Did you ever listen to two people fight and think, “this argument is so frickin’ stupid. This has to be about something else.”
In New York City, the mayor, the board of education, the teachers, and the teaching experts/professionals have their panties all in a twist over the best method to teach kids how to read: whole language v. phonics. It’s also a nation-wide fight; Bush made it a component of No Child Left Behind. But in the city, the war is especially fierce. (Thanks, Amy)
Whole language is a multi-system approach to reading that involves taking cues from the text and reinforcing reading lessons in other subjects. The other reading approach that has been set up as its polar opposition is Phonics, where students learn to read by memorizing rules to decode words.
The whole language operates on the presumption that breaking down words distracts kids, even discourages them, from growing up to become devoted readers. Instead, students in a Balanced Literacy program get their pick of books almost right away—real books, not Dick and Jane readers, with narratives that are meant to speak to what kids relate to, whether it’s dogs or baseball or friendship or baby sisters. Over time, the theory goes, kids learn the technical aspects of reading—like contractions, or tricky letter combinations painlessly—almost by osmosis. The joy of reading is meant to be the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine of spelling and grammar go down.
Ask any parent what they are doing to teach their kids how to read, and they’ll describe a mixture of methods. Most of us are reading to the kids before bed, providing them with fun books, pointing out words on signs, and occasionally making them sound things out. I’m probably doing more whole language at home, because I know that they do some phonics at school. Because I never learned phonics and, thus, can’t spell, I know that my kids need a little of it. As long as there is some mixture of methods, most parents aren’t losing any sleep over reading methods.
It may be because pedagogy bores me, but I think that this major fight is all about politics. Now you look who is on what side of this fight. On the phonics side, you have Diane Ravitch, Bush, and the City Journal people. On the other, you have the Teachers College experts and the Board of Education. Each side has a fundamentally different picture of schools.
The pro-phonics people believe that teachers are directionless. Many are slackers, protected by their union brethren. Phonics will force the teachers to conform to a uniform approach to teaching, one that proven results. Test scores improve after using phonics. This method has been especially useful working with kids on the lower end. key words — proven, uniform, tested, science, rules
The whole language people believe that teachers and students shouldn’t be cramped by rules or testing. Both will blossom when given the opportunity to choose their own course. If the whole language approach works well in upper income schools, then it should also be used in lower income areas. key words — self-directed, creative, natural, holistic, intuition
One approach has faith in teachers, the other doesn’t. One approach puts value in test scores, the other doesn’t. One approach sees education as a science, the other sees it as an art. One puts value on the educational experts, the other sees them as quacks and prefers control by elected officials. One thinks schools should be fun, the other thinks that schools should be structured.
And these two sides are locked into a mortal fight that goes beyond this silly reading war. Those opposing views of schools and teachers are at the bottom of the educational fight from voucher and charter schools to testing debate to standards.
Apt. 11d 
“…Test scores improve after using phonics. THIS METHOD HAS BEEN ESPECIALLY USEFUL WORKING WITH KIDS ON THE LOWER END. key words — proven, uniform, tested, science, rules
The whole language people believe that teachers and students shouldn’t be cramped by rules or testing. Both will blossom when given the opportunity to choose their own course. IF THE WHOLE LANGUAGE APPROACH WORKS WELL IN UPPER INCOME SCHOOLS, THEN IT SHOULD ALSO BE USED IN LOWER INCOME AREAS. key words — self-directed, creative, natural, holistic, intuition..”
Here you have a perfect description of how the Demmies have lost their way. They are in the pocket of the teachers’ unions, and plumping for a nostrum which works just swell for upper class kids – the children of their big donors, who are going to do well anyhow – and letting cohort after cohort of poor kids get shortchanged on one of the most important skills they could acquire.
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The most ridiculous part of these arguments (and I agree that they are political) is that both sides seem to agree with the premise that there is one right way to teach reading, instead of accepting the fact that different kids learn in different ways ….
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Dick and Jane were intended for Look-Say use, if I’m not mistaken, so they don’t have a whole lot to do with phonics.
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“The whole language people believe that teachers and students shouldn’t be cramped by rules or testing. Both will blossom when given the opportunity to choose their own course. … One approach has faith in teachers, the other doesn’t.”
Unfortunately, the implementation of the Reading and Writing project in NYC is not so free as this. There are just as many rules and restrictions imposed on the teachers as under any phonics-based regimen. Everything is controlled and structured from the top down, and it’s all based on ideology.
Not only do they forget that children learn in different ways, but also that teachers are effective teaching in different ways as well. If both camps agree on one thing, it’s that individual teachers should not be able to determine for themselves the best methods of teaching their own classes.
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There is far too much demand on both sides of the spectrum for “all or nothing”. Some kids need lots of structure. Others are stifled by it. Others need structure, but not the kind of structure they are getting in their current environment, etc. etc. I worry that the phonics proponents forget that kids need to read something meaningful (or else reading is boring and hateful), and that whole language proponents forget that context doesn’t necessarily provide meaning. In fact, I worry sometimes that an over-reliance on context diminishes comprehension, because kids don’t feel like they “need” to look up an unfamiliar word–they just guess, often wrongly, in a situation where guessing hurts them (I’ve actually bought pocket dictionaries for tutees to carry around with them so they have no excuse for guessing). But I don’t have any evidence that these kids learned to read via whole language as opposed to phonics, so I don’t know why they’ve decided to over-rely on context…just a gut worry.
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I try to be as pragmatic as possible about child development and educational methodology, and I’m profoundly suspicious of false choices. Why not have a big healthy dose of structured phonics instruction, lots of reading out loud, some controlled phonics readers, and then quickly move on to “real literature”? There is no reason why it has to be either/or, particularly since learning to read should be the main business of the first years of school, so there’s nothing else more important.
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There’s a very informative webpage devoted to the subject of “Reading with and without
Dick and Jane. The politics of literacy in c20 America”
at
http://www.virginia.edu/oldbooks/2005/exhibitions/dickandjane.shtml
“William McGuffey’s phonics-based primers, which emphasized the sounding out of words by learning letter-sound associations, dominated American primary education from the middle of the c19 until the early c20. During the Progressive Era, some educators and social scientists began to believe that McGuffey’s moralizing texts were too complex for young readers, and they argued for a simpler approach, one that used a carefully limited vocabulary and story lines that were more relevant to the lives of contemporary children.”
[snip]
“The result was Dick and Jane, who made their debut in 1930 in Scott-Foresman’s Elson-Gray Basic Readers, accompanied by a guide urging teachers using them in their classrooms to adopt the whole word (or look-say) method, one that emphasized the meaning of words, rather than using rote phonics drills. The primers constantly repeated the few words in their texts as a replacement for phonics exercises. To help teachers, each primer had a vocabulary list at the back of the book, with a paragraph explaining the number and relevance of the vocabulary words introduced.”
[snip]
“In the later 1950s and early 1960s, Dick and Jane found themselves in troubled waters. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch struck out against look-say readers in his bestseller, Why Johnny Can’t Read. Flesch argued that the whole word method did not properly teach children how to read or to appreciate literature, because of its limited vocabulary and overly simplistic stories. Other phonics advocates in the 1960s echoed Flesch’s arguments, calling for new primers that focused on phonics and introduced students to real literature.”
Dick and Jane (with their limited vocabulary, abundance of sight words and pictures) were a product of the anti-phonics progressive education. Whole Language is another chapter in that tradition.
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I agree that there shouldn’t be this either/or approach to reading as Amy said. And also that there has to be some flexibility to deal with individual students, as Jo(e) said. Any rational outsider to this fight will agree on that.
The trouble is that we’re locked into an extreme debate by people who have professional reputations based on one system of learning and by people who have come to hate each other feverishly. When a reading curriculum is being imposed in a large city school system, the stakes are even higher. The trouble is that none of this is serving students very well.
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Here’s a question: what reading programs are being used most successfully in schools that serve mostly low-income children?
In all that I’ve read recently on the subject, the view that I find most absurd and disheartening was the one about how Whole Language (or Balanced Literacy, or whatever it’s called now) works for upper income kids, so it should be implemented for lower income children. That’s almost exactly backwards. With kids from prosperous families, we have absolutely no idea what is the deciding factor in their academic success. Is it school? Is it mom and dad reading to them? Is it mom and dad buying and using Hooked on Phonics or Teach Your Child to Read in 100 lessons? Is it mom and dad’s good example in reading a lot for work and personal pleasure? Is it the tutor? Is it the Kumon worksheets? There are potentially dozens of confounding factors, and who knows which is the deciding one. With poor children, I would think that it is considerably simpler to figure out what is working, because there aren’t as many outside academic inputs. In fact, school might be the only input.
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My two kids – middle to upper middle class educated parents, majority (but not overwhelmingly, we have a good number of free lunches) middle to upper middle class kids in their classes – are doing very nicely with what looks to be a mix of phonics and other techniques. My number 2 boy was struggling some until he found CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS which he totally loved and walked nose-in-book to the bus in the morning, had to be led because he was reading. Number 1 is reading Harry Potter, has been through 3 of them, has good memory of the plot line, who is betraying whom, the play-by-play of the Quidditch games, etc. So, success.
But I want to make more noise about: the most vulnerable kids are the ones who need phonics most. Those kids are not my kids. It is a betrayal of those kids for the Great And The Good to push whole language as a one size fits all for the schools serving the kids whose families least reinforce reading.
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The problem here is that for the last 15 years in Ontario we have only been able to use whole language readers (we must choose from the Ministry list). You can’t really teach a phonics based program with these because WL books throw all sorts of letter combos to kids who don’t know them and haven’t learned them. That goes against the basic principles of sequential & cumulative phonics reading program. We haven’t really had a reading war; its’ been a phonics massacre. We now have “balanced literacy’ but all the readers are still whole language. Ultimately, the reading material given to a student will define the methodology. We now have WL with phonics on the side. That’s not balanced at all.
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We have this controversy here in Australia too, but with a nuance – the whole language side insists they haven’t abandoned phonics, but use a combination of methods, but the phonics people insist that they are just pretending, and that phonics aren’t used seriously.
And the sides of the debate line up just the same way politically, too. The political side is a powerful insight in this post – I had been wondering why this was getting so much passionate attention from conservative commentators (think Ann Coulter equivalents), but this makes sense – it’s a microcosm of the whole philosophy of schools.
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Jennifer,
I believe that’s exactly the state of the thing in the US–as you said “the whole language side insists they haven’t abandoned phonics” while the “phonics people insist that…phonics aren’t used seriously.” In the New York story that Laura linked to (and I recommend reading the whole thing), phonics comes in, but pretty grudgingly and unsystematically. The article opens with a description of the method being used on a second grader. The instructor often has little Enami reading the pictures when she hits a word she doesn’t know (like “disappear”, which would be a good candidate for sounding out). Sad, sad, sad.
There’s really no way of knowing what’s going on without spending time in individual classrooms. Good teachers may be doing a lot of supplementing on the side, whatever the official curriculum is.
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Another thing that is crazy-making about the debate is the way that an idealized vision of whole language (cute little kids all joyfully reading real literature) is opposed to a picture of little phonics-bots sitting uncomfortably behind desks in rows, reading Dick and Jane (even though Dick and Jane was NOT a phonics text) and doing “drill and kill” without understanding what their lips are saying. Using phonics doesn’t mean using phonics to the exclusion of everything else.
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I’m a poster-child for the phonics people. I was always several grades ahead for the reading. I was way ahead in SRA. (remember SRA?) But I never learned how to spell. I think that everyone, regardless of the income level, should learn a little of it.
dave s, interesting point about using different teaching methods based on a school’s income level. That’s vaguely disturbing. I mean I can see teaching differently based on an individual child’s needs. One kid might thrive better with WL and another kid might need phonics. But to say that an entire school population based on their SES should learn in a more structured, rule based fashion is ethically wrong.
I just don’t see why kids can’t read fun books that interest them, while at the same time learning about the silent e. Captain Underpants for all.
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Laura,
Of course there’s absolutely no contradiction between learning a few simple rules and reading fun books–why should there be? This is what I was complaining about earlier–why the assumption that insisting on systematic phonics means only phonics?
By the way, just for all your readers at home, here’s a paragraph from one of the Captain Underpants books. It looks hard!
“After a hard day of cracking jokes, pulling pranks, and causing causing mayhem at school, George and Harold liked to rush to the old tree house in Harold’s backyard. Inside the tree house were two big old fluffy chairs, a table, a cupboard crammed with junk food, and a padlocked crate filled with pencils, pens, and stacks and stacks of paper.”
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I don’t want to keep beating a dead horse here, but it is a real straw man to assume that phonics and fun are mutually exclusive, and understood to be such by proponents.
I don’t know if they’re any good, but I’ve noticed that our local Barnes and Noble has a large display of phonics boxed sets using popular children’s series. I wasn’t able to find them on Amazon, but Amazon does sell a Clifford phonics CD-ROM, and I believe there’s also a version of it in book form.
(Incidentally, I haven’t been very impressed by what I’ve seen of kids’ educational software. It’s seemed really crude and poorly designed. Too bad.)
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I think the conservatives are absolutely right to see this as a thinly veiled attempt by liberal academics to undermine ideas about authority and impose their values.
I know very little about this debate, but I’ve spent plenty of time dealing with the communicative approach to foreign language instruction. It plays out exactly like this whole language approach.
In a nutshell, old methods are presented as mindless repetition of rules. Instead, student are not supposed to study grammar. They are supposed to concentrate on communicating. They are not to be corrected, because this might hurt their self-esteem. The point of learning a language is to gain cultural understanding. Any notion that studying grammar and the way a language works might be intellectually valuable or satisfying is completely dismissed.
The idea is that 20 year-old college students acquire a foreign language in the same way that a child does: by osmosis.
There is absolutely no debate about the method. Anyone who disagrees with the method is considered morally suspect. Your allegiance to the method will often be checked out in job interviews.
I was poking around on the internet for some scholarly articles about this, and it doesn’t take long to find scholars talking about the need to not project authority in the classroom because it’s oppressive and demoralizes students.
I have no doubt that the method does erode the authority of the professor. In fact, I was having some discipline problems with a few students this year. Mid-semester, I also decided to actually lecture and teach a few grammar point. It’s amazing how much better students started behaving when I took clear control of the class room for just part of the hour.
It’s also amazing how appreciative students are when you actually take the time to teach them the material they are expected to know. Imagine that.
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You wrote:
“One approach has faith in teachers, the other doesn’t.” — sounds like you’ve drunk the Whole Language koolaid.
Whole Language supporters have effectively framed the issue of using explicit instruction in sound-symbol correlation and knowledge of the underlying structure of English in teaching reading as being “conservative” or even fueled by religious fear.
A more explicit anti-phonics view was given by whole-language advocates in an article appearing in Education Week of Feb. 27, 1985:
By contrast to the heated political language engaged in by both sides, read what Louisa Cook Moates had to say in 1996:
Neither/Nor : Resolving the Debate between Whole Language and Phonics
(a transcript of a lecture given at the 1996 Washington summit conference on Learning Disabilities hosted by The National Center for Learning Disabilities, New York
And because of the dominance of the whole-language ideology in the schools of education, teachers are still not being taught how to teach reading.
There is a proposed curriculum, which you can read at LDOnline
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This is all very interesting to me. I haven’t met a another teacher here who thinks like I do, but 15 years ago I helped to start a Canadian org. to promote phonics. It is mostly made up of parents I think. It’s now called the Society for Quality Education. They put out a great little newsletter on line debuking all kinds of bogus edubabble. I spite of great determination and endless hammering at the Ministry, there have been no results. Disappointing. Now they are into independent schools as a last resort. As I live pretty much in the northern bush, it’s not likely this will come my way. So I’m not so into the group now.
Another contradiction with this issue is that WL proponents often say “children learn in different ways”. Do they? I’m not too sure about that. But supposing they do, then wouldn’t it make sense to have different methods available?
Has anyone followed the reforms in the UK?
Let me add that I just eat up all your comments. Music to my ears after too much silence.
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Liz,
That’s an excellent point in the article about the difficulty of the literate adult in understanding the struggles of the beginning reader. Reading is so easy for us now that we forget how we (nearly all of us) got where we are. As a capable adult reader, you see a word and immediately know it. It’s only when you encounter a completely unknown word (like a chemical compound) that you stop and slowly read left to right, syllable by syllable.
The political side of pedagogy is very unfortunate, and really clouds the issue. However, if I’m not mistaken, some of the biggest, loudest foes of classic “progressive education” are political liberals.
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Laura, you said: “..dave s, interesting point about using different teaching methods based on a school’s income level. That’s vaguely disturbing. I mean I can see teaching differently based on an individual child’s needs. One kid might thrive better with WL and another kid might need phonics. But to say that an entire school population based on their SES should learn in a more structured, rule based fashion is ethically wrong.” Now, I think I don’t buy that as an ethical stricture, and here is a quote from Abigail Thernstrom (Joanne Jacobs quoted her couple years ago) which goes to effectiveness – at least on teaching manners, not specifically for reading. Why do you think it’s not morally okay? Does it change your view if it is what works?
For that matter, I am having a hella time teaching my own little barbarians manners, could use some more help from school…
“(Successful inner-city) schools combat what Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson has called “the greatest problem now facing African Americans.” And that is “their isolation from the tacit norms of the dominant culture.” His statement is really the academic version of Bill Cosby’s recent remarks in which he talked about black parents who are not parenting and about kids who can’t speak standard English and who will be shut out of the world of economic success.
This is how the best inner-city schools I know address that “isolation from the tacit norms of the dominant culture.” In addition to an academically superb program, they demand that their students learn how to speak standard English. They also insist that kids show up on time, properly dressed; that they sit up straight at their desks, chairs pulled in, workbooks organized; that they never waste a minute in which they could be learning and always finish their homework; that they look at people to whom they are talking, listen to teachers with respect, treat classmates with equal civility, and shake hands with visitors to the school.
These are skills as essential as basic math. Without them, disadvantaged children cannot climb the ladder of economic opportunity.”
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Amy,
You wrote in brackets (nearly all of us). I’m interested in what you remember about learning to read, since you were an early bird. Any chance of a hearing a recollection? In the back of my head I am wondering about the notion “all kinds learn differently’. Maybe kids learn the same way, just faster.
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There’s a similar debate on the math side of the aisle. That one interests me more, perhaps because my relationship with math is more troubled. I guess I really don’t have an investment in the reading issue, one way or the other, having been a voracious reader my whole life and having children thus far who’ve picked up reading pretty fast. BTW, my oldest learned reading before kindegarten by playing a Clifford Reading CD-Rom game again and again and again. I would guess that’s phonics (and not a bad way to teach it, too, imo. It made repetitive recognition of words and sounds fun in a mindless computer game sort of way. Although she did have little comprehension, she could read books fairly fluently. The comprehension came later. Should that be the order?)
On the math side, though, I have doubts. I remember plenty of drilling with the times tables and the like through school. It seemed that everything was like that. I’m sure some of it has to be that way, but I wanted to know: WHY? Why is this important? What is it for? Maybe the problem was that I was learning by the drilling method after I was already sophisticated enough to want to know how all the little parts of what we learned went together. I would have preferred a more intellectually integrative form of math education, which is what seems to be more popular today, especially in high school. But there seems to be a political sub-group that attacks this vociferously, claiming that the important thing is that students memorize their times tables and learn the standard way of doing everything, even though things can be done different ways in math.
There is a part of me that thinks conceptual understanding gets lost in that shuffle.
But maybe this is just my learning style, which was inherited by my daughter, who learned her times tables so, so easily by the current methods of skip counting. She LOVES math. I never did, even though it was always understood that I was good at it.
There are so many ways to teach math, more it seems to me than reading. In graduate school I took a class in which we studied how–and WHY–mathematical methods and concepts were developed in ancient history, the Egyptians and the like. Now that made sense to me, although it’s mostly forgotten.
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Dave,
Your point about tacit norms is well taken and I agree. But we had an incident in a school here that is getting a lot of press. A little Philippino boy who ate his lunch using a spoon and fork, apparently the traditional way, was reprimanded and told by a supervisor that he was “eating like a pig”. He was made to eat alone. Maybe he was eating the traditional way, only badly, who knows. But the incident has generated a lot of letters. It’s obviously a sore spot.(There’s no doubt the supervisor needs a lesson in manners!) It seems to me that some behaviours, such as black American lingo, are identity emblems. This may not help with rising up the ladder, but do they want to do that?
Sorry for elbowing in like this. You folks have probably had dialogues for ages.
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Christina,
I’ve heard one or two stories about kids who loathed phonics and taught themselves to read without them, so I didn’t want to say that phonics are necessary for 100% of kids. But I am pretty sure that there’s no harm in trying phonics first.
I’ve lately been hearing more and more about kids who started school able to read, but that wasn’t me at all (of course, schools have traditionally discouraged parents from teaching kids to read before starting school). My dad read me chapter books at home (Annie Oakley’s thrilling adventures, plus Nancy Drew). My first grade teacher read us the Wizard of Oz and we did some phonics. Reading groups were fairly small (probably ten or so kids or even less) and we sat at a round table. I recall our teacher teaching us sight words like “was” and “saw” with flash cards. My first big breakthrough was, I believe, on a long car trip, when I’d been given some Donald Duck comics. I think I also read one of the Moomintroll books as a first grader. By second grade, I was reading the Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, and Watership Down (the last at the suggestion of my teacher). I read very few of the books that are intended to help kids start reading. I wasn’t an early reader, but I really took off fast once I did.
Of course, there is some danger in generalizing from the experience of kids who found learning to read simple.
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Lisa,
Reading methodology does get a lot more attention than math (maybe because more parents are comfortable with reading). To make up for that, we have the good ladies at kitchentablemath.net, a site which I have been raving about to whoever will listen for the past week. It took me almost a week to read/skim through the archives, but it was so informative and suspenseful, too.
Incidentally, I have unpleasant memories of elementary school math–page after page of worksheets, with the problems just getting longer and longer as time went by. Yuck!
Christina,
I think the goal of the school should be to equip the student to be able to switch between dialects at will, according to intended audience.
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What I find most distressing in this whole debate is the trend to greater oversight and control from above: so that we end up with THE ONE WAY TO TEACH THIS SUBJECT AND ANY DEVIATION WILL BE PUNISHED approach. And there are reports. And commissions. And politico-posturings. And arm-waving. And finger-waggling.
What we lose is the ability for individual boards, schools, teachers and parents to devise solutions that work best for the students in their particular situation. That is, short of something like an IEP and a special needs system which, again, is so institutionalized and regimented as to resist individuation!
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Amy — I didn’t mean to imply that phonics couldn’t be fun. I was merely referring the rhetoric surrounding these methods. Even the phonics people don’t use the word “fun” all that much. They use the words “structure” and “memorization” and “rules” much more often.
But that’s my problem with this whole thing. It has become too ideological.
re: how kids learn to read. I’m watching my youngest teach himself how to read. I’m doing nothing about this, except watching. He naturally does both WL and phonics. He makes me tell him the “words sounds” of words he points out to me. He also does try to sound out some words. Usually he’ll get the first syllable right, but he’ll guess at the rest.
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Thanks for that info about your son, Laura.
It seems we all agree that imposing a mandated method is not going to get us anywhere. I was asounded to see a discusion on TV from the UK debating synthetic and analytic phonics. It seems that even the synthetic phonics believers are worried that Rose’s plan to mandate synthetic phonics will backfire.
We now know that phonics advocates need to take the inclusive path, so they can identify themselves positively from the exclusive WL dogma. (When I can use a phonics-based prgram with WL on the side, I will accept “balanced literacy”.) However, that said, I have been dogging our various Ministers with that line for 16 years now to no avail.
Canada seems to send every Minister, his entourage and extended family abroad to study goodness knows what. Why do you think the UK experience has not spread out across the oceans?
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Laura,
By the way, I was just looking at the end of your post, and noticed that your description of the differences between the Whole Language and Phonics is somewhat contradictory.
“One approach sees education as a science, the other sees it as an art. One puts value on the educational experts, the other sees them as quacks and prefers control by elected officials.”
If “education as a science” refers to the Phonics people and education as “art” refers to the Whole Language people,
then which of the two thinks that educational experts are quacks? Is it the Whole Language people, or the Phonics crowd? I would think that both sides have their preferred educational experts, lined up in battle array, and both would dismiss the opposing experts as quacks.
Another small quibble–I would argue that rules have a lot to do with fun, since it is impossible to play a game and enjoy it without them. Furthermore, games have structures–baseball diamonds, basketball hoops, chess boards etc. So, the words “rules” and “structures” should not scare us off. Memorization is another scary concept, but I would argue that it really doesn’t need to be frightening. There is pleasure in knowing and learning, a sort of sensuous joy in the alphabet, the multiplication table, or the conjugation of a French verb.
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My father taught me to read when I was three, using phonics (or as he called it, “sounding out words”), but the books we used were my mom’s old readers from her Catholic school childhood. The stories were interesting to me. So I don’t see the dichotomy between learning to decode words with phonics, yet reading for meaning and pleasure at the same time. I went to school knowing how to read, and was lucky (in the days of Dick, Jane and Spot) to have a teacher, a nun, who let me sit in the back by the bookcase and read silently while the mind-numbing three word stories were read by my unfortunate colleagues. Instead I read stirring and gory tales of the lives of the saints! Today, these would be pulled from the library shelves!
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Many thanks cafl. Whenever I ask early-bird readers what they remember they always come back to phonics. No one says whole language. Makes me even more suspicious about this “every child learns differently” theory.
I am looking to get some more ideas on teaching beginning math. I’ve been working on simplifying things to their absolute basics.(like phonics is to reading) Can’t find a site. I checked out the kitchenmath site. Wow. These folks are wizards. Don’t think I want to ask about how they would teach basic addition to kids with very very weak “math sense”.
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Catherine Johnson of kitchentablemath.net is amazing and inspiring (she has a less active co-blogger named Carolyn Johnston who is a math PHD). I have no idea how she finds the hours in the day to read just about every worthwhile book there is on education, distill their wisdom for her blog, do pages of math problems, reteach her son at home, volunteer teach an enrichment math program, and still have time to be a “mom from hell” at school, let alone do all the other things that a working mother of three boys has to do. If you can believe it, Catherine at some point signed herself up at her local Kumon center along with her kid, was tested to find her level, and started in 4th grade math!
For me as the mother of a nearly 4-year-old and a one-year-old who has been thinking vaguely of the kids’ going off to school as my vacation, Kitchen Table Math has been a huge eye-opener. School is going to be a lot of work.
My personal suggestion for how to distill the beginnings of math would be to start with Kumon’s workbooks for preschoolers and go from there. You can get them from Amazon.
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Amy — It is possible to make a science out of an art, which is actually more scary, because that means that there is something mysterious involved. Something that needs special training not found in books, but only learned at special teacher schools. (You understand that I’m just decoding rhetoric and not subscribing to this thought.)
Sure, rules can be fun, but this is not how the phonics people are selling things. They are appealing to a more conservative audience that believes that children have had way too much fun in schools and that they need more structure.
Sorry, it always comes down to politics for me. I’m most interested in who is waging these wars, why, how are they selling things, and who benefits. For me, it is a no brainer that multiple approaches are good for kids. Sadly, I have little useful to say on the subject beyond that point, so I’m more inclined to pick apart the war.
(dave, good comments. I’m shelving my response for a while, until I can think of a concise way to sum up my point. )
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I’m fascinated by the fact that nobody is commenting from the perspective of teachers. What makes me insane about this debate is that every good teacher I know–and I know a lot, starting with my sister, who is one of the best–does both. To teachers, it is quite obvious that you need to engage and empower kids with books that interest them AND you need to give them decoding skills, and while sometimes you do one and sometimes the other, often you do both: “sound out the first letter. what other sounds can you see in that word? what was the previous word? look at the picture. do you see anything that starts with that sound?” etc. It is absolutely scandalous that the education debate in this country keeps ending up being between the “Diane Ravitches” and the “Teachers College professionals,” not to mention the businesspeople who appear, somehow, to be education experts these days, while teachers, actual, practicing teachers, are almost always left out.
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Becca,
There are a couple of real live teachers on this thread.
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(God, I got out of bed to make this comment. Really sad.) I agree, Becca. This debate has become all about politics and not about reality. These two extreme forms of thought have created this false choice. Parents and teachers have a more realistic approach which encompasses both phonics and WL, but politicians, administrators, and experts who make the real decisions have got their feud going on and are making a real mess of things. They aren’t really fighting about reading methods; they are fighting about their views about schools and democracy.
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I am a liberal, but I favor phonics. I don’t understand how this has gotten politicied, but the studies say phonics works better.
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Amy,
I am quite familiar with Kitchen Table Math. I’ve been reading it for months. And while I admire their passion and curiosity, and their efforts on behalf of their children, I just am not sure they are right. I am not sure the people who are attacking the new-new math are right. As Laura is pointing out, there is some politics going on here, and politics can make people irrationally and overemotionally invested in their point of view. The way the opponents of the new math excoriate the NCTM (the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics)is a bit too much for me.
And I should add that I am not mathy myself, but I have access to mathy people who give me their point of view. My husband has no interest in this debate (the man never read a blog in his life and stays out of politics: as Emerson? Thoreau? said, he is interested not in the Times but the eternities), but he is a overly-educated math teacher at an extremely elite private school, one of those old schoolers who never took an education course and is highly educated in his subject. He tells me that NCTM has its limitations, but they and their standards are not the cause of students’ math problems. He tells me that it is good that math education is becoming more conceptual and less rote, and that many students today (at elite institutions, mind) are WAY ahead of where we were back in the 80s. More than one year ahead. Know much more than he did, as an excellent advanced math student who went on to major in math and attend math graduate school, when he entered college. So the new methods are not hurting these students.
Maybe they don’t work for everyone, but I’m not sure. It makes sense that conceptual understanding would make it easier to memorize; don’t we all know that from our experience? I find it much easier to memorize something that makes sense to me, and fits into some theory or picture of the world, than a random set of facts. Some students have problems with conceptual understanding (I teach college logic, so I understand that side of math, and I have many students who dislike math. My students are not nearly as elite as my husband’s), and I’m not sure what the answer is for them, but I just don’t think that rejecting all the new stuff that is going on in favor of rote memorization is the answer. It might give them some modicum of understanding, but without the conceptual understanding they don’t really know math. Still, what can be learned through brute computation and memory is obviously better than nothing.
For example, regarding calculators, he would say that they are not good in elementary school (my daughter has never used one in school, though she likes to play with them on her own), but necessary in higher math. Otherwise you spend all your time making mindless calculations, and less time learning the conceptual underpinnings of math.
Also, I wouldn’t assume that homework will be difficult for your children, just because it is for someone else’s. That seems to assume that the schools are intractably bad, which is something I just don’t agree with. The only thing I do is tell my daughter she should get it done. That’s it. I know I’m lucky, and my daughter is a very school-y kid. We also have a great school. But though I push her to read in the summer, and my husband plays chess with her, and we talk at the dinner table, I’ve never done workbooks with her outside of her schoolwork. My form of homeschooling is to introduce her to all the FUN STUFF.
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Anybody who has chewed on all this and wants MORE can find it at:
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Becca writes “you need to engage and empower kids with books that interest them AND …(phonics)” as though this is the Whole language part of a reading program. This is totally untrue. This is an argument conjured up and perpetuated by whole language propogandists. Let me explain. In the late eighties and nineties I taught first grade and scrounged up copies of an out of print phonics-based reading program (Language Patterns pub. by Holt Reinhart). I couldn’t make sense of the whole language readers I had been given. (Impressions – Holt Reinhart and Expressways by Gage)I had many many books in the classroom. This was recommended in the preamble of every teacher’s guide in Lang. Pat.
This myth has perpetuated because there seems to be very few phonics hold-outs (teachers) like me who are vocal and the readers are long gone into dumpsters and third world countries. Younger teachers have very little evidence available to really understand what went on.
I tried using both WL and Phonics together by using both kinds of texts. The result was not good for the kids. (Of course there was always a little group of early birds who ate up everything) But too many kids were getting confused. They’d try to sound out the WL texts, applying all short vowels ex, k-i-t-e (we hadn’t got to long vowels yet), and then search the pictures of the phonics text and guess using the first letter. Eventually I abandoned these WL texts and folowed my phonics readers, supplementing the program with phonics booklets and as many of the delightful childrens books (trade books) as i could get my hands on.
Phonics teachers were brutally persecuted by WL advocates. Lots of older teachers coldn’t take it and retreated quietly into their classrooms just waiting to retire. That kind of persecution still exists today, I hate to say. Politicians were oblivious to the whole mess.
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piling on:
http://www.joannejacobs.com/mtarchives/016316.html
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I’m not impresed with the phonics approach because I don’t think that an auditory representation of the written word is what we really WANT when we read. I think that teaching people to sound out words leads to being able to read no faster than one can speak.
In English, many of the “hard words” can only be decoded by following rules about sounds if you already know the answer. My first grader stumbles on “though” and “thought,” for instance. Yet that’s only an issue for the artifical task of reading aloud–she would never mistake their meanings.
I am sure that I do not make any effort to map out a possible pronunciation for unfamiliar words. I simply assign them a meaning based on context. I’m sure of this because I have noticed that I don’t assign a pronunciation for bizarre proper names, and because I can enjoy reading French despite barely being able to speak or understand it.
I am not sure that I read the same way that other people read, though. I know that I read 2-3x faster than people with similar SAT scores, for instance. I also know that my mother, who is now a reading specialist, did a “study” in college using me as a subject (for convenience) at the age of about 8 and got what her professors considered bizarre results.
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Shamhat,
It’s a lot easier to figure out the irregular words if you can sound out most the others. Every approach needs to have “sight words” due to the nature of the English language.
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What are some basic math “concepts” even before addition/subtraction? Understanding a number line – distances not dots? odd & even numbers? This is stuff some kids don’t know in grade 4!!!!
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I think that the learning methods of freaky smart kids aren’t very useful in helping us to figure out how to teach the other kids.
Incidentally, a close personal associate has two PHDs, one of them in math (probability, specifically) and has an extremely shaky grasp of the multiplication table. Make of that what you will…My personal belief is that he would not have functioned very well in any field requiring accurate computation.
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Shamhat,
You can get away with your reading method in a closely related language like French. I wouldn’t recommend it for any more exotic language, or if you want to use reading to improve your spoken vocabulary.
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What are VERY basic math “concepts” before addition/subraction? Number lines represent distances not just dots? odd & even numbers? Why we use place value? I have kids in grade 4 who don’t know this stuff! What else might they not know that I might not know they don’t know? Yikes.
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Lisa,
Here’s a question: Are we sure that those elite college kids who are so brilliant at math are necessarily getting it from their public school instruction? Don’t we have to factor in their parents’ homework help, their Kumon worksheets, their private tutors, etc. Also, plenty of them don’t go to public schools, or go to some special magnet school. With elite kids, it’s tough to figure out which factors are most important.
I’m not a math person or from the upper middle class milieu, but my life now would be considerably less comfortable if my father (a math MA) had not seen me through two hours of math homework every night when I was a highschool student.
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Amy–
I am referring to elite high school students, not elite college students. My husband teaches in a private high school. As far as I know, the parents are not coaching the students in calculus. I doubt most of them could do so. And for the price they pay, I think most of them would be upset if they had to supplement their children’s instruction in calculus at home. And my husband is the tutor. Private school teachers are expected to provide tutoring time during the day to students who need extra help.
What are such schools offering that other schools are not? That’s the key question. Of course the schools are elite. Are they elite–and do they succeed–because they offer more rote memorization? Even at the pre-high school stage (as most of these institutions have a lower school and upper school)? That is not my husband’s view, and he has worked with at least one stellar, very experienced calculus teacher virtually almost all of whose students achieved 5 on the AP exam.
Or do they succeed because they hire talent that can teach at a very high conceptual level?
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Being educated as a physicist and having taken lots of math, though I don’t work as one, I assisted the math teacher in my kids’ 7-8 classroom. My observation is that sometimes math averse elementary school teachers jump on the bandwagon of understanding concepts and less rote learning in an ill-informed way. For example, having not mastered problem solving techniques themselves, they simply reduce the repetition and memorization, throw in a big dose of calculator use (“In the technological world, we don’t have to spend time on long division”), and never teach the kids the elementary math they need to move up to algebra.
It is very important to have a basic grasp of number facts or kids can’t factor, can’t see patterns in number sequences, and can’t simplify algebraic expressions. If they haven’t mastered ratios and proportions and if they haven’t learned how to tackle word problems, they will be unable to set up equations to solve algebraic problems.
I agree with Lisa’s husband that the advanced kids in high school today are more advanced than those of us who were math and science lovers in high school in the 60s. I do think that there are a lot of kids who never make it through algebra successfully because they were not expected to master fractions, place value of decimals, percentages, ratios and proportions, basic geometrical formulas and especially the word problems relating to all these things.
Finally, I think too many Americans, including especially the moms I have known, think math is some kind of freak talent that you either have or don’t have, instead of realizing it is something most of us can master with application and practice. One of the boys I tutored was a good basketball player, a smart young man and self-described as terrible at math. I asked him how long he practiced basketball every day — “a couple of hours.” I asked him what he would say to a friend claiming to be unable to play basketball, but who never went out and shot any hoops. “You can’t play basketball without practicing!” he said with quite a bit of consternation. “Well, neither can you do math without practicing.” He got this, and I am happy to say he came to me at 8th grade graduation and thanked me for showing him that he could do math. So I don’t think it’s about worksheets to drill millions of bare arithmetic problems. But I do think it is about practicing problem solving, and mastering all the mechanical building blocks adequately as you create a scaffolding that allows you to attempt more and more complex mathematics.
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This is a funny thread. Like is there someone here who is an expert? Or is being a mother enough to “know best” how to teach all kids to read?
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AAmom, Who are the experts is a very good question.
Researchers? Ken Goodman and his now discredited “research” made us mistrust this group of experts.
Teachers? The manner in which teachers blindly accepted whole language while legions of kids failed to read made us mistrust this bunch.
Parents? Those whose kids had no trouble reading took up the WL banner in droves and forgot about the unfortunates.
And then there are those self-appinted experts who base their knowledge on their own school experiences.
Personally, I’m keeping a close eye on the reforms in the UK. They seem to be leading the pack in ending the reading wars.
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