Reading Wars
What bothers me about the Reading Wars is that they are political, not educational. Politicians empanel scientists to validate their beliefs about which methods are or are not effective, and then impose their views on teachers and students in the interests of what they claim to be a social need.
[link to Reading War article from Se Hace Camino Al Andar]
I thought we were over the discussion about whether phonics or whole language was the best way to teach reading. I thought the Republican, test-crazed, right had sealed the deal and ended the war, leaving only a few isolated pockets of the sociopsycholinguistic insurgency to support the alternative view of literacy as an active construction of meaning, as opposed to a view of knowledge as a received commodity. Check out this speech by James Boggs in 1977. An excerpt:
Every day it is becoming more painful for us to cope with the deterioration of our society because we continue to believe in concepts that were created by people at another state of history for completely different purposes - for example, in this case the concept of education to get a job which was begun in the late 19th Century as the Industrial Revolution was speeding up. Now we have come full-circle on the concept of education. Not only do we believe that education is something like money in the bank that you go to school and get, but we have lost touch with our own reality because we believe that what was true at one time in history remains true for all time…
[link to Boggs speech found a couple of links beyond a post by Brad Hoge.]
We need to keep speaking for ourselves. Somebody may eventually listen.
I should be happy that New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg mandated Balanced Literacy, because it reflects my own philosophical biases about what literacy is and must be for students to gain a critical purchase on the meanings they construct. Meaning is always constructed, whether we intend it to be or not. I think the meaning that’s in question here is the definition of reading itself. But I’m bothered that it is a political answer to a question of pedagogy.
We need to recognize that whether we like it or not, reading is political. It’s political in Australia. It’s political in the UK. It’s political in Egypt. I have to agree with Morag Fraser:
So much education policy…is driven by expediency, ideology or professional enthusiasm without empirical warrant. I don’t want to see any more accommodation of vested interest or political power games in research into teaching reading. But I do, desperately, want to know what works.
And to that I would only add that I want to know what works for me and my students. I can only know that by paying attention to what happens in my own classroom every day, and having the chance to make adjustments to what and how I teach. Resources, training, and the freedom to put them to use are the critical needs that teachers have.
Liz wrote,
Hi from California. Here’s a thought–you cannot teach what you do not know. And if in the process of becoming a teacher, you aren’t taught the fundamentals of language, you can’t respond effectively to your students’ difficulties and mistakes.
Louisa Cook Moats wrote “The Missing Foundation in Teacher Education” in 1999. (You can read the whole thing here:
http://www.greenwoodinstitute.org/resources/resmiss.html
The results of this survey indicate that teachers who are literate and experienced generally have an insufficient grasp of spoken and written language structure and would be unable to teach it explicitly to either beginning readers or those with reading/spelling disabilities. Teachers commonly are misinformed about the differences between speech and print and about how print represents speech. Before elaborating on the importance of this knowledge for instruction, we should ask, why do such wide gaps in teachers’ background knowledge exist?
The absence of previous coursework, although an obvious explanation, does not fully explain this phenomenon. First, there is evidence (Lindamood 1993) that complete and explicit awareness of phonemes in syllables is an underdeveloped metalinguistic skill in many people although they have learned to read. Lindamood also reported that those individuals who have trouble comparing the speech sounds in words tend to be thse who are below average on tests of spelling ability. Thus, many average adults may have acquired linguistic awareness sufficient for basic reading though not sufficient to teach reading and spelling elements explicitly to children. Lindamood, and others, suggest that phonological analysis skill may be distributed normally, like many other language abilities. This variation, presumed to be intrinsic, appears to be relatively independent of intelligence.
In addition, many adults, even experienced teachers of reading and writing, conceptualize words in their written rather than their spoken form unless they are taught to pay attention specifically to speech sound structure. For example, when asked to count speech sounds in known words, they will count letters rather than phonemes ( e.g. yellow will be viewed as having six speech sounds). Explicit phonemic awareness in many adults may even be limited because of their knowledge of print. Childrn who are first learning the alphabetic principle show in their creative spellings the capacity to analyze words phonetically (e.g., they will spell dragon as JRAGN and use as YUZ.) (Treiman 1993). However, as they become familiar with print and as decoding becomes more automatic, children begin to judge what sounds are in words by their letters. Ehri (1984) showed that fourth graders are beginning to store words in their lexicons (mental dictionaries) as orthographic or written images. Once they could read, Ehri’s elementary school subjects believed there is an extra /t/ in ditch that is not present in rich, although only the initial consonants differ in these words. The adults surveyed in this study made similar judgment errors. They needed formal instruction and many examples to think beyond print while analyzing speech. Time and practice were needed to grasp concepts such as the identity of speech sounds, the nature of sound-symbol correspondence, the existence of minimally contrasting pairs of words in English (rich-ridge), historical changes in English spelling and pronunciation, and the organization of the English spelling system.
Again, you can read the whole thing here:
http://www.greenwoodinstitute.org/resources/resmiss.html
One of my quarrels with whole language ideology is the underlying assumption that learning to read is “hard wired” into the human brain — all you need is exposure to good literature. That assumption is demonstratably false.
Link | April 27th, 2006 at 8:39 am
Brad Hoge wrote,
I think we all cringed when Bush placed reading ability at the forefront of NCLB, not because anyone dissagrees that reading is “fundamental” but rather because we knew the emphasis and implementation would be wrong. Like many other trends, we are going in the wrong direction. We must remain steadfast in our “professional” assertion of quality teaching practices, however, if we are to bring public education into the 20th (oh, snap, I mean 21st) century. In the meantime, spoken word poetry is a creative way to spice up ANY topic, which can address the multiple skills needed to fully develop language. It may just pass under the radar of most conservative minds, as well, and be tolerated as a “clever” gimmick.
Link | April 27th, 2006 at 9:13 am
Doug wrote,
Without meaning to fan smoldering embers of the Reading Wars, I may have done just that with this post. My point was intended to be about the tendency of politicians to see education problems as a political condition, and to seek remedies for educational problems through political means. Often this involves mandating teaching methods that are somehow perceived to be in the best interests of everyone.
That said, Liz, you weighed in with some commentary that I need to respond to. First of all, you reminded me that we should think about the ways in which every decision we make in our classrooms simultaneously favors some and disadvantages others. One of the great challenges of teaching students from a broad range of experiential backgrounds is that they all don’t respond similarly to instruction. It doesn’t matter if we’re teaching phonemic awareness, or chinese calligraphy, some may thrive while others chafe. In light of that, teachers need to remain flexible and resist dogmatic attachments to methods and theories that they recognize to be ineffective.
Your apparent endorsement of phonemic awareness, which at the same time indicts teachers for failures due to lack of training in the subtleties of graphophonemic analysis, sounds like a prescription for a complex problem that is looking for a simple solution. Louisa Cook Moats overstated her argument in the article you quoted, and in the next breath she recoils with more temperate language. “It is known, beyond doubt,” Moats argued, “that degree of awareness of the phonological structure of words is the best predictor of a child’s subsequent reading success,” yet in the next sentence she moderates the inference that this skill is teachable, and that intervention with phonemic analysis will inevitably lead to reading success, as she stepped back and reported only “promising developments” in early intervention research.
The research findings and the claims made about the efficacy of explicit training in phonemic awareness are misleading because nowhere has causation been demonstrated. What we know is that there is a correlation between the results of standardized tests and measures of phonemic awareness, which, as Weaver said, is as unremarkable as saying that bread and butter go together (Constance Weaver, 1994).
I’m not going to debate the point beyond saying that we can trade and refute research studies like bible passages all day, and get nowhere, because our differences are ideological, and not based on objective truth, despite the faith you may have in allegedly objective, research-based findings. To resolve these differences we’d need to find common ground and work forward from there. I don’t think I have the time or the will to fight this war.
When we get to the bottom of your post, though, we can see that you may not be as interested in phonemic awareness or teacher training as I first assumed. It sounds like you may be merely ginding an ax against whole-language, an orientation to education which you appear not to completely grasp. If in referring to “whole-language ideology” you intend to discredit whole language theory as being merely a belief, and therefore illegitimate as an approach to literacy instruction, you ignore the fact that all instructional decision-making is rooted in ideology. Whole language practitioners are open about their philosophical leanings. Advocates for “research-based” instructional methods are not as forthcoming about the ideological assumptions they make since they apparently think that science is ideologically neutral, which it isn’t. To claim that whole language teachers believe that learning to read is “hard-wired” into the human brain and that all you need is is exposure to good literature, is to engage in the rhetorical ruse of holding up a straw man so that you can easily knock it down, which you can, since it is a mere caricature of what whole language teachers actually think. I do think that language learning is hard-wired into the human brain. That is an understanding which has been attributed to Noam Chomsky. Learning to read a book, on the other hand, is unfortunately a frustrating and difficult process for some people. I’m sorry if you or someone near you has had that experience. A member of my family was shortchanged in school as a kid, and that is in part how I came to be a teacher.
We may not agree on any of this. That’s OK with me. I thank you for responding to my post, and leaving one of the more challenging comments I’ve had in a while. You made me think, and for that I am grateful.
Link | April 27th, 2006 at 10:04 pm
Sarah Puglisi wrote,
The best phonics I ever used as a first grade teacher was a simple book created by the MaCrackens’ which taught explicit sound/letter word.Practical application is key in a classroom setting.So is coping. This was a very practical approach.
For years in California we sat 40 on the carpet trying to teach to complex language needs,social equity issues, demands of rapidly growing communities in areas with unbelievable issues ,lots of struggle in school leadership within educational systems,problems from trying to supply students with all the things that public ed.promised….so,yes,teachers lacked lots of skills.Are you aware that a teacher in LA was paid beginning $24,000 a year facing $3000 for car insurance and rents at 1800 a month? It was not really attracting a person with a brain in their head about survival.Think practically. If you want the levelof engineer,brain surgeon-pay for it, train it,lead it,develop it as such. Don’t yell at the lady who sailed down into Soth Central and got a bullet whizzing over her car on the ride home. Practical truth. NO ONE PAID FOR IT. Prop.13 left systems in complete choas.That’s the truth of why we were not looking as fancy as the faculty of MIT. But frankly I had Reading Recovery and many skills but the numbers rather made it difficult to differentiate the experience to promote opitimal literacy,irregardless of philosophy. It took ten years for me to buy every book I could get,out of pocket. So a reseacher or a person looking in can have inordinate insights…….but whole language had depth aspects for those different levels and those students to allow us to create meaning. Systematic and leveled and tooled up in dialectic we may not have been. Sitting on my 1st grade carpet thinking of these comments….I still find it ironic that I’ll use whole language phonics and build phonics and writing and get results…….because it was so explicit,but so practical. We do need to do so much…..individually but in script based proscribed programs which is my current mileu what we do really is chant.I believe in effect the debating is being slid just right out the door. Get in there and follow orders. Or I hear “teamplayer”,”collegiality”,”Same Page”, The importance of of every child getting exactly the same thing in “every room”.So it might be lots of the world needs to go workin schoolrooms and offer a practical way to survive in a script written for no child in particular.
Link | April 29th, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Doug wrote,
I saw MaCracken in a video at a professional development meeting, talking about her book, and she said that teaching phonics is simply a way of showing kids how language works. An elegant way of thinking about a topic that has been given a lot of attention. The best thing about the book you mentioned is its versatility. It worked for many grades, many situations. I wore the cover off mine and had it covered in book tape.
I enjoy your commentary on the problems of having too many kids and too little of everything else you need in order to give them what THEY need. Like you, I’m sensitive to words that ask me to ignore what I see and forget what I know. Carry on. Push back. I’m subscribing to your blog because based on your comment, I think you have some important things to say. Thanks for your contribution to the discussion.
Link | April 30th, 2006 at 7:38 am
christina wrote,
In Ontario, politicians have blocked phonics-based instruction. But the issue is not politically based. I suspect it is ego based by influential bureaucrats and advisors, and by publishers as whole language has resulted in very strong market for selling books. As you probably know, there are 3 types of readers, sight, whole language and phonics. Whole language literature based means the program uses trade books only and no readers. The material a student uses to read ultimately defines the method. A teacher can’t use sight or whole language readers to teach a phonics based approach.
In Ontario, teachers can only select reading programs from a Ministry approved list. They have to be Canadian it seems. There are no phonics readers published in Canada. ( By readers I mean a full reading series, not just little phonics blooklets.) There are only whole language readers on this list. By the early 1990’s all sight word readers and the only Canadian phonics series (Language Patterns) were removed. For 15 years I have been pleading with various Ministers and fuzzy thinking bureaucrats to allow teachers the freedom to choose. I have never asked WL readers to be removed; I have only asked for phonics readers to be added. My argument is inclusive, not exclusive. It is the WL advocates that are exclusive and always have been. No one will listen. Grassroots organizations have tried and failed. I have contacted every Minister of Ed., literacy societies, teachers unions, college of teachers, newspapers, tv shows, ombudsman, faculties of ed. and everywhere else I can think of. No go.
I have been publicly vilified by my peers, switched classes and attempts have been made to dismiss me because of my views. Now, as a special ed teacher I have had success as I am able to use what I want.
Remarkably, and thankfully, a Ministry demonstration school in Ontario, Sagonaska, uses intensive phonics to remediate extremely dyslexic
students with success… not that every students becomes a perfect reader, but students understand the nature of their difficulties and learn how to use technology etc to keep improving and achieve success in school. Improvement in their self esteem dramatically changes and they develop greater determination to continue their schooling. Yet the Ministry of Ed. inOntario ignores all this. Go figure.
We are in a mess right now, plodding along the exact path UK took but we are now at the point where millions of dollars are spent on literacy leaders etc. Young teachers are beginning to look for positions abroad.
We may have to get worse before we get better. Meanwhile, there is a generation of non-readers out there that should get together and sue the Ministry for their unbelievable myopia over the past 15 - 20 years.
Link | May 7th, 2006 at 7:43 am
Doug wrote,
Christina, advocating for teachers to have the option to choose is right on. Even though you claim otherwise, if politicians have anything to do with education, it’s political. Your statement “…but students understand the nature of their difficulties…” is the key.
Your comment will likely prompt me to say more about this subject. It’s interesting to hear from teachers who are still concerned with this discussion. Ironically, the situation you describe is the opposite of many US schools-but for the same wrong reasons. It’s wrong to have to choose one approach or the other for every teacher, every kid.
My district has adopted a phonics-based program for primary grades, and gives intermediate level schools a choice between a whole language or “skills-based” program (because phonics isn’t emphasized at higher grades). This seems to me a good compromise, though I’d say that for primary teachers who feel strong commitments to whole language philosophy, they may be dissatisfied.
The get-worse-before-we-get-better view of our current environment seems to speak to so many problems we face now, and not only in education. That’s a dark cloud to be living under. I hope we begin to see daylight soon.
Thanks for your comment.
Link | May 7th, 2006 at 9:58 am
christina wrote,
Thanks for your response and support. I think I am looking at the term “political” slightly differently. We have three major political parties and over the years, all three have been in power. So what I really mean is that this issue is not specifically attached to any political party’s agenda. They have all goofed.
Also, many people believe that a “balanced literacy” approach is just that, but in many many cases it really means a WL approach with phonics on the side.
In order to determine if it is truly a phonics based approach one would have to have some experience with different types of readers and then examine the hierarchy of phonics skills required in the first few readers. Open Court (American) is far from a traditional phonics-based reading series. It seems to follow a somewhat odd hierarchy, it is extremely costly and a teacher needs a wheelbarrow to get the manuals & resources home.
I realize you may not want to get into this area in this depth, but if you typed to me the first few stories or first booklet in the reading series you are referrring to as phonics-based, I could easily determiine whether or not it is truly a phonics reader and therefore phonics based.
One problem with this issue is that lots poeple who engage in discussion on the “Reading Wars” rarely get into the important specifics but rather mill around the issue with “philosophical” ideas. As an informed teacher, I think you can only get to the root of the problem by looking at the specifics … because that is where student meets methodology and that’s what really matters.
If teachers have a choice, which they still may not in your area, then I believe that the most effective method will rise to the top.
Christina
Link | May 7th, 2006 at 11:04 am
Doug wrote,
You’re right about me not wanting to get into the specifics of various programs. I understand, too, about the programs with so many materials that you need a wheelbarrow to carry them home. A funny conversation with a multiage teacher convinced me of the inappropriateness of them for some classrooms. She wasn’t laughing, by the way.
One of the problems with the discussion about whole language/phonics (I really do think I need to write more about this.) is that, as you say, people get philosophical. That’s because the entire issue is values-driven. Whichever side of the debate a person comes down on they are making a claim about whether a word-level, or context-level approach to making meaning is more “effective.” But even the word effective has an ideology behind it, and may mean different things depending on who you’re talking to. It’s easy to go into questions about what means what, which usually leaves nobody convinced of anything they didn’t already believe. These kinds of debates are hard to resolve. They’re like discussing religion.
Link | May 7th, 2006 at 7:31 pm
christina wrote,
Dear Doug:
I have avoided getting into blogs like this for two years. I really don’t know why I did, and i shouldn’t have because it’s too frustrating. You seem to have accepted the idea that teachers can choose between whole language readers and phonics based readers in the intermediate grades. How can you accept this? The entire notion is absurd and absolutely bogus. Have you ever seen a real phonics-based reading program…really and truly??? I wonder. The entire issue is really only relevant in the primary grades. By the intermediate grades the entire hierarchy of phonics has pretty much been covered. The grade 4 readers in all 3 methods are virtually indistinguishable. All the rest is vocabulary development and language usage. I have only seen one phonics series that ended with multiple prefixes and multiple suffixes that comprises a heck of a lot of the English language. But this more about language construction than phonics.
The reason why the reading wars has continued has less to do with political decisions and more to do with the fact that everyone has an opinion, and most opinions are based on the blind acceptance of edubabble. Philosophical discussion, for me, are hopelessly subjective, utterly useless, and pointless. I don’t discuss religion either. As far as i am concerned, to get to the truth, you need to nit-pick and sift your way through all the crap out there. I’ve taught kids to read with severe learning disabilities, and mild intellectual kids as low as the 2nd % ile according to the WISC. I know what works because I’ve seen it with my own eyes. This is my truth. Good luck with your quest for yours.
Link | May 7th, 2006 at 10:30 pm
Graham Wegner wrote,
The Reading Wars spill over into the Comments Mild Disagreements here. My own very simplitistic take on this (remembering that political pushing for phonics only is a big deal down under) is that while there is a place for phonics in a whole language program, there doesn’t seem to be room for whole language in a phonics program. That goes against everything that we know about kids and that is they learn in different ways using different approaches at different paces. My oldest son taught himself to read before starting school - implementing a phonics based reading program for him would be a complete waste of time and could ruin his love of reading. However, he is terrible at hand eye coordination stuff and goes to a coordination program to improve these skills. If you applied a phonics only advocate’s point of view to physical skills, then all kids should do this coordination program even if you are naturally talented at sports. Sorry, Doug, I might have inflamed the situation here!
Link | May 8th, 2006 at 2:48 am
Doug wrote,
I AM quite unable to sift through all the crap. As a consequence, certainty will never be mine. The quest for truth will inevitably leave me in doubt because I’m hopelessly addicted to asking questions, and I keep getting distracted by things I didn’t expect to find.
-wishing peace and an end to hopeless contestations of meaning and method. Simplicity, Graham, is the only rule.
Link | May 8th, 2006 at 8:06 am
christina wrote,
Guesss I can’t leave it alone. Misinformation just drives me nuts. Once again, Graham has failed to mention any specifics. Exactly what whole language reading programs and phonics reading programs is are you referring to anyway?
In a good phonics-based reading program with good readers (books), your son would have scooted through the early stuff and moved on to material at his level.
I know all about children who read early. When my parents took my twin sister and I to church as kindergarten children, we used to occupy ourselves reading the hymnary. We just got the code early. I can remember when the lights when on and understood the igh letter combo.
I think the reason why I know how to teach phonics with little invented tricks and games is because I got it early. I have never been taught about phonics or how to teach it. I just know it. I was taught in school using the sight method (Dick and Jane) but that’s not how I learned. Your son was taught using WL. but that really isn’t the way he learned to read.
I belive your argument is completely upside down. These days, advocates of WL encourage parents to read to their children in order to teach them to read and to enjoy reading. As a result, I have seen many parents read little easy books tirelessly to their children who don’t catch onto reading quickly. These books do not particulary help the expansion of a child’s vocabulary to include more complex language. On the other hand, in the phonics program I am referring to (Language Patterns) teachers are encouraged to have many books in their classrooms. The program includes art, drama and all sorts of creative things. But, importantly, it expects parents and teachers to read material to their children that is well beyond the child’s reading level. This is critical for expanding their vocabularies. (My mother read us Pilgrim’s Progress in kindergarten, of all things.) Early WL advocates (Goodman) encouraged kids to guess using the first letter. That’s pretty tough when a child encounters a more complex and non-conforming word and they don’t have the vocab. Of course, lots of kids will expand their vocabularies because their parents are well-spoken, but few parents speak daily in the kind of complex language found in books. Also, WL advocates encourage parents to read to their children in order to encourage a love of reading, considered a building block for reading.
Personally, I have not encountered a learning disabled student who didn’t enjoy being read to, but you could read to them ’til the cows come home and they still wouldn’t learn to read themselves.
Your argument just doesn’t hold water. It is a good phonics program that includes all the nice things that WL brings to the table. (Big books are an exception). It is WL that rejects the sequential and cumulative acquisition of phonics skills that so many kids need because they are not early readers and they don’t get the code on their own. Phonics programs do not throw letter-sound combos at kids that they have not learned, and that they do not know. I does, however, include sight words. It must. It promotes real reading and not guessing at words or memorization, two characteristics of poor readers. Don’t confuse a phonics based reading program with a collection of little booklets that focus on one phonics skill at a time (ex. Dr. Maggies phonics program).
If phonics based reading programs had not been eliminated from Canadian and American schools, we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. It is only the fact that Ministries of Ed. went so nuts for WL, and WL advocates were so down on phonics that the reading wars started in the first place. Over the last 15 years or so it has never been a reading war, but rather a phonics massacre. Balanced literacy still means WL. Look at the readers for goodness sake. Phonics teachers like me just want teachers to be able to choose from the best selection of any method.
In the UK, they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and gone to synthetic phonics in the early years without readers. This is like teaching a kid to play piano by making them play scales, chords and arpeggios without letting them learn to play tunes and pieces. That’s the stuff they want to play for grannie. This has come about because, once again, those bureaucrats who have the ear of the Minister are all about edugabble, have probably never taught children to read, and therefore lack good common sense. I’m not part of that movement at all. I know that a child needs to experience the joy of reading from their own book. Therein lies the motivation and the magic.
If anyone responds I will, of course, read your comments. But I’m done.
Leave it alone Christina.
Link | May 8th, 2006 at 8:42 am
Doug wrote,
Christina, your tenacity is remarkable. Thanks for your interest.
Link | May 8th, 2006 at 9:25 am
Graham Wegner wrote,
Doug and other regular commenters at this post, here is an interesting link to see what one “expert” here down under is publishing in the mainstream media. Then, to get a more complete cross section of how this opinion is seen by Aussies, read the comments section and watch the piranhas from either side of the fence rip into each other’s point of view! An argument about the “correct” way to teach reading might get a more sympathetic hearing if it wasn’t wrapped up in such a blatantly political wrapper. Teachers do get sick of being told that they are incompetent especially when rubbery figures are used to bash them around the head.
Link | May 15th, 2006 at 2:55 am
Susan wrote,
Christina, I’m a UK remedial reading teacher and I use a true synthetic phonic programme. I can assure you that using synthetic phonics does not mean throwing out the reading books (unless they are whole language ones for complete beginners), though that is the malicious rumour that is being spread around. What we advocate is that children are only given text that they can be expected to decode, given the teaching they’ve had in class, so they don’t have to resort to guessing and memorising. This will mean that initially they will be given simple words and sentences to read and then decodable books. For more correct information on UK synthetic phonics please see my website and also http://www.rrf.org.uk and http://www.syntheticphonics.com
Link | May 15th, 2006 at 3:54 am
Sarah Puglisi wrote,
Like a dutiful script reader we are “pig, jig, wig, mig, sig …” saying in room 10 in the PROSCRIBED , politically mandated NCLB phonics driven curriculum in Underperforming South Oxnard , thanks, with children who have no one to read to them, no books in houses you would not enter but I sometimes visit on weekend food runs,they have no opportunity to enter this reading war debate.
And these are not on-line families, these are often main-line familes. They have a heck of a lot of dependence on those getting massive consultation fees to tailor the debate and define my teacher praxis. I’m no longer, as the NCLB Federal person stated so eloquently to me-”a teacher is no longer thinking of what to do. We tell them what to do”…thanks….just push it through the political and textbook driven culture in Sacramento and at the Dept. of Ed. and thus decide what we need to do in the next five minutes jerking our knees. So reading is now the phonics of the great minds…Our present knee jerk is a DEMAND that with children who are not speaking English we start the 1st grade experience with a story that reads “go cat, Sam go, go Sam, sam cat, go”. Because after all armed with that, and that fine collection of 5 sight words, and the “at” family they can go make some nice meaning . Chant those sounds with the “Sound sight Cards”.
Can we get real for a minute….
Today I took my class to a firestation and read some books about it. It is not in the “adopted” curriculum. It is a meaning based activity involving “doing” . It’s actually at everyone’s level, as it is about life. We listened, held the hose, went to the park with bag lunches (100 percent free lunch is us) and brought back 8 lunches uneaten. We wrote basic stories, made fantastic watercolors and used a great many words none in the text design as jig, fig, wig really doesn’t talk about saving lives working in fire stations. And a huge fire is raging up in our mountains-Day Fire- and we are breathing horrible air and everyone is getting ill. Then we read the stories and then we clapped. Jessica , my little student who lives in a garage, with an open infection on her face which a year ago necessitated an operation who needs glasses for the worst strabismis I’ve ever seen, (when will the nurse care?, how many times do I have to go see her on the one day they hire her to be there a week) anyway Jessica lingers after school. I think, oh , she wants to read our FIRE book again. No, I was wrong. Do you know what she wanted? Was it to read the phonics book perhaps, that super great answer to literacy? So “at her level?” So Go Sam Go.
You know it wasn’t either approach. Not phonics driven, nor Whole Language either. Sorry. Wrong debate, my friends on the edge of the world…who think real thoughts and care about children…
Jessica wanted something you really need to UNDERSTAND, it being obscured in this political reading nightmare, (an argument that seems over here by the way the right won it- it’s phonics…hat, sat, cat, bat….)
This child who weighs in at 29 pounds wanted to take home all the leftover lunches so the family would have some food this weekend. Her mom died a couple years ago of a drug overdose. She has a non related aunt at 350 lbs, a very old adeled grandma and her gramps, and two sisters. So basically , fundamentally my job is to listen to all the multiplicity of views and opinions and thoughts and debates, read my scripts from the Central office, get attuned to the Standards, stay on task, and turn a blind eye to the leaving behind of that family who is eating peanut butter sandwiches this weekend- a little old Mexican grandpa carrying home her bag and telling Jessica with the 8 apples he can fix her a frittata. Consultants walk into my school and take $25,000 straight of our very small budget to watch for a week and outline all the shortcomings in our literacy approaches, and outline and underscore our errors in thought and our reading competencies.After all they know what’s best for a Jessica they surely won’t think about for 5 seconds as they cash out that check at Data whatever their NCLB based consulting company… But me…I’m sitting here crying for the first time in a very long time. I just usually can’t access the tears….because frankly I have to feed this child, get better possibilities to bloom.I can’t afford pity, I have to inspire a life.. The next time anyone thinks about warring over reading don’t think about your own child….think about the one in the garage in South Oxnard who has the whole world in her tiny hands. BECAUSE she has to feed her tiny grandparents. And no momma. Do you really know , not doing my job, what in the world you are talking about?
It’s really too hard on those of us on the front line to be pulled around politically anymore. Get over to the ghetto and find out what is going on in literacy. Then you might see why we need to work out of literature. All of man’s existance in times of trouble, pain, difficulty he turned to creation to find a way to make meaning and sustain his soul long enough to find a way to deal with the impoverishment of poverty. We need to rise, and , sorry, pig, fig, jig, is really for those that “have”, , the luxury of being able to fill their cup in libaries, books, language, bathrooms, homes, gardens, museums. I’m not working there. I’m in NCLB jail.
Link | September 22nd, 2006 at 6:47 pm