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2019-10-25 Home Front: Culture Wars

Finally: 85 Years of Educational Malpractice Coming to An End

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Posted by Lex 2019-10-25 09:59|| || Front Page|| [8 views ] Top

#1 At least one tent in the Shitshow's been folded.
Progress, of a sort.

Too bad about the two-plus generations of educational malpractice. Sorry, kids

Posted by Lex 2019-10-25 20:41|| 2019-10-25 20:41|| Front Page Top

#2 Educational malpractice, indeed.
Buddy of mine has twin girls in elementary school. Kids seemed unable to learn to read. There were suggestions they might be retarded. (laughable if you knew the kids)

Dad called bullshit on the whole mess, started teaching them old-skool phonics. A year later, the kids were reading at grade level.

tl;dr: The Whole Word Method for learning to read is BS. Phonics kicks its ass demonstrably and for multiple reasons.

Posted by SteveS 2019-10-25 20:51|| 2019-10-25 20:51|| Front Page Top

#3 Every time I see a "If you can read this, thank a teacher" bumper sticker I want to gag. My uncle, who was a machinist (made nuke sub reactor parts for many years) but also could do pretty much anything taught me to read when I was 4-5 years old. With newspapers.

Posted by M. Murcek 2019-10-25 21:28|| 2019-10-25 21:28|| Front Page Top

#4 Being a voracious reader, but not an "educator," I hold to the rather old-fashioned theory that the best way to teach children the beauty and power of the written word is to read aloud to them.

And that the words that should be read aloud with the old words crafted by the old poets and the other great writers of our culture: Poe, Tennyson, Kipling, Bobby Burns, Frost and Roethke. And perhaps a bit of Eliot or Shakespeare.

Because when humans hear music-in-words, they imbibe a sense of the order and beauty in language: logic and memory and desire, all mixed together in a kind of magic that appeals to the innate sense of grammatical, semantic, logical-emotional structure that all humans have from birth. And that makes poetry, and beautiful language generally, so memorable when it's spoken and heard.

But no, I haven't been trained in the ways of "whose word" or Common Core or Uncommonly Stupid.

Posted by Lex 2019-10-25 21:44|| 2019-10-25 21:44|| Front Page Top

#5 * "whole word" or whatever asinine label they slap on their nonsense

Posted by Lex 2019-10-25 21:45|| 2019-10-25 21:45|| Front Page Top

23:16 trailing wife
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