatever else fit the beat. That was fun.

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    2. I asked Mom to teach me to read when I was 4. She refused, saying I would be too far ahead when I got into Kindergarten.

      So I got into Kindergarten with a bunch of kids who had two or three years of preschool. They knew the alphabet, knew words, etc. I was behind from the start. And I hated reading.

      Until I hit 2nd grade and wanted to be just like my older sister, so I picked up a book at random from the library shelves and read it start to finish.

      By the beginning of 3rd grade I was reading on a college level.

      Liked by 2 people

    3. A Short Tale for Mike H.

      While browsing the blog

      on a summer’s evening

      I read your challenge.

      I thought a bit and soon the answer came,

      to put the words together in a row

      in order that is meaningful to me

      and yet completes the challenge that you throw.

      You did not specify a rhyme,

      nor tell me I could take my time,

      and so I quickly shaped this verse.

      I’ll giggle if I hear you curse!

      A posset for your headache will be provided at the completion of the assignment, provided that you read this thru and admit that I have met the requirements as laid out in your imaginary exercise. The quest is now complete.

      The End.

      Liked by 1 person

  9. I sometimes wonder how anyone can believe the idiotic ideas they’ve forced onto kids when it comes to education. I think you’re right, they’ve been immersed in the concept that it must be “new”, “different” and “break away from the past” so much they simply cannot see the harm they’ve done. I had to work with my kids when they were young to get them through some of the stupid crap the schools were doing. No wonder the education system is a total mess and so many young people are the victims of it. Thankfully mine came out okay and they work with their kids so hopefully they will be able to actually be fully functional adults.

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    1. “unburdened by the past” –ignore the lessons of history because they are inconvenient, or you can’t be bothered to learn, or you simply must be smarter than everyone in the 400 generations before you.

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  10. In addition to losing the ability to glean ideas and content from long-form prose. students are trained to read for specific content and dump the rest. Skim until you find what looks like the keyword or answer, write it down, then move on to the next question. One problem with this is that context is lost. Another difficulty arises when they hit cumulative topics like history, where they have to go back after two or three weeks and apply what they are currently reading to what they read earlier. It’s not there. They can’t retain it to access it later.

    I suspect that a lot of the non-school reading a lot of younger people do today is in on-line games and stories, where you read, get information, apply it, level up, and move on. Retention is not needed. Unfortunately for them, the real world operates a little differently, and they get bitten either in the grades (the better option) or by something far more painful.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Unfortunately for them, the real world operates a little differently,

      All I’m going to say is that my employer put on a great push for certification this past year in cloud and AI. And people went out and got them, including me. The problem is that you could achieve a passing or better score by taking the training courses, memorizing the practice exam that came with it, and finding online “exam courses” that could fill in the questions the practice exam didn’t cover.

      That seems to be a similar process to what you’re describing.

      I shudder to think how little relationship to actual knowledge those certifications can represent.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. Certification seminars have always been this way.

        I avoided taking seminars or classes just to get certified. Then too, after equivalent of 10 years of post HS education (AA, and 2 bachelors), I was done with classrooms.

        I would take seminars after digging into something and then needed a “boost”, if you will. Which meant I personally got a lot more out of the seminars.

        Only two seminars I took without pre-learning was Visual Basic and Java. Mentioned them recently regarding job searching.

        Good thing I wasn’t looking for work after retiring. My current *”skill set” is woefully out of date.

        (*) Like anyone who hasn’t been programming for 35 years constantly isn’t current. Change from functions to classes/inheritance wasn’t that big of a lift. Okay, terminology got me. But the concepts didn’t.

        Liked by 1 person

  11. We moved around a lot and have a large family. You can tell which schools taught phonics and which did not by checking which of my siblings love to read and which of them loathe it.

    It all depends on which schools they attended.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I came close to this. What saved me were the Farley (Black Stallion/Island Stallion), Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Heinlein, Norton, Norse, etc. (how the former gateway into SF? No idea.)

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      1. Much the same. I read all of Farley, plus Jack London, Mark Twain, Andersen, Grimm, Aesop, Bradbury, Clarke, Burroughs, Verne, and many more, along with Geisel and Eastman, of course.

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  12. they’re good at school. It was a great breakthrough for me when I realized that school was something separate from learning and that one could be good at one and not the other. I hated school even though I managed to miss the entire progressive education thing, more or less.

    Liked by 3 people

  13. “Kicking and screaming builds character” 🤣

    I think part of the ‘whole word’ malarky, at least in the beginning, was that experienced readers do pretty much read familiar words in toto. We’ve seen them so many times that reading them instantly as gestalts is practically a conditioned reflex. So, when a bunch of experienced readers at the most rarefied levels of academia got a compulsion to ‘improve’ teaching to make it more ‘progressive’, guess what they did? And then, having maleducated a whole generation of students to the point that the latest crop of teachers were now illiterate, they were unable to admit that they were catastrophically wrong so they doubled down by attacking any form of phonics-based teaching.

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    1. I suspect you’re right, at least about the way the teachers thought. I recognized the same thing in the Common Core math: it was math the way that I thought about it. And I am very good at math. I can see the logic of the curriculum designers: people with math PhDs think about things this way, if we want our students to be brilliant at math, we should teach them to think about it this way too. Except that most people’s brains don’t work like that. People with this weird, abstract way of thinking about numbers tend to become math people; they don’t become math people because someone taught them weird ways to think.

      I remember in 7th grade pre-algebra, my teacher was gone one day, and I was asked to teach the lesson. I was excited to show everyone how I worked with exponents, and how it just made everything so easy to understand … and they all looked at me like I’d grown two extra heads. That’s when I figured out that, whether it was better or worse, my method just didn’t work for most people, and if I wanted to teach, I needed to do something that worked for them, not me.

      The “whole language” thing is worse, though, because almost all people who read entire words or even sentences in a single glance didn’t start out that way; we started by learning our phonics and sounding it out. Saying, “Experienced readers just take in whole words at a time, so we should teach the kids to do it like that,” is like saying, “Most Olympic swimmers prefer water that’s at least five feet deep, so let’s outlaw kiddie pools and just hold the introductory swimming classes in the diving well.”

      Liked by 1 person

      1. The problem with seeing math and knowing the answer, most have to memorize the basics first. That is how I was taught. That is hubby was taught. That is how our son was taught. I was not allowed to pass 4th grade until I could complete all the times tables in a minute or less. (Had a minute for each level. So 9 minutes total.)

        Then got taught the 11x shortcuts later on. Algebra, had to go through the steps. Etc.

        Programming is the same way. Just because I could look at a solution and see a pattern and route, doesn’t mean someone else could. When one had to have everyone on the same page. That matters. More than once, diagram it out. Then look at faces. Back up and look at the “problem”, and change the explanation. Critical with tutoring and support.

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        1. And for math– what is basic?

          Teaching other kids really does work to figure out steps.

          (but you also need a teacher who actually deeply understands what they’re teaching)

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          1. Basic math is knowing how numbers 0 – 9 add, subtract, and multiply, by sight.

            Repetition. What ever method works for the individual until they can do it on paper to a standard. Some take longer. Some need other forms before the paper. This is not a defect.

            Division requires multiplication, and subtraction, whether one does this the long method or not.

            Shortcuts by sight come later. Some never get there. This is okay too. As long as they can do the basic math on paper. The rest can be stepped into.

            Number dyslexia is an impediment later.

            IMHO

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      2. Sometimes the ones who find an activity a natural fit, find it impossible to teach it to a non-natural. I found out in high school that I was a terrible tutor for remedial math, even though I was great at calculus.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Same. Not HS, but college.

          Roommate had to take algebra. I could not understand why she couldn’t follow the examples in the book for homework. I’d diagram the homework answer out for her. It did not go well.

          OTOH, part of the problem was she never took math in HS, and passed the *math assessment test our junior year. Her SAT math portion OTOH was not good.

          (*) Everyone had to take. Even those of us who were past algebra and still taking math. You know the ones of us who had the whole test done in 10 minutes? Then were drumming pencils on tables or knees because we were bored? Then they excused us to the library. Idiots, what did they think was going to happen? Early ’70s, FWIW. By the time little sister hit HS, the students who’d taken algebra or higher in HS were excused from these assessments.

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  14. My freshman year at university (University of Toronto, 1982…) there was an English proficiency test, and had been for a couple of years. The requirement was to write a 300 word essay on one of five topics given to you. There was a time limit but I thought it was pretty generous (an hour, or possibly two).

    Handwritten of course since this was 1982.

    If you passed, you passed. If you didn’t pass, you had to take it again the next year. And the one after that, if you didn’t pass, you (I think) were kicked out. Possibly it was just a requirement to graduate, although that might have been set up not to allow the “perpetual student” to keep going.

    My year there was a little bit of excitement because apparently there were a couple of people who had previously failed twice and therefore were in danger of being removed.

    I wonder if that requirement is still in place.

    (looks it up).

    Looks like they’ve outsourced it to the standard English tests (TOEFL etc), or if you’ve done high school in certain places. Which isn’t nearly as rigorous, but I suppose it’s cheaper.

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  15. I’ve recently seen a rough draft by a very smart kid, who is actually well educated and understands what his subject is.

    It is not simply a matter of writing it in a white heat, and needing the editing pass.

    He is a native English speaker, and fluent. His natural writing hand is not quite so well practiced. The important fixes are the ‘written in a white heat’ bits that don’t quite flow for what he is saying.

    The copy edits are less important, I feel. For now, and maybe for long term.

    It was a bitch and a half getting my own stream of consciousness typing to be fairly good level even when raw.

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  16. I don’t remember NOT reading, tho I do have some memories of chanting the vowel sounds in first grade class.{I guess that means I”m old.}

    My very sad proof story of the evidence of vast functional illiteracy comes from the medical practice where I worked. At one time we decided that the maternity clients could fill out all the pages of forms necessary for registration on their own while waiting for their individual appt. Except a lot of these people couldn’t. They didn’t actually know their written address and zip. They couldn’t comprehend a list of medical words like hypertension and cancer, and diabetes. Some floundered at writing their partners full names [!!!] A three page document they struggled over for 45 minutes sometimes…. We had to give up and just go back to having someone orally taking their history and fill in the papers. It was so shocking and disturbing to realize all these adults were somehow functioning in life without real literacy. I would sit and watch them struggle to understand the most basic questions in print and want to laugh and cry at the same time. It has really affected my outlook on “the general public” at large and not for the good.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. This is sad!

      Kind of makes me understand what happens at the hospital sometimes.

      No, it isn’t that I can’t read or write. It is my arms aren’t long enough anymore. I need the reading glasses to see that dang tiny print!!!!!! Geez

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  17. And now for something completely different: there’s a new anime, ‘Otome Kaujuu Caramelise’ or ‘Kaijuu Girl Caramelise’ about a high school girl with a bit of a personal problem — when she gets too emotional she turns into Godzilla.

    Literally. She transforms into giant bipedal dinosaur with atomic breath. Well, as of episode 2 she hasn’t actually used the atomic breath, but we’ve seen the glow. I can see how that could be socially awkward. 😁

    Also, season 2 of ‘The Saga Of Tanya The Evil’ and ‘Clevatess’ have started.

    Liked by 1 person

  18. I have my moments but I think that’s just age. However I grew up loving reading. I read history textbooks for FUN. it was one of the classes I excelled at because by the time the rest of the class was a couple weeks in, I’d read the damn thing from cover to cover. Spelling? love it. never got a B. I might miss the occasional word here and there but it was rare. Now as I’ve aged I just don’t have to patience for dealing with people anymore. So I’m more blunt, short spoken, and written, than I used to be. This from someone that insulted people in ye old classic Shakespearean. For the giggles. stopped that years ago because more often than not the people I was insulting, if it was face to face, looked at me like a deer in headlights just standing there waiting to be run over….repeatedly.

    What you’re talking about Mama Taz and people’s complete inability to master their emotions and emote everything…is why getting into arguments, or even civil discussions is kinda pointless sometimes. Be it online or in real life.

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    1. I would unironically love to be insulted in Shakespearean English. :) I have a mug at work that’s got a bunch of insults from the plays printed on it; I see them every day, but of course now that I’d like to bust out a few (look at me, I can play, too!) I can’t bring any to mind. Sure as heck wouldn’t be recalling any of them, nor even a half-decent garden-variety insult, in any face to face situation…that’s the kind of thing that only comes to mind long after the moment has passed.

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  19. I wonder if Miss Otame is a caricature or metaphor on the trope of the statu variabilis female.

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  20. Well, now, I struggled mightily through “A Clockwork Orange” – which I was assigned at a later age than when I was already reading SF adult novels for many years.

    But it’s possible that it was not the “weirdness” of it, but that I have never liked reading things where I want ALL of the characters to die a horrible, painful death.

    Liked by 1 person

    2. On the other hand, I read A Clockwork Orange when I was going through a teenage stage of “read all the SF other people think is good.” I reread it after going through the Russian Basic Course at DLI, and it was MUCH easier…but, yeah, Alex and his droogs deserved much worse than they got. Looks a lot like the modern YooKay, doesn’t it?

      Liked by 1 person

  21. There is a third factor that plays into the whole word nonsense, in addition to the “make teaching as easy as possible for the teachers” and “hamstring the poors’ ability to think as much as possible” factors that you name.

    The third is that the left, broadly construed, have a deep-seated need to hold themselves as smarter than all of human history. They are new, therefore they are smarter than Past People, who were so silly that they wore powdered wigs, or whatever derogatory trivia they can put hand to. Therefore, phonics is not only difficult to teach, but is also wrong-bad because it is old. It was done in one room schoolhouses by stupid hicks. Whole-word is, contrariwise, super-smart. After all, look at how those stupid hick conservatives howl against it. Case closed.

    Liked by 3 people

  22. My brain has decided to dump most of the school memories* and we moved around a lot so I don’t remember whether I was taught whole word or not. I wasn’t a good read until the summer after third grade where I fell head long in Little Women and haven’t emerged from reading since. As an adult I’ve always liked etymology and studying the Greek and Latin roots of language was my favorite part of GRE preparation.

    *Probably for the best since public school + undiagnosed autism was a thoroughly miserable combination.

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    1. Going off of my kids, and off of the objective things from when I learned to read, my method of learning to read was “just quit screaming at me while the letters stop moving around, please.” (I may be dyslexic, I think several of the kids are from the “is that a p or q” things, and I know we all have waaaaaaay too much of the hate to be wrong so agonize to death bug.)

      I can remember doing all sorts of different methods to learn to read, but in all of them, the person teaching me kept yelling while I was working out “um ok this is… like a telephone pole…that’s a t, it goes tuh.”

      Literally the main thing I can remember is getting a flash card and going “telephone pole tuh tee” and couldn’t get past “tele.”

      This was fixed by … adults not yelling at me for long enough that I quit flinching, at which point not only can I read, I read really well, and actually fast enough that my husband can’t tell if I’m giving him crud or not because I have no idea how long is long enough for him to read a paragraph so I can scroll to the next page.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. My huband refuses to read alongside me. And I have no patience for waiting for him to finish…..

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        1. I am A Very Good Girl.

          …it maaaay drive everyone else up the wall, because I ask every two times I read the same paragraph…..

          :rofl:

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  23. A couple more thoughts on whole word… there really were people who thought we should teach reading as though our words were pictographs. They felt that Chinese children learned their first words more quickly. Maybe. But the down the road lies disaster since learning every word costs the same. With phonics, the process can speed up. It is also true that dyslexics have to be taught phonics in a very particular way, one which works perfectly well with non-dyslexics. But you cannot teach a dyslexic child a letter name and then a sound to go with it. You have to teach them a shape and sound at the same time. Writing Road to Reading does this beautifully.

    When I was a teacher I had to take a class in teaching reading, even though I was Middle School. Every word in that class was about how to AVOID teaching reading. Asking the kids to guess what the story might be, for example. Why not just read it and find out?

    Liked by 4 people

    1. And Chinese isn’t even pictographic. It began that way, but that’s not how it functions. Granted, it’s not phonetic, but “new” words typically have two signs squeezed together. One tells you the sound of the word, the other the meaning. (<- is horribly oversimplifying, but still.)

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I was thinking that too. Once I started studying Chinese, I got very annoyed at the “one character equals one word” and “every character is a picture” assumptions. All but the simplest characters are made of building blocks, combining parts of other characters together into patterns. There often is a meaning-part and a pronunciation-part. It works very different from what we’re used to, but there is logic to it, and a pattern! It’s not purely about memorizing every symbol.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Younger son taught himself to read by writing letters. He’d come and ask me to write the sound ah, so I would. Then he’d come back and ask me to write at, etc. And he’d copy it. endlessly.

      Liked by 1 person

    3. And some of the irony of that? Chinese kids also learn a phonetic writing system (there are a few types, depending on which Chinese-language country one lives in) and many children’s books use phonetic writing and formal characters side-by-side. People making that argument simply don’t understand Chinese language.

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  24. A heretical comment on phonics. Phonics allows one to say a word properly but conveys the meaning only if the word is already in your spoken vocabulary, or closely akin to a known word.

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    1. No, this is what all the idiot teachers say. So what? That’s like saying “There’s a problem with hearing a word and not knowing what it means. We should only unstop people’s ears for words they already know.”
      I don’t know how you decided this made any sense, but it doesn’t. Not even vaguely.
      Sure. kids will read a lot of words they don’t know. I did, since I read everything in the house, including professional books for various relatives. Here’s the thing: Some words you’ll guess from context. And if that fails? it’s why we have dictionaries.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Yes. The original comment that ‘phonics tells you how to say a word [really it only allows you to guess, this is English] but it doesn’t tell you the meaning’ strikes me much the same as someone saying “a calculator adds numbers, but it doesn’t help you change a tire.” Huh-what??

        This one falls firmly into that bizarre category often called “not even wrong.”

        All I ever wanted from phonics (as a cheatsheet, for any language) was to convert between the written and spoken forms of a word, even ones I’d never seen. To a possibly-lesser extent, do the same but in reverse (usually we call this “spelling”). “And that’s enough” as the British say.

        I’ve never really ‘done’ sign languages, but that would be another, similar, conversion.

        To me (and I was taught phonics, under that name, from kindergarten on), teachers knowing there is such a helpful cheatsheet, organized in the form of rules, and then withholding it deliberately and a-purpose, is a particularly nasty and vicious form of practical joke. Like, say, making students do their initial lessons in writing the letters of the alphabet in invisible ink, then heating the lemon juice on their papers to reveal what they wrote so they can be graded strictly for it.

        And I almost literally shudder to contemplate trying to even begin learning a language like, say, Hungarian (s -> ‘sh’ but sz -> ‘s’ while zs -> ‘zh’ etc.), or Scottish or Irish (s -> ‘s’ near ‘broad’ vowels a, o, u, ao, but s -> ‘sh’ next to ‘narrow’ vowels e and i), without the cheat sheet. As a full adult.

        Borderline child abuse? Or just plain child abuse? [rant mode ends]

        Liked by 2 people

          1. After only a little reflection — yes, this “pings” as all-too-plausible, at least for many of ’em.

            “Learned” to read in a classroom afflicted by “hole language” [sic] methods? Check.

            Never noticed their deficits, and then next asked an older relative for help? Check.

            Got an “education degree” and learned all the latest indoctrination dogmas? Check.

            Suddenly, the “gateway writing” part of my mind is supplying historical paper/thesis titles like

            “Knowledge Collapse Without ‘AI’ Mythology: Contagious Learned Illiteracy During The Early Spaceflight Era, ca. 2000 A.D.”

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        2. Once I mastered diphthongs (thanks to the old bat mentioned elsewhere), phonics was my bosom friend. For some reason, homonyms never gave me a problem – that is one small part of the language where you do use “whole word.” Some people never did learn to distinguish (I want a “f*cking grammar” coffee cup that has things like “Hoard – a f*cking dragon sits on it. Stay very quiet. “Horde” – a f*cking big mob of creatures that want to kill and eat you. Run away screaming.” Okay, that won’t fit on a coffee mug, although I can dream of having one that big to save on trips to the kitchen.)

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      2. That’s how I ended up with my rather odd vocabulary for my age. Latin, Greek, and some admixture of chemical German. (Also how I learned to look things up when my elders didn’t want to explain some of the actual meanings… Although I was never taught the stork theory of childbirth, I got the complete picture through reading and researching the words. Why I’ve always been “Doctor Dad” when the kids bring something home from their physicians – I break it down into what it means.)

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    2. Not untrue…but the same is also true of the whole-word thing. And once you’ve got a functional base of meanings to work from, you can expand your vocabulary exponentially just by working from context.

      Unlike whole-word learning, phonics gives you the tools to see what words are made of, which gives you a huge advantage in understanding meaning and gaining new vocabulary. There’s a huge body of vocabulary that opens up to people who understand the basic meaning of latin prefixes; you can very often infer the meaning of the rest of the word. But if you don’t even recognize the prefix for what it is (which is very possible for somebody that never got phonics), every new element could potentially be a hard stop instead of “okay, we’re adding this component to something I already know, and based on context, I know what they mean together.”

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    3. If you say a word phonetically it lets other folks help you.

      Like, on the yahoo Star Trek boards, a guy did a derp, and couldn’t remember how to spell “cute.”

      About eight posts of variations starting with q and folks figured it out.

      Because most other speakers write, too.

      Liked by 1 person

  25. I missed phonics, in favor of having to learn a version of the international symbols for sounds (b-stard phonics of a sort). The problem? I spell by ear, and never learned to match the sound symbols to the correct letter combination options in English, aside from the inverted “schwah” e. I learned to read by listening to my parents read to me, then matching the sounds to the words on the page, and extrapolating from there. Not quite the worst of both worlds, since I am literate, unlike a lot of young men and women in the big cities (see John McWhorter’s rant-monograph about the damage whole word has done to African-American men’s education), but close.

    To this day I spell by ear, which is great for everything BUT English. For example, since the local dialect replaces “e” with a dull “a” sound (“indivisable”), I do the same when I write words, then have to go back and change things when I transcribe, or run SpillChuck.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I get the distinct impression, though my ‘samples’ are far too scattered and far too few, that until ‘recently’ (maybe around the turn of the 20th century??) this “spell by ear” was far more common than not to speakers of our common American English.

      Go back ~150 years, around the time of the Civil War Between the States, and there are cases I could name of people of the same (immediate) family spelling not only their different first names, but their (allegedly) common surname, slightly differently. No-one seems to have thought it odd, in the family or out.

      So-called ‘standard’ spellings really are quite a new thing, measured across the recognizable span of English (which for me starts around the time of Chaucer, I can read that with glosses).

      Liked by 1 person

      1. The earliest spelling of our last name seems to be, “Dymoke.” There are now Dimocks, Dimmocks, Dimmicks….phone solicitors often say, DY-mock.

        Then there’s the occassional guy who says, Dimcock…..*sigh.*

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  26. They said in 4th grade, I read at a college senior level, which is where their system pegged out. I wish I could return to that, but cancer treatment fried brain and years later, still not right.

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  27. … I did not tell her about the Whitechapel murders and their relationship to the investigation. I had told her the outline. I had told her the outline was a Gothic novel about a Transylvanian nobleman. I had not told her that the nobleman was real, or that the Gothic murders currently filling every newspaper in London were the final deployment phase of a campaign that had been running since before human civilisation. I was going to tell her. I was going to tell her when the novel was finished and the immediate urgency had resolved. I was going to tell her – and I am recording this in full honesty, because the record requires it – because I did not know how to tell her in the middle of November 1888, when the dread was present and the novel was not yet finished and the deployment was running, in a way that would not add to the weight she was already managing on my behalf…

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  28. I think a chunk of why folks have Issues is that nobody does the groundwork.

    It’s… like…. on Star Trek, they “show” us that people are really smart because the 8 year old does calculus.

    Which makes sense, because you prove a 12 year old is smart because they are “studying” college age textes.

    Except…. you need all the groundwork laid out to get anything from those texts. No matter how much you study them, they won’t give you the fertile soil to grow in.

    You can’t speedrun experience.

    That can be glossed over if you’re very smart, and in an environment where everyone else knows things so you can get enough pieces to make a go of it.

    It doesn’t work when nobody else has been taught, either.

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    1. I recall someone telling me at some point that calculus is actually much more intuitive for kids (“rate of the rate” and other such non-arithmetic concepts) and should be taught in the standard curricula either before or concurrently with arithmetic in elementary schools.

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  29. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » LOOK, SOMETIMES I GET EXERCISED…  Teach The Children Well.

  30. <<Frankly, they follow the rules and what they were taught, because then they’re covered. They can’t be sued for malpractice if they’re doing what the manual taught them were best practices.>>

    You just gave a perfect description of medical training now, including the jargon. “Best practices” ( *SPIT* ) means you do what the higher ups tell you to do, regardless of what you think or whats right for the patient.

    Liked by 2 people

  31. I remember hating phonics when I was forced through it in first grade. In hindsight, the problem was not phonics itself — it’s that I already knew this stuff and was bored out of my mind! I went into Kindergarten reading proficiently and hoping for lessons on ancient history, only to end up being expected to sing songs about numbers and the alphabet.

    And people sometimes assume that I want to homeschool because of politics, or because it’s trendy right now. I guess the politics could be a secondary problem, though I haven’t looked into whether that’s a problem in our area and I do know that our local high school regularly hosts a gun show as a fundraiser opportunity, so I figure it’s probably better than average. But even setting that issue aside completely, I still would rather homeschool, because I saw how my natural enthusiasm was squashed by teachers who always answered questions with “you’ll learn that next year.” And between both parents, I’d be more surprised if any of my kids turn out not to have ADHD than if they were “typical”!

    As for the part about A Clockwork Orange, I could halfway excuse it if we’re talking about lower-case “old English” and not the Saxon language itself. But even that would be an inaccurate label for that particular novel. It’s been years since I looked at it (and I don’t recall reading it all the way) but Burgess is well-known as having invented a lot of words for that book. It’s not quite Tolkien levels of linguistic nerdry, but it’s on the chart! So if anything the book is new English, not old! And the fact that a university student wouldn’t be able to figure out the difference (whether or not she could read it independently) is what’s really disheartening to me

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  32. AS you know, I attended a small film school in California. For the final in the 101 level Film Theory course, we had to write a brief essay, like a couple paragraphs… ‘one page’- on auteur theory and whether we thought it was correct or not. So many people lost part of or all of the 25 points of the test that one page essay was….

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  34. Re: “reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge.” I’m guilty of believing that listening to spoken lectures is an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge, and that there is something screwy about those who insist on using it.

    Re: “Whole Word.” My theory has long been, and continues to be, that pushing it is a case of Reynold’s Fallacy (the one coined by the Blogfather). “Naturally good readers normally use a version of whole-word when they read. So we’ll teach everyone to use whole-word and then everyone will be a naturally good reader!” This leaves aside that naturally good readers have a whole toolbox of methods they fall back on as needed, including some phonics-like ones. That also leaves me wary of some of the phonics boosters, who seem to treat phonics as a universal panacea, nothing else needed, rather than ‘merely’ a necessary basic tool.

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    1. “listening to spoken lectures is an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge, and that there is something screwy about those who insist on using it.“

      –

      Amen.

      Anyone else have the sensation of the adults talking from Charlie Brown comics when in lectures? Even large work meetings. I’m better off one on one or very small groups.

      Worse. Even taking notes is worthless as coping tool. The notes are not legible. My handwriting is generally legible. Would be better off typing on a laptop, at least the typing corrections would be a distraction. I realize that is probably what happens now. Not an option when I was in school, or the last years of working (not that there were a lot of work meetings, < 1 per year).

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      1. The Charlie Brown effect? Kind of. I get distracted by my own thoughts and then realize that I’ve been hearing things that sounded like words but conveyed no information at all. (Sometimes just my mind wandering, but hearing an interesting idea will often do it.)

        Note taking? Ha! Not on your life. I can’t multitask like that. I’m either writing or listening, and that’s all there is to it.

        Some of the best results I’ve had in information-dense meetings at work recently have come from tag-teaming it with a colleague who needs to take notes to boost her recall (and takes very good ones). We have a quick AAR meeting, in which her notes fill in the things I missed when the words turned into Charlie Brown noises, and the connections I made when my mind was on the wing help flesh out the notes and sometimes clarify concepts. And neither of us has to bug anybody about repeating what they just said. :)

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        1. And yet I keep reading claims that “Writing notes by hand when listening to a lecture is the best way to learn the material!” (Usually as part of a “ban electronic gizmos in class! Make the students listen and take notes by hand, instead!” argument.)

          Er, no? Not for me?

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    3. I’m guilty of believing that listening to spoken lectures is an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge, and that there is something screwy about those who insist on using it.

      I’ll also add to that those who insist on making YouTube videos or podcasts on topics that would be better done in written form. You have a 20 page essay on the subject? I’ll give it a shot, at least. You’ve made a 3 hour YouTube video about it? Sorry, I don’t care how interesting your subject, I’m not watching all that!

      Liked by 2 people

        2. Video can be useful if it both shows and tells. “This is how you replace the dohickey in your Fnord model washer. First, you need to dis-distim both doshes… turning them counterclockwise and…” [shows closeup of the guy’s hands doing the de-distiming.]

          Talking-head videos? Not useful.

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      3. I’ll watch something that is less than 20 minutes, if the subject is one where the information is otherwise scattered around. (Just watched one tonight on the early development along the Nile ~4000 to ~3000 BC.)

        Well, one exception, on occasion, is the rabbi that does the “Esoterica” videos. For some reason, he can keep my attention focused, with only the infrequent rewinds.

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    4. Your second paragraph gets at something that I’ve observed with all the complaints about Common Core math. A lot of what they’re really trying to teach in that is mental math skills, often things that I figured out how to do on my own anyway, but the problem is that their materials don’t explain it well and then the teachers, even if they are good at teaching (which is sadly not guaranteed) don’t know what to do. They may or may not even be clear on what is intended.

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      1. I considered making a “New Math” comparison, and decided to leave it out for the sake of brevity. Yes, the more general pattern is teaching[1] everyone to do it the way the naturally-good-at-it people do it, without considering the foundation that the naturally-good-at-it people also have.

        [1] Or trying to teach it, when the teachers don’t really understand it themselves. Which is even worse.

          Liked by 1 person

        1. The mental quick math has to come when and only when the skills are already solid. Even then have a reason! Our 6th grade teacher gave us a reason. Competition! Racing to finish math problem on chalk board. Long before quick *estimation of tip percentage, or mentally totalling groceries.

          (*) Or in our case, since we round up cost + tip to the nearest whole number.

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          1. I have always disliked math races but they definitely do have a place in education. I think for myself, the main reason I figured out how to do mental math tricks is because I don’t want to always have to pull out a paper or calculator. I don’t remember anyone teaching me how to regroup numbers when adding them together, or anything like that, but it is useful to know how. But for it to make sense, you need the foundation first! And traditional notation is good at that.

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      3. You’d hate my class. I’m a sage on the stage, acting out historical characters, filling in updated or correct information not in the textbook, pointing out connections, and stuff like that. I put material on the board, as well as having illustrations.

        But yes, I talk, lecture, ask students questions, role-play scenarios, and don’t permit electronic devices in the classroom unless it is specifically an electronic assignment. I know it’s not ideal for some, but otherwise I feel as if all I’m doing is babysitting as the students click buttons and try to go where they’re not supposed to on the ‘net (i.e. anywhere but the electronic classroom. Go WikiWandering during study hall, not my class, if you have not finished the assignment.)

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        1. Already stated that standard lectures and meetings cause a Charlie Brown effect on me. I’ve tried many hacks to overcome this (except laptops in meetings or lectures, primarily because pre-laptop or desktop at work). Including standing up.

          But …. There are always exceptions. Had a history class on western native histories, winter ’79. Had no problems taking notes, or paying attention. Did not need the produced Cliff Notes for that class (not that I got them often, affordability was a problem, should have) Charlie Brown effect held off. Professor was that good. There are other situations where the problem was more easily overcome. Not many. I try.

          What you are describing I probably would not have a problem.

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    5. “…the people entering the ivies are functionally illiterate.”

      Oh, they are. For sure. Most kids can’t read a fiction book. They can’t reason either, because they’ve never been taught the rules of logic.

      There’s a reason Twitter is a hundred and twenty characters, right? And there’s a reason I must scroll through an entire fricking YouTube video to find out the torque spec on the front brake bolts for my truck, that being that a list and a written explanation isn’t popular enough to make it to the first three pages of Google search. (Also I think they’re screwing search up on purpose, but that’s a different rant.)

      Caleb Hammer and Ben Shapiro are famous for sitting with examples the untutored masses and getting jaw-dropping stupidity on video. Shapiro argues with Lefties, Hammer argues with people in debt.

      I myself have experienced the shortcomings of education a lot, every time I’ve gotten a certification or a license to do something over the years the instruction was at best tangential to the subject at hand. Most recently motorcycles, I had to take the test again. The test was made probably 60 years ago and hasn’t changed.

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      1. I happened on a couple of Hammer’s vids recently, and the thing that lept forth from the demeanor of the ”guests” showing as… okay, being kind; object examples, uneducated adolescents in adult bodies and especially financially so, sitting there looking so foolish, with all their financial dirty laundry aired out in public…is how they came off as smugly superior, the exposure being an unalloyed positive, a dream come true, sitting there making the guy exasperated as a great achievement – after all, they were on YT with someone famous. Look, look, that’s me!

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    6. I’m another one (maybe it’s a partial diagnostic for Oddness?) who doesn’t remember not knowing how to read. My parents read to me early and often and one fine Sunday when Dad was reading me the funnies I asked if I could read to him. Then I did (to his and Mom’s surprise). I was three.

      I don’t remember first grade, probably because I spent 30 days of the year sick (I caught everything, sometimes more than once). But I passed, which says something. I do remember liking my second grade teacher because she gave me books. And not second-grade books.

      As for phonics not teaching words’ meanings, it sounds to me as if whole word doesn’t, either. I know that since no book left in the open was safe from me I not only read but memorized Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, somewhere around age 9. The fact it was essays talking about literary/theater tropes in 1950s and early 60s New York (Jean Kerr was the wife of NY Times theater critic Walter Kerr), plus the travails of raising four boys, meant nothing to me: I got a lot of the meaning from context, and I laughed a lot.

      But it worked against my brother, who turned out to be dyslexic. I couldn’t teach him because I couldn’t understand why he was having so much trouble with something so easy.

      Liked by 1 person

      2. I don’t remember not being able to read, but my memories from being four are *very* sparse, with no younger memories at all.

        I do remember being frustrated in kindergarten because of the “pre-reading, prepare to learn to read” instruction when what I wanted was actual instruction to improve my reading ability.

        Liked by 1 person

      3. Huh…I hadn’t thought about it that way. I do remember not knowing how to read (I have some very clear memories going back to when I was not quite 3, and I wasn’t reading then), but I don’t remember learning how to read or starting to read. I just remember my parents being very surprised when I read something out loud at age 4. Or maybe I asked them what a word meant, and they went “wait a minute, here…can you actually read the rest of this?” (it’s a memory that used to be much clearer).

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        1. I remember the first thing I read consciously. It was a neon sign across from the bus stop that said the name of the company and then LTD. I asked dad what Ltd meant. He asked where I’d heard it, and I pointed on the sign.
          Because I’m part clanker on my dad’s side there followed a lecture on the law of incorporation….

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Speaking of being part clanker, “ask him the time, he’ll tell you how to build a clock” is something the wife and kids have said about me before. 😅

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        2. I didn’t get my glasses until the end of first grade, and though I could read before then, I could not read *well*. I was way behind grade level, and my first grade teacher didn’t think I was smart enough to do more.

          I was far sighted, and all the in school tests were to catch near sightedness, so it didn’t ping in then that the reason I was having trouble was that I couldn’t see the book in front of me, though I could see the board fine.

          The only reason I got glasses when I did was because my dad couldn’t make his eye doctor appointment, and since they would have to pay for it anyway, mom took me instead.

          So, I got my glasses, and insisted on getting Pippi Longstocking at the Scholastic book fair (though it was beyond my reading ability, and on thought I’d quickly drop it). It took me a week (or longer) to get through, then a few days, and then I was unstoppable.

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          1. Chuckle Chuckle

            When I had my eyes checked (grade school), it was discovered that I was near-sighted in one eye and far-sighted in the other.

            I thought everybody shut one eye when reading and the other when looking at something far away. [Crazy Grin]

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          2. OTOH, both my kids taught themselves to read before preschool, just from us reading to them, watching Seseme Street and Between the Lions, etc. My son in particular kept asking me “What does this say?” whenever we were out and passed a sign. It about five me crazy. But when he read the sign for “Steak & Shake” as “Steek & Shake”, it was all worth it, since I knew he was getting it.

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    7. For those with children, many of the Dr. Seuss books are effectively phonics lessons. Put your finger on each syllable as you read to your children.

      As to the Harvard students, it’s not whole language that’s removed their ability to read. It’s that they grew up in a competitive system that rewards a CV of completed activities, sports, clubs, bogus businesses, charity work, etc.

      There’s no time to sit for hours and read a book. The system actively searches for charismatic extroverts from families with the means to fund extensive extracurriculars.

      This is a recent op ed from a Harvard student: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/12/5/miller-harvard-books-course-requirements/

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      1. And this is fascinating: https://fortune.com/2026/06/29/roberto-serrano-brown-university-massacre-ai-cheating/

        There are ways to correct this new aversion to learning.

        For one, make the SAT hard again. Bring back analogies. Prioritize advanced vocabulary.

        Reduce the number of extracurriculars students are allowed to list on their applications to three–and reduce the weight given to the activities in the admissions formula.

        As to the lack of moral fiber demonstrated by the elite college student body, I don’t know how to solve that. It would be a good thing for colleges to attempt to resist the trophy kids. Maybe admission by lottery would correct things.

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    8. ”…who can’t read takes the might of the department of education, the cumulative apparatus of the schools of education and state licensing.”

      It’s implied in that stack, but don’t discount the teachers unions in this. “Whole word” seems like an easier “I checked the box and that’s that – my students now guess really enthusiastically” for lesser teachers than the measurable results of phonics.

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      1. It’s also a side effect of the attempts to modernize the reading material for children. Librarians regularly cull materials from their stacks. Old, established books are removed for present day, dumbed down slop presenting desired propaganda. Look for older books.

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    9. I was reading “Dick and Jane” books at 21 months (I have the dated cassette tapes to prove it.) so was probably learning the alphabet and words before that. I know my mom had a neighborhood co-op school in our garage where we recited the Pledge of Allegiance and learned French among other preschool things, and I was less than 3yrs old when that was going on. So, I know I could sound out the words, but I also sight-read, too.

      My siblings were super struggling with reading and my parents bought the Hooked on Phonics set and I went through all the records and flash cards because it was interesting. So, I guess I got some phonics, there – I don’t remember being taught any in school.

      My hubby got swats in Kindergarten for “lying” that he could read. His grandmother (an old 1 room Kentucky school teacher) came into talk to the young teacher the next day. She asked the teacher if she had handed him a book to see if he COULD read, and she said no, that he was too young to read. Grandma picked up a random book and handed it to him and he read it. The young teacher had to apologize to him for the swats. (He is also severely dyslexic, but by learning to read so early they didn’t know it until much later in life.)

      I homeschooled our kids – 4 out of 5 were dyslexic. I had to try a lot of different methods to teach them to read. And some it took a lot longer for fluency. But the main book I used to help with the phonics was, “An Acorn in My Hand” By Ethel Bouldin (Super hard to find now). I used the same thing to teach my grandson to read before kindergarten.

      I used to read very fast and had a near photographic memory, but, between eyesight issues, health issues and a few head knocks, I’ve slowed a lot, I forget a lot, and generally just don’t enjoy reading very much. But, I would rather read than listen to a video or audio track.

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    10. When I read Donald Kingsbury’s Courtship Rite in French, I found that I was reading sentence by sentence. I had to look up words, and sometimes a word was key to what a sentence meant, but I was grasping sentences as wholes. On the other hand, if I try to read Classical Greek, it’s word by word and painfully slow. I think that’s akin to the difference you’re pointing at.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. I don’t think I can even read Classical Greek at this time. I’d like to get back into it. They say your brain doesn’t NEED to shrink with age, so…. I’m gonna try.

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    11. I was reading before I was three.

      My mother taught elementary school during the day at a very high end private school (1st, then 2nd grade) and afternoons, and the occasional evenings, tutored students in reading. All the standard primers of the day (mid-’50s) were in stacks around the house, and it was to be many years before solid phonics teaching was abandoned in favor of the “whole language” bullshit. It was impossible to not overhear her in the dining room working with students who had reading problems (most of which were letter and word recognition problems caused by what were called back then “reversals” – which eventually came to be known as dyslexia), so I got a very early “journeyman’s education” in reading. My father’s den (attorney) had full shelves on three walls, our television was only rarely on so empty time was spent reading. I was reading – a little – French by 6 and some Spanish by about 8 because my mother spoke and read French, my father had spent time in Cuba as a chemist in a sugar mill while in college and spoke “common spanish” and read it some, and we had books in both, so when I exhausted the in-house supply of English books I started on the others. Never learned to speak either worth a damn, despite classes in both in school, but I can still read them.

      I’ve had a severe addiction to the printed word ever since, and like commenters above I cannot see something written in a language I understand and not immediately read it. Totally a reflex action. I absolutely cannot imagine not reading, nor not being able to read; to me, not reading is a insult to the human mind. I see stuff printed in a language I do not know and have to fight the urge to learn it; if I had the time, I would.

      Heavy tech stuff slows me down (engineering degree, 35 years in IT, specializing in enterprise system design) and fiction, of nearly every kind, is the brain candy reward that makes slogging through desert-dry tech stuff bearable. It takes a lot for me to TBAR a book, I keep hoping it’ll get better in another 30 pages and suddenly I’m at the end (I did throw a Kindle across the patio once (TKAR?), gave me an opportunity to buy a new one with more memory, so…..)

      I sometimes get depressed about the thought that someday, like all human things, it will come to an end and I won’t be able to read anymore. For me, Heaven will be a place with endless shelves bulging with books.

      And coffee. Books and coffee. For eternity.

      Liked by 3 people

    12. Thinking about this some more, I wonder if those who do not read – I mean not only those who don’t read at all (and I think that’s a special category – it includes those who do not have reading skills, the kids upon whom the failures of the education industrial complex are foisted by the system failing, for whatever reason, to teach them), and extends, especially, those who do not read well, for whom reading is uncomfortable, a “skill beyond” – have any awareness of the deprivation they are suffering under.

      And then, I wonder how to fix it.

      Reading – seeing the assembled words on a page, as a coherent group with greater meaning than the individual words, sensing the patterns <i>and sensing the mood and potentially greater meaning and emphasis of the entire phrasal construction</i> – isn’t just a fundamental societal skill, it’s a portal to things so much greater that denying it should be a crime.

      Man journeyed to the moon in 1969, but writers had taken us there, and far beyond, centuries before, and still do today. We may know what happened down the street yesterday but historians have long brought us “what happened, the who, the how and the why” from our ancestors, recent and ancient. Philosophers have presented the “maybes” and “what ifs” for, well, forever. “How to” writers have taught skills, simple and complex, and presented ideas for millennia.

      To not read is to be denied all of that; if not reading is a choice, so be it, but not offering, and failing to deliver on, the opportunity to experience it….well, it’s wrong.

      Liked by 3 people

    13. Our oldest son is very bright but could not spell in grade school.

      However, if you looked at what he did write, the words were correctly produced phonetically.

      That’s the major problem of English.

      He eventually learned some of the idiosyncrasies of the language, and would introduce himself to people and then spell his name as “J-O-S-E-P-H-sounds-like-an-F.”

      Similarly, he could not memorize the times table and rattle it off, but instead (so his teacher finally discovered) would derive each product individually every time.

      He’s in high-level computer programming, literally rocket science, now.

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      1. When I get very tired, I spell all F sounds with ph. I thought this was a weird quirk. Until older son complained of doing the same.
        It’s still weird, but apparently also genetic.

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