Another victim of memorization

Amen, amen.

And what a tribute to this man who’s decided that he’s not too old to learn how to read well!

Victoria,

Couldn’t agree with you more re: phonics. Why did anyone ever think that it wasn’t a good way to teach reading? I know retired teachers who believe in it strongly so where did our schools go wrong - were these teachers not listened to - and why now is it so hard to get schools to use it across the board. Our local public school is using an OG based program ONLY for its ESE classes in SOME of the schools and they can’t be convinced that it would be good for all children - even after my private school sent the 1st grade teachers to the program given to their ESE teachers so they could use it to teach their classes reading!

Why schools still won’t use phonics — the prime motivators of human history: inertia, ignorance, laziness, nepotism, and shortsightedness. Memorization takes less work and little knowledge and training on the part of the teacher — just read at the kids and hope and pray that it “takes” (This is the misuse of whole language that has been going on for the last decade or two). Sure, half the kids fail, but that’s three years down the road and no longer the problem of the primary teacher, and if the principal is still in the job he/she can blame the child, the parents, TV, society, and finally the teacher. As long as you have someone to blame you can hire poorly educated primary teachers at low wages and browbeat them into doing things your way and not rocking the boat.

If you used a phonics program you would have to make sure your teachers were literate themselves and take the risk of hiring people with independent minds and get in trouble with certain shortsighted teachers’ unions (not all of them, but I’ve met some), you would have to buy books for the classroom and them more books for the school library, you would have to get rid of poorly-performing teachers who don’t actually teach because their faults would be visible and you would get in real trouble with certain teachers’ unions, and you would send literate questioning young people into the high school where more of your faults and more illiterate teachers would be visible. It’s so much easier to keep your friends on the job because they’re such nice people, avoid spending money on frills like books, and avoid rocking the boat.

My daughter went through K in the era of whole language. She was in the “average” (middle) reading group. Three years later the tide had changed and I observed a K classroom while trying to decide where to place my LD son. A neighbor’s child was in that classroom and was in the average (middle) reading group. The difference between what the neighbor’s child could do and what my daughter could do at the same age was unbelievable. And the top reading group in K was really really reading books.

My big mistake was in thinking that K didn’t matter. I knew they were whole language. I knew the research. I just didn’t think it was a big deal until first grade.

Beth

In the district we transfered from in 2000 whole language ruled. My oldest sons reading level stagnated at the 3.5 grade level, my youngest son at the primer level, yet the school told us this was the most accurate method. They said look at your daughter she reads above grade level. Problem is she could read before she even entered the school building. She walked and talked at 8 months and could read real stories by age 3. It was nothing the school did. When we got to the district we are in currently they could not believe neither of the boys had any phonics skills at all. They had to teach them from the beginning. Now 1 1/2 years later my oldest son is reading on grade level and the youngest almost 2nd grade. The old district told us the boys were lazy and not trying–did this laziness cure itself with a simple move? Or was it as I expect due to better teaching methods?

Victoria,

I agree with you 100% that everyone seems very quick to blame low level reading on the kids and not hold teachers and/or methods accountable.

Here in Pa they are going to test the kids to death why not use those $$$ on buying decent materials and send teachers to special reading training.

Cheers.

Unfortunately, that’s really the long & short of it.

Look, unions have absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with the whole language/balanced literacy/phonics debate. Period. They concern themselves principally with employment & certification issues. Second, I cannot speak for U.S. teachers in all districts, but teachers in Canada graduate in the upper 25%ile of their university graduating classes, so teacher illiteracy is clearly not the problem. Third, stop blaming teachers for the whole language debacle. We teach (or taught) what we were trained to teach; we did not set our university and teacher college curricula—others did. Too bad they formed theory by looking at their navels and then rammed it (and continue to ram it) down our throats under the guise of “well-researched” theory-based practice. (Yes, I’m a teacher trained in PG among other things, and the mother of an LD child). States and provinces, not teachers, set pupil and teacher curricular standards. If you are concerned about policy direction, lobby your senior school board admin., trustees and government representatives. Join the local parent council. Pressure your local learning disabilities association to get proactive in the reading wars. Present an organized and effective case. You may just find teachers like me joined in the same fight. Teacher-bashing will not make for cordial relations among potential allies!

I’m not saying all teachers are perfect, but most do the very best they can with what little they were given in the way of balanced instruction about reading and research methodology. Some of us are trying to make a difference and swim against the current (sometimes meeting hostility from administrators & colleagues in doing so.) But constant teacher-bashing makes it pretty discouraging work, I must say.

I guess each of us has had a raw nerve rubbed the wrong way on this issue. Let’s hope we can work together in mutual respect.

This is not a teacher bashing issue - it should strongly be an accountability issue. Universities and teacher trainers have done a great disservice to the at-risk students of this nation with their all-important “theories”. In their world one is rewarded for innovation - for “new” ideas - for publishing - for leading. Wherever it lead, appears not to have mattered much.

Are there consequences for these disastors? It appears the publishing companies who profited greatly with their “whole language” readers - will profit handsomely from their phonics-based readers. The money may go around and around but it seems to always end in the same few pockets.

I happen to be a teacher, a former union member, a parent, and a Canadian also. And while I have met a number of good and concerned teachers, I’ve also got enough horror stories to go on for hours. My daughter’s Grade 8 teacher who could not read the word “causal”… the Grade 9 teacher who sent home a paper of instructions containing seven major errors including the self-referential “Make sure the subject and verb agrees” … her Grade 3 teacher who could neither add nor spell so seven-year-olds were correcting her … the Grade 1 teacher who never wrote anything on the board but the names of students to be punished, and who wielded her power by refusing to let a student out for his scheduled reading assistance, had been destroying kids’ lives for thirty years but the school couldn’t touch her until she finally retired the next year … The young lady preparing to teach Early Childhood (which means she could teach up to Grade 2 or 3 level in some areas) who in a month’s time could not finish the children’s book “The Hobbit” because it was *too long*, and who couldn’t pronounce the name Bilbo … my coworker teaching Grade 10 math who could not do the problems in the text and came to me to do them for him (and I was not yet officially certified in math, but he was, and tenured) … my coworker who was certified and tenured to teach English (ESL, but still) but couldn’t speak a single error-free sentence in the language … the head of math department who lectured me on how to teach senior college-entrance math by doing only the most basic review questions and doing them in class beofre sending the same for homework, so the kids only had to imitate work two years below their supposed level… the math teacher with a science PhD, had to be called “Doctor”, who couldn’t prepare students for the SAT because he couldn’t understand the questions (Grade 9-10 level) himself … the language specialist from the government who flat-out lied about the success of his pet program and methodology. And my only results from the unions were that (1) when another teacher entered my teaching area, ripped papers off the walls, and announced in his class that I was a bad teacher and the students should ignore me, and I made a formal complaint, the union response was that he was tenured and I was a new teacher so he had union protection and I did not (2) teaching in a small rural school with four teachers for eight grades, we were informed that the union had voted to go on strike in the big city for more preparation time (we had none) and higher wages (already higher than ours) and had also voted to tax every other non-striking teacher to fill up their strike fund, taken out of our pay without a further by-your-leave (3) complaining to the schools about some of the more egregious examples of incompetence above, I was informed that the people either had tenure or were popular with the students or both, so the school would take absolutely no action.

I’m the first to be positive and to suggest practical things that can be done to make teaching and learning work. But I am not blind to problems when they are there.

And passing in the top 25% of your class means *absolutely nothing* when you are taking only education courses with inflated grades, unfortunately.

Hi everyone,
Boy is this a hot topic. As most of you know, I work in VA. I have worked in Fairfax and now in Loudoun County, two of the richest counties in the U.S. We now have a state budget crises and our salaries may be affected. Even though we have a budget crises, Reading Recovery is alive and well in the county. The cost for this ‘program’??? is $5000+ per child. There is a lot of research about RR and how ineffective it is. Noone is listening. Due to our state tests, SOLs, teachers come under a lot of accountability even though you all know that student performance involves a lot of variables, whole language one of them. I use PG for reading remediation along with other remediation programs in my classes. When I interviewed for my high school teaching job, I told my supervisor about the programs that I would use and asked her if I could use them. She said yes and asked me what would I have done if she said no. I told her that I would have had to have interviewed for another school. Needless to say, she was thrilled with what I said and of course I was offered the job. This is not the norm. So many schools, particularly high schools, don’t want to hear remediation, just accommodations. What a shame. The head of sped came into my classroom to observe PG in action. She came, saw and I never heard anything more about it. However, the head of reading, whole language person, came into my classroom and asked me to give two presentations on PG for the county on staff development day, March 11th. She also asked me if I would give a presentation for her elementary Reading Recovery teachers. You could have picked me off the floor! Of course, I said yes to both. Last week, the teachers had to sign up for the different presentations, about 100, to be given on the 11th. Last Tues the head of the staff devel day called me. He had a favor to ask. He told me that something had happened that had never happened before. My two presentations had ‘sold out’ in just three hours! He asked me if I would give another one first thing in the morning. I said that I would. He told me that requests had tied up the phone system and were pouring in through email! He said that I could have given about 10 presentations and it still wouldn’t have been enough! I am so excited and I wonder if the county will ask for trainings. The presentations are targeted to regular ed, not special ed teachers. I will keep you updated on what happens next. This great response, I think, shows that most teachers want more options to teach reading but most colleges don’t prepare them for what they face in the real world and the administrators are the problem. I am sure that every teacher wants her students to succeed but they don’t have the tools to teach every child. Every program that I use, I had to be trained after college. Sorry that this is long but I had to share.

BRAVO!!!

That word rears its ugly head again. It seems when children have significant reading problems, the child is to blame - LAZY. He/She didddles. Plays Around. Does not Work. Does Not Care. on and on and on and on ad nauseum

Children who cannot read cannot do reading assignments. They cannot sit in a chair and pretend they’re working (making the teacher happy) when they cannot do the work.

After third grade it is the rare teacher who will listen to a child having difficulties read.

I agree that $$$ should be spent on materials and training. Having taught reading for 33+ years, I’m not sure there are many decent reading series out there, furthermore, I’m not sure anyone could teach teachers how to teach reading

I have in high schoolers who have hidden their reading difficulties and guess which ones have behaviors….the ones who can’t read… Some of them don’t even want to be seen with me in the library as they are learning to read in a small group…I have to find a “safe place” where no one sees them learning things that they didn’t get in elementary school…..

We are making headway slowly but surely but somedays I want to say to heck with it…especially when I have a smart aleck kid acting like learning to read is a waste of time and because of his pride he won’t admit he is in the same boat as the ESL kids…instead he ends up cussing, and creating such a scene that the ESL kids who really want to learn to read shut down. It is nuts I am trying to make up for 10 years of failure and shaking off that monkey called failure is sure hard to do….

And teachers wonder why these kids misbehave, duh! They are frustrated. I think people need to realize that we take for granted that we can read. I can’t even imagine not being able to read. That would be so frustrating and I would feel like such a failure.

There aren’t many good reading series out there, but there are a couple. There was a decent series put out by Holt-Rinehart that I still use in tutoring although it’s now out of print. Publishers would put out better series if schools and state systems would buy them.

It would be a lot easier to teach education students in college how to teach reading than to fill them up with the stuff they get now! Just listen to the teachers on this board who are so happy when they meet Phonographix or Lindamood Bell or OG and finally get a system of reading instruction that works — we keep hearing “Why didn’t we do this in my education training?”

Wow! I’m sorry you’ve had such rotten experiences! Maybe I’ve had rose-coloured glasses on all these years, but I guess I’ve been lucky enough at the high school level to work with solid teachers. (My upper 25th%ile figure by the way, is based on pre-education level university training. High school teachers typically have honours degrees whereas elementary ones aren’t required to. And yes, sadly, most teacher ed. courses are bird courses!) Two teachers, in my experience, couldn’t spell, but they are dyslexics (both now administrators) who get family members to vet everything they write! In my experience, despite there being procedures for doing so, administrators are usually too gutless to get rid of the real duds, even though no one prevents them, not even unions (who obviously should have a vested interest in maintaining professional standards) —unless parents and students mount a near insurrection.

My interest, currently, is in looking for ways to get the word out about useful reading instruction. There are small victories—two teachers from elementary schools have come to me for the heads up about PG in the past week. I sold my principal (soon to be promoted to superintendent) on what I’m doing, and teachers at a nearby big city workshop had lots of interest in my efforts. But this is small-scale, piece-meal stuff. I’m also volunteering to be a SEAC (Special Education Advisory Committee) LD Association rep. for my area of the province. I’m told board administrators sit up and listen to SEAC, which has lots of influence. But recommending approaches for outside the spec. ed. umbrella is outside the mandate, so even this too won’t be enough!

How did that mother of the dyslexic son in California get legislation rolling that ensures (theoretically??) the instruction of structured, direct instruction phonemics and phonics (ABC Law, I think it’s called?)?

In Britain, Tony Blair has sent all primary teachers back to school for the heads up on such approaches, but it’s easy there—education is a responsibility of the central government. Period. Here (as in the States if I’m not mistaken) we have a patchwork quilt with each province calling the shots. My government (Ontario) recently initiated stringent new curriculum standards with mandatory testing at grades 3,6 and 10 (with plans to test everybody in just about everything every blessed year—talk about over the top!). Many of the curricular changes are excellent, long overdue, but why oh why could they not have gotten early reading instruction right? Answer: whole language still rules in teacher faculties. The tragic result of our curricular changes is that most LD students will be hung out to dry after grade 10 when they fail the literacy test required for graduation. Already dropout rates are mounting. To introduce high stakes testing without proper instruction to bring struggling readers to grade level is just simply cruel!

Since LD Associations concern themselves with lobbying for their own—not for general ed. programs, where does one lend lobbying support? Is anyone aware of associatons out there (Canadian or US) that lobby for effective early reading instruction for everyone? I’d like to have a model for political action on this one if such a thing exists.

On a personal note (and I’m sorry this is so long) my severely LD son got his report card today. Fifteen months after identification and scoring at Gr. 1.3 in reading, and after 5.5 months of Barton tutoring and 1.25 years in an SLD classroom, he reads just above grade level and was recently discovered in his room attempting The Hobbit! The 36% of grade nine students in my school who tested out at Gr. 5 or lower in reading on recently administered standardized testing should have been so lucky!

Any suggestions on how to get the word out would be appreciated. Now that I’ve begun to make a difference in my school and have begun to work at the community level on this, I’m looking farther ahead. There is an election looming!

Lord only knows how you can get the word out. I’ve been trying for thirty years and for my pains have been labelled a crank. But you have to keep trying, which is what I’m doing here and in private tutoring and in adult tutoring.

I have seen a light at the end of the tunnel with the US
NIH/NICHD study, which is just too big and too respectable to sweep under the rug like they did all the other evidence.

A good article in Scientific American which I just picked up in the subway tonight! Please see note above.

By the way, my young relatives were “educated” in Ontario schools, in a very nice town in a nice wealthy area with a nice middle-class education-oriented two-parent family, to the extent of having prepaid university savings funds. They both started out as gifted in primary and ended up as failures by high school. He got into a lot of trouble and dropped out twice, and she slipped down to the general and basic level and got one year of tourism at a community college.
They could read but were bored silly and found other things to occupy them,
and were never taught how not to count on their fingers (literally).
The non-English-speaking English teacher and the math teacher with degree and tenure who couldn’t solve standard problems ina Grade 10 book and the head of department lecturing me in how to teach Grade 9 level work out of a grade 12 book were all Ontario, in two different widely-separated schools.
I don’t know where those honours degrees are from or in what subjects, but rare indeed is the high school math teacher who has any real degree in math at all, and I’m the only one I know with an honours degree. Lots have “math education” degrees, but those relate to math degrees as military intelligence relates to intelligence.
If you’re in a good suburban high school teaching advanced-level classes (although that so-called grade 12 class was also so-called advanced … ) then maybe you meet other qualified people, but the rest of the province is not doing as well as we would hope. Of course your fifth-grade readers entering Grade 9 tell you something is not doing as well as it should in your own elementary too!
Don’t know where you are, but the rot is pretty widespread.

Good luck in your campaign, and let’s each try to spread the fight to two or three more peope and we will get there.

It sure feels good when people start to realize that there is something that can be done about kids who can’t read… Hats off to you Shay!! you are touching lives and making changes and that is FANTASTIC!! I have been setting up a reading intervention program for the SDC at the high school. It has been a rough road to hoe the teachers are starting to listen to because the kids are responding…favorably…just wish there was more time in the day….

I could always teach middle school remedial reading from the old Holt Basic Reading Series and MacMillan Series R. Both have very exaxt readabilities, fairly interesting stories, and opportunities for phonetic based teaching. The rub? These must be teacher developed lessons.

Too many of our “phonetic” series are written to formula and are thus - BORING. Phonics and art must co-exist. The whole language people were not wrong in all of their “immersion” ideas. Students should be immersed in good literature with supporting art and music. MUST BE! Yet, many of our allies are so focused on the code - they’ve forgotten the cognitive elements of reading/ the motivating elements of reading. We don’t read to bust codes - we don’t even read to improve accuracy and speed - we read to either (a) enjoy, or (b) gather information.

Obviously, what I propose is an integrated system of instruction. Those having difficulties must be allowed to continue in their comprehension and vocabulary growth by listening to age/vocabulary appropriate materials. They must be allowed to use their expanding vocabulary with the readers in the group. Immersing them in code emphasis only is harmful.

We know how to teach reading and have for quite awhile. There are entrenched professors who quite obviously have ignored the instructional demands of at-risk students. These teachers of dangerous, kid-harmful philosophies must lose their “pulpits.”

Ken - the series I was referring to was a primary series, phonics-based. The Grade 1 materials were so-so and I continue to use my favourite Ladybirds for continuous text and Scholar’s Choice Check and Double-Check for systematic phonics. But the H-R books in Grades 2 and 3 were really good and hold kids’ interest; in fact I’m using one right now with one of my bilingual girls. I would recommend picking up a set of these used for anyone who is tutoring; really nice content, and lots of new vocabulary introduced if it is decodable, so less clunky than most Grade 2-3 books. In order, “Silver Steps”, “Golden Trails”, “Wings of Wonder”, and “Flights Near and Far”.

For thirty years I have been arguing (a) you *must* have phonics for independent reading, and (b) phonics is a *tool*, a key to unlocking all those wonderful books out there, not a subject to stand on its own.

You need a strong phonics foundation, but you don’t live your whole life in the basement; a lot of so-called phonics-based programs fail (like a lot of well-meant but misguided math programs) because they spend years telling the whole long shaggy-dog story but omit the punchline.

The National Right to Read Foundation has been helping activists since 1994. They have worked with people at all levels to bring about reading reform. Their website is nrrf.org
They were a wonderful help to me when I was a parent activist in Maryland and now I am the Michigan state director for the NRRF ( a volunteer position).