Re: Math Skills Survey Shows U.S. Lags Behind
Message #17 Posted by James M. Prange on 11 Dec 2004, 4:29 p.m.,
in response to message #11 by Ren
I do wish that all married couples would fully honour all of their
marriage vows, stick together, and live happily ever after (or
until death parts them, whichever comes first), but sometimes one
or the other or both parties fail to honour the solemn contract.
When they can't (or won't) work things out, it sometimes seems
better for all concerned if they go their separate ways.
I can't blame someone who lives up to the marriage promises, but
has a spouse who doesn't. Nor can I attach too much blame to
someone who made the wrong choice as a young adult and married
someone who wasn't deserving of it. But I do think that it would
be best to consider long, carefully, and realistically before
saying "I do." Every person is always changing, whether we like it
or not, and not always in the ways that we'd prefer. Getting
divorced is usually a lot more expensive than getting married in
all ways except paying for the celebration.
Being single and childless, it's easy enough for me to criticise
someone else's marriage or children. "If that were my kid...."
Yeah, sure, we'd all raise perfect children, wouldn't we? And of
course, if I were married, my wife would be perfect, which perhaps
explains why I'm single. Or maybe it's more that any wife of mine
would prefer a perfect (or at least tolerably good) husband.
But regarding the school systems, I'm sometimes amazed. For
example, at least locally, they insist that youngsters must learn
to read without "sounding out" new words; supposedly, the only
right way to read is "sight reading", where you recognise a
particular pattern of printed letters as being a particular word.
Okay, in fact, that's exactly how I read, for words that I already
know. But for new words (and there are still some new words for
me, even at my age), I still "sound them out", although silently.
How else am I supposed to learn them in the first place? Aren't we
supposed to reason out how a word sounds, not just that a word
that has a particular appearance has a particular meaning? I at
least assign a provisional sound until I have a chance to look it
up in a dictionary to find out how it really sounds in actual
usage (or maybe how the editors guess that it would sound). I
thought that the idea was that a particular sequence of letters
should sound (well, more or less) a particular way.
But no, it seems as if the school system thinks that letters,
letter groups, and letter patterns aren't supposed to have any
sounds or sound rules associated with them until they make up a
complete word, that a particular random and arbitrary sequence of
letters should be associated with a particular sequence of sounds
known as a word, to be somehow memorized. To be sure, often the
spelling of a word seems somewhat arbitrary in relation to its
current pronunciation, but it's certainly not random. Have these
people all lost their minds?
These days, it seems that "phonics" has nothing to do with letters
and sounds, but rather "how are these little pictures different"
and "how are these little pictures alike". Okay, I realize that
recognizing that p, q, b, and d are different although in some
ways they look alike, and that the same letter may look a little
different depending on the typeface, are indeed important for
learning to read, but I think that they've gotten a bit off-track
with pictures of dogs, cows, bushes, and trees, to the exclusion
of letters and sounds.
So we teach the kids at home, saying "try to sound it out, now",
and "what sound does the letter 'ennn...' make", for example, and
when they say "but we're not supposed to do it that way", we
assure them that that's exactly how they're supposed to do it,
until they've learned the word, except silently instead of out
loud at school.
I can't help feeling that the reading program at school does a lot
more harm than good. I expect that some children are being taught
by the school system to hate reading. What is more helpful to
learning other things than being able to read well? The thought
that very likely some children don't get much (if any) help at
home with learning to read is frightening.
Parents complain, relatives complain, professional tutors
complain, private remedial school staff complain, but the school
system won't change that policy; after all, they're professional
educators, so they always know better than anyone else how to
educate. We should all just mind our own business, and not stick
our noses into the wonderful modern methods that they're using to
teach the children.
Well, at least it provides employment opportunities for tutors and
business for private remedial schools. I often feel as if I may as
well be flushing the school district tax money down the commode.
The situation with mathematics and science education may leave an
awful lot to be desired, but to me, basic literacy seems a much
bigger concern. How much are they going to learn if they can't
read their textbooks well?
How much of our knowledge is gained from personal experience and
experimentation, compared to what we've read? To be sure,
experience may well be the best teacher, but it's sometimes a
painful way to learn something, and it's relatively slow. I trust
an experiment that I've done myself a lot farther than I trust
anything that I've ever read, but I don't have the time or
equipment to test everything experimentally, so more often I just
take what I read from a (more or less) trusted source as probably
true, unless I have reason to believe otherwise. Many experiments
would never occur to me if I hadn't read something to suggest
them.
I'm certainly thankful that when I was learning to read, phonics
(with actual letters and sounds) came first. What letters and
groups of letters sounded like, how some letters determined which
particular sound some other letters represented, all sorts of
useful rules, and that rules always had exceptions. That went
together with learning to read about all the namby-pamby things
that those city slicker kids, Dick and Jane, baby sister Sally,
and their oh-so-cute little pets Spot and Puff, were up to.
I'm sure glad that there were more interesting things available to
read, but we certainly did have a lot of fun with Dick and Jane.
We usually all got a good laugh out of Dick and Jane, and
especially with the ad-libbing and sometimes acting that we loved
to do when Sister was busy with another group. Sometimes we had
that happy little family doing and saying some outrageous (but
perhaps more realistic) things, occasionally using words that
definitely weren't supposed to be in our vocabularies.
"Puff saw some funny things."
Dick fell off of the tin roof on the shed into the honey wagon.
Dick did not seem happy. Dick's mouth was full of manure. Dick
cried, "Manure, manure, manure!" Puff saw this from the haymow,
and laughed because it seemed so funny. Puff laughed, "Meow,
meow, meow!" Jane came to help Dick, but Jane fell in too.
Jane cried, "Help, help, help!" Sally came to help, but Sally's
barn boots stuck in the manure pile. Sally walked out of her
barn boots, so Spot came to help. Spot licked Sally's feet
clean. Spot barked, "Good, good, good!" Sally cried, "Help,
help, help!" Sally fell down. Spot licked Sally's hands clean
too. Spot barked more, "Good, good, good!" Sally cried more,
"Help, help, help!" It all seemed so funny to Puff. Puff
laughed and laughed, "Meow, meow, meow, meow!" Jane cried more,
"Help, help, help!" Father came to help. It all seemed funny
to Father, but Father did not laugh. Father cried, "I will fix
it all!". Father fixed it all, but Mother did not seem too
happy. It did not seem funny to Mother at all. Jane said "Thank
you, thank you, thank you!" Spot barked "Ow, ow, ow, ow!" Sally
said "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" Dick said, "Manure,
manure, manure!" Mother did not laugh. Mother cried, "Shame,
shame, shame!" Mother washed Dick's mouth clean. Dick cried,
"Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch!" Father was happy that he did not
laugh. Puff fell asleep in the haymow. Puff had happy dreams
about funny things. Puff had a good day.
Well, Sister Michael Marie never seemed to get a laugh out of our
little dramas, but I'd never imagined that she'd ever laughed in
her entire life. I'm not at all sure that I quite realized that
she'd once been a little girl, or anything except an awesomely
tall nun. Maybe she grew up in Dick and Jane's neighbourhood, and
had no idea that there were children like us. Now, I suppose that
either she was laughing as soon as she got inside of the convent,
or else she cried herself to sleep every night; we must've been
quite a learning experience as her very first class. I do hope
that she's developed into a sweet old lady instead of a horrible
old crab. She did manage to teach all 48 of us quite a lot (or
maybe we learned even more from each other), even though she
wasn't able to teach us to urinate strictly as scheduled, whether
we felt even the faintest urge to do so or not. I suspect that
that may well have been what she tried the hardest to teach us (it
sure seemed to be). But she had a good point there too; being able
to urinate even when the urge isn't felt turns out to be a very
useful skill, especially when there won't be a convenient
opportunity to do it again for quite a long time.
Regards,
James
Edited: 11 Dec 2004, 4:52 p.m.
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