Wednesday, December 23, 2009
Automaticity is a Myth
I argue that this claim is sort of a sick joke, like telling all children, "You must learn to dunk the ball." I've just finished a thorough analysis of this issue for Improve-Education.org. Here's how the piece startsDuring the last dozen years the Education Establishment has stepped back from Whole Word, or pretended to, and retreated to a mixed-bag approach called Balanced Literacy. This is the official position in many public schools. In this shift to Balanced Literacy, the Education Establishment pretends there is much greater emphasis on phonics. Isn’t that progress? In fact, this claim is often a lie.
The boy and hung
State standards operate under the assumption that most people don't know what their kids need to learn, nor how well they have to learn it. That's why the State thinks it has to set standards for every school.
But I think every parent knows this much - their child needs to be able to read and enjoy it, and be able to do all the simple operations of arithmetic in their sleep, and to be able to write to express themselves to their own and their reader's satisfaction.
Those are the Three Rs - Reading, 'Riting, and 'Rithmetic. Anyone who thinks their child doesn't need to do all three well, is welcome in School Hell. Fortunately, parents like that are few and far between.
In School Hell, though, state standards can mess with the Three Rs. Popular modern "curriculums" can tell you that basic arithmetical skills are not necessary, because kids can use calculators. Word processors can give children the feeling that skill at spelling and grammar are something a machine can do for them. Video games, programs that read books to children, etc. can lull administrators into thinking that if children are "exposed" to books, that is as good as children being able to read well for enjoyment.
Wouldn't it be better if the child just loved to read and was constantly picking out his or her own books to read for enjoyment?
When I was in Junior High, I had a psycho-nazi teacher from hell who gave us a summer reading list. She said we could just pick out a certain number of the books on the list and do reports on them. I noticed that none of the Tolkien books were on the list. (This was at the end of the sixties, and it was the first wave of mass popularity of "The Lord of the Rings" in the U.S.)
Having just finished "The Hobbit", I asked if I could exchange one of the books on the list for "The Fellowship of the Ring."
It was as if I were Oliver Twist asking for "more," only she didn't throw a ladle at me. But it was forbidden. Now why on earth would a teacher forbid a child to show initiative? Why couldn't I exchange "The Fellowship of the Ring" for, say, "Charlotte's Web"? We'd had that book read to us probably three times in grade school. It wasn't like I was trying to weasel out of reading something on the list. I would have read all of them, just to be able to present a book-report on something by Tolkien. None of my classmates had read him yet, but lots of them loved to hear me tell them about "The Hobbit."
Here was a kid dying to turn his classmates on to something fine, but the teacher was ready to report him and send him off to Mr. Bumble.
Looking back in the distance (this was almost forty years ago) (sigh), could it have been that the teacher just hadn't read Tolkien, and was afraid of facing something in her classroom that she didn't have total control over? That's my theory, anyway.
