A LETTER FROM A CANADIAN TEACHER -- ABOUT PHONICS:

In my own kindergarten year, I would occupy myself during those long long sermons by reading the hymnary. I remember being excited when I figured out the "igh" combo. Later in school, I was taught with the Dick and Jane sight word series. I was often partnered with kids who couldn't read very well, if at all.

By the time I hit teachers college I had a few firm beliefs. The way you were taught to read in school is not necessarily the way you learned. I was an early-bird reader because I picked up phonics quickly (and on my own.) Enjoying reading is not a building block for learning to read because non-readers in my classes loved being read to by the teacher, enjoyed looking at books and still didn't catch on. The poor readers I was paired with guessed at the first letter or searched the pictures for clues. I was lucky because I just got it.

My first Faculty of Education course on reading was selling whole language. I could make neither hide nor hair of it all, and it seemed to lack commonsense. Trying to understand where all this came from, I learned that whole language travelled through the International Reading Asociation. In North America, the big poobah was Ken Goodman. (Smith came a little later) Many faculty members belonged to the IRA and carried WL back to their home turf. Many had never taught children to read, or had not taught long enough to grasp the tough spots. They became gurus themselves and flogged their WL ideas on the innocent, and made lots of money writing new WL reading series and speaking at teachers' professional development events. They were death on phonics. Period. Reputations and egos were now strongly in the picture. Primary teachers, who are characteristically caregivers and gentle folk, got confused by the edugabble and meekly followed the NEW WAY. After all, who wanted to be accused of teaching "half" language" or of being "teacher focused". ("Balanced literacy" today is another one of those terms that suggests anything else would be "unbalanced".) Things got ugly. Phonics holdouts were vilified publicly when they raised questions. The word "dinosaur" became the most popular insult. (What other profession treats its veterans like this.) Fear entered the scene. Older teachers retreated quietly into their classrooms and waited to retire.

Publishers liked the new WL readers. They could market a entirely new sets of readers and WL sells lots of books. Quickly, both phonics and sight word readers were removed from print and only WL were published . As teachers can only select from Mnistry-approved texts, the choice had disappeared. When I plagued the various Ministry bureaucrats as to why there was no phonics-based reading program on the list, I was told repeatedly "that's all the publishers send us". I didn't speak to a single bureaucrat over that 15 year span who knew the differences between the texts of the three methodogies or who had ever taught children to read. So now publishers were determining the method for teaching children to read.

The WL gurus (letters after their names gave them a lot of clout) grabbed the ears of the Ministers. Education Ministers didn't bother to investigate or question. They were far far too busy and it all sounded pretty rosy. Politicians weren't really interested at all. Most letters I got back were "thanks for your interest."

In time, the phonics-based readers and sight-word readers hit the dumpsters or were shipped off to third world countries. The preamble in the teacher's guides to my phonics readers were filled with creative ideas (art,drama, poetry etc) and teachers were encouraged to fill their classrooms with books. The evidence is no longer there to show younger teachers that phonics reading programs were not just about drills, workbooks and booklets focussing on one phonics skill at a time, but were full-fledged reading programs with all the good stuff now thought to be exclusive to WL.

It was the growing number of children identified as "learning disabled" and complaints from the high school teachers that they were getting too many poor readers and non readers that finally caught the attention of the politicians. (Parents and grassroots organizations got very little attention.) Once again, they listened to the WL gurus, still holding the reins at the faculties of ed. By now, the gurus were getting nervous with the increase in research pointing to phonics. Knowing that sticking to the ideas they'd been teaching for years might cause others to question their credibility, they attempted to slime their way back to some middle ground calling it "balanced literacy": "Of course we always meant teachers should use phonics ". Meanwhile their old articles and dissertations say the complete opposite. Politicians bought it, because, once again they simply had absolutely no time to do their homework and get the terms straight.

Now, the public doesn't know who to believe. Smith and Goodman blew their confidence in research. Blind acceptance by teachers of WL made this group suspect. Parents whose kids learn to read early took up the WL banner in drives and forgot about the unfortunates. And then there are the faculty members. Who can trust a bunch who have come up with ideas like open-concept, multi-age grouping, multi-generational grouping, discovery math, whole language,and who just recently were flogging Gardners Theory of Multiple intelligences as a cure-all. (Like, duh, people are good at different things).

So the reading wars continue here. (It really was and is a phonics massacre.) The only ray of hope seems to be in the UK. They are prepared to say on public TV: "We know whole language was very bad for children".






THE DISTORTION OF HISTORY TEACHING

In 1950, a U.S. Senate committee released a report on the "employment of homosexuals and other sex perverts" in the federal government. The report warned that gays "lack the emotional stability of normal persons," so they could be easily blackmailed by communist spies. Newspapers claimed that 10,000 gays had infiltrated federal agencies, posing what Senator Joseph McCarthy called a "homosexual menace" to national security.

So if the Legislature passes a bill requiring instruction about gays in history, will students hear about this sordid chapter of our past? I doubt it. That's because the bill's supporters - like so many of us - regard history as therapy. They want the gay kids to feel good.

Listen to the bill's author, Sen. Sheila Kuehl, D-Santa Monica, one of the Legislature's six openly gay lawmakers: "Teaching materials mostly contain negative or adverse views of us, and that's when they mention us at all." By requiring schools to teach about the "role and contributions" of homosexuals, Kuehl argues, her bill would help gay kids overcome the stigmas that surround them.

Maybe so. But it would also distort the past, exaggerating the exploits of heroic gays and neglecting the continued discrimination against them. Most of all, this approach would allow all of us - straights as well as gays - to evade the complex and painful history that we share.

It has happened before. In the 1920s, when anti-immigrant sentiment was at its zenith, a wide range of ethnic groups fought to insert their own heroes into America's grand national narrative. Polish-Americans demanded that textbooks include Thaddeus Kosciusko, the Polish nobleman who aided our Revolution; Jewish-Americans pressed for Haym Solomon, a merchant who helped finance it; and blacks celebrated Crispus Attucks, the first American to die in it.

Oh, yes, and German-Americans wanted textbooks to include Molly Pitcher. Why? You guessed it: She was German. Her birth name, some said, was Maria Ludwig; and eventually, thanks to German pressure, the textbooks said so as well.

Germans also claimed Abraham Lincoln as one of their own, providing an easy target for satirists in the press. "The German origin of Honest Abe clashes with the Italian theory [of] L'Inchiostro, meaning 'the ink,' " one newspaper teased. "The Chinese theory proves direct descent from the famous Lin family. Abraham Llyncollyn was Welsh beyond a doubt, and the origin of Abraham Linsky-Cohen needs no further explanation."

Worst of all, these ethnic groups helped block a more critical, complicated reading of the Revolution itself. During these same years, historians began to question the long-standing myth of freedom-loving Continentals against tyrannical Red coats. Roughly a third of Americans fought on the British side, we discovered, while many people in England supported the Revolutionary cause. Even more, the leaders of America's freedom struggle often practiced - and defended - the enslavement of African-Americans.

But very little of this complexity entered the textbooks, thanks to the combined efforts of our newly multicultural patriots. If we rejected the glorious tale of America's birth, ethnic activists said, we would diminish ethnic contributions to it. Each group "could have its heroes sung," as one editorialist observed, but no group could question the underlying melody that united them all.

Fast-forward to the 1960s and 1970s, when blacks and Hispanics inserted a whole new set of great men - and even a few great women - into our history texts. Crispus Attucks took a bit part, or disappeared altogether; leading roles went to Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez.

Even as textbooks included these new activists, however, the books gave little sense of what the heroes were acting against: white racism. A real examination of racism would interfere with the optimistic themes that still permeated the texts, as reflected in their sunny titles: "Quest for Liberty," "Rise of the American Nation," and so on. Nor did the books discuss the less-than-heroic involvement of Africans in the slave trade, or of Hispanics in the genocide of Native Americans. After all, the purpose was to make the kids feel "positive" about themselves. And only "positive" information would do the trick.

So if the bill about gay history passes, we can expect another round of heroes - this time, of course, gay heroes - to enter the books. But that won't help us address the really tough questions about American history writ large. Why have gays suffered so much discrimination, during the McCarthy era and into the present? What does that say about our nation - about its conceptions of love, of family, and of "freedom" itself?

Nor can we expect any criticism of homosexuals: Once heroes enter the pantheon, they become as sacred as all of the other gods. So the texts might discuss how gays bravely fought AIDS during its early years, promoting education and safe sex. But we'll never hear the unlovely coda to this happy tale: In the era of protease inhibitors and the Internet, many gays have reverted to the destructive practices that spread the disease in the first place. It happens to be true, but it isn't nice. Forget about it.

So say it loud, and say it proud: Walt Whitman! James Baldwin! Harvey Milk! But please, don't say anything bad about these gay Americans - or about anyone, really. Remember, the first goal here is to feel good. The truth comes second.

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

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