Well I FINALLY got a job and it is teaching high school kids Language Arts. Since they are all special ed. kids, and not reading well the school told me they are only interested in teaching them to read.
I’m not too keen on high school kids, though I have worked with them before. But the question I have is, they were very interested in my OG background for the job, but now I found out they use Corrective Reading. I have read semi- mixed reviews. It appears to be sequential and discourages guessing (yea!), but is highly scripted (though after Barton…). Anyway, some teachers do not like the scripted nature of it.
BTW, they were really interested that I was willing to take the Wilson training, but this is— I think— the real thing. Not just the 3 day overview, but you take on a student and so forth. So I could take that now but wouldn’t be able to teach it this year at all.
It looks like Corrective Reading would help kids who are not severely dyslexic, but for one reason or another (like WL say) haven’t learned to read.
Any comments. I feel sure I have read about it here, but I tried doing a search and got LOTS of hits some having nothing to do with Corrective Reading.
Anyway, it doesn’t look like Read180.
—des
Re: SRA Corrective Reading
Well it isn’t Read180!! From what I have read “Corrective Reading” (SRA) is a very scripted program with some unusual aspects, such as “choral responses” and somehow choreographed responses. OTOH, it is also sequential and explicit phonics, without much of a multisensory component. It is definitely not whole language (which is why, I think the WL folks hate it so much). I just love SRA’s response to “well what do you do if h.s. kids feel embarrassed about doing phonics”. The answer was “close the door”. I like the answer because it doesn’t imply “well the kids are embarrassed, so we just skip it”. :-)
The scripted aspect is a drag, it’s the part I really don’t like about Barton. OTOH, I have learned a whole bunch from Barton, and I also have learned to de-robotize it, which I guess you can do after hours with using the program. I am allowed to bring in anythign I want, as long as it works. I could read novels (not all the time of course), teach them OG aspects of multisyllable words, OG spelling rules ala Barton, some multisensory techniques. OTOH, I do prob. have to “finish” a certain degree of it. But they are very concerned about results— so if it works I imagine they are open to it.
The folks there *seem* very nice, very knowledgable, but they do work under constraints such as NCLB and the ABQ board of ed. I will say that right now it is the latter that is annoying me. I am not officially hired. I will get the job, as they have asked for me. However, since all hires go thru the Board, and they have yet to contact me, I am in limbo sort of. It is possible that school will have started before they contact me. The assist. principal told me today that tomorrow she is “camping out” at human resources and waiting til they do something. She said certainly they can hire 8 people (this is a HUGE school— 2000+ kids).
Anyway they have less than a week. I am not so anxious to do the typical school district first few days nonsense. But I am very anxious to get hired before the kids actually get there and from what I gather it is possible I won’t be. I would really like to see the program before I teach it. :-} (Though as I said the first few days or so, they are mostly testing and placing kids. They are doing homogenous groups, which is a good thing, imo. )
—des
Good for you!
Unless you get something mechanical like Read180 or a school that has so bought into the watered-down version of “whole-language” that you aren’t allowed to teach, you can take *any* program and make it work. Look over the materials you have, decide which things you need to teach more explicitly, decide where you need to supplement with extra worksheets etc., and just do it. As long as you read the assigned texts and do the assigned workbooks — which often do have worthwile material in them — then you can spend the other half or more of your time on teaching what skills are needed.