Will today's reminiscence stir up the flames of controversy? I hope not, because I Remember JFK should be a comfortable place to slip off one's shoes and enjoy a little pleasant time-traveling.
My mother was a schoolteacher who was raised by a schoolteacher. She didn't tolerate anything but hard effort from me when it came to schoolwork.
She was also a firm believer in phonics. And she made certain that my kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Abels, would teach me phonics when I was five years old.
And teach me she did. Time passed by slowly when I was five, but it seems like she taught me the basics of phonics one morning, and by that afternoon I was reading LIFE magazine.
Though that is probably an exaggeration caused by less-than-perfect memory banks, the fact is that I, too, became a believer in phonics, even though it made the next couple of years in school a tad boring.
According to Wikipedia, the debate about whether or not to teach phonics was raging way back in the 19th century. No less an authority than Horace Mann decried the teaching method, claiming that it stunted overall learning development.
One thing's for certain. My mom learned phonics. So did her mom. And between the three of us, we were all the last ones standing at class spelling bees during our own individual eras.
Thus, I learned phonics at an early age. And, as it turned out, so did my classmates. Teaching phonics was standard operating procedure at Miami, Oklahoma's Nichols School in the 60's.
But such wasn't always the case. During much of the twentieth century, the look-say method of reading was taught. "Look, Dick. See Jane! See Spot!"
I remember being handed one of those pre-primer books in the first grade and looking it over. In fact, I read the whole thing while sitting at my desk. By the time the teacher sat down, I was done with it.
The rise in the teaching of phonics during our childhoods can be largely traced to Rudolf Fleisch.
Fleisch was a proponent of Plain English. Wikipedia defines Plain English as "a generic term for communication styles that emphasise clarity, brevity and the avoidance of technical language." In other words, lawyers need not apply.
Fleisch wrote a book in 1955 called Why Johnny Can't Read. Again, quoting Wikipedia:
The book was a focused critique of the then-trendy movement to teach reading by sight, often called the "look-say" method. The flaw of this approach, according to Fleisch, was that it required learners to memorize words by sight. When confronted with an unknown word, the learner was stumped. Fleisch advocated a return to phonics, the teaching of reading by teaching learners to sound out words.
So the world read Fleisch's book, and schools began adopting the teaching of phonics en masse. My mother couldn't have been happier.
I wish I could have found an image of the big colored records that my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Cox, used in her class. She had a portable record player, and would get out a box of phonics records that were brightly colored in blue, yellow, and red. Perhaps there were other colors, too, but I distinctly remember those three.
We would open up our phonics books and follow along. When the record would command us to sound out the letters, we would obey. In the meantime, Mrs. Cox had discretely slipped out of the room for a quick smoke. Teachers with tobacco habits LOVED phonics records.
By the end of the third grade, the rest of the class who had not been so fortunate as to have attended Mrs. Abels' kindergarten training program had pretty much caught up in reading ability to the rest of us.
When my kids started school in the 90's, I carried on the grand tradition laid down by my mother and grandmother. My kids were taught phonics, and both became voracious readers.
Nowadays, the debate over phonics has resurfaced. In our "everyone is a winner" society, any child who has problems learning via a certain teaching method is held up as living proof that that method should be abandoned.
Whatever.
All I know is that when you teach a kid to read well, the kid will do much of his own teaching from then on.
Comments (2)
If children are inculcated in the 3 R’s when they are young using rote learning techniques, then a foundation will have been laid on top of which they can build abstract concepts. Rote provides an anchor for abstraction so that nebulous mental constructs may be deconstructed into their relationship with basic precepts which were learned by memorizing the simple rules of basic math (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division) and the rules (phonics) which translate spoken language into the graphic representation which is the written word.
My wife and I both were taught phonics and math by rote but our children were not taught phonics in school (or rote arithmetic for that matter,) in fact my youngest son’s 5th grade teacher was reprimanded for attempting to teach phonics (along with the prescribed curriculum) and told that he would be fired if he did not desist (this came out in a parent/teacher conference as I was railing about the sad state of public schools anent my first paragraph.) Fortunately my 2 sons had natural math aptitude (my daughter seems not to have inherited the math gene and still struggles with even basic arithmetic) and all were excellent readers (thanks to my wife whose work was making well rounded kids instead of money – but trouble free children are worth any amount of money.)
Given the facts that 44 million American adults cannot read above the 5th grade level, every year 20 million high school seniors are functionally illiterate when they graduate and many colleges require remedial reading classes for incoming freshmen, it is high time that the American primary school educational system stops experimenting with abstract and esoteric pedagogy and returns to basics and phonics training is a good starting point.
Posted by Burt | April 2, 2009 7:33 PM
Posted on April 2, 2009 19:33
I am still not sure what phonics is? I thought that it was something new? If we did phonics in grade school, I wasn't aware of it! We did the tradional Dick and Jane Books...See Spot Run...See Spot run fast! I do remember flash cards too for spelling and arithmatic.We learned to write on the large lined paper. Cursive too! So if any of that was considered phonics, then I guess we did.
Posted by Rivers End | April 13, 2009 8:33 PM
Posted on April 13, 2009 20:33