More on reading; a bit of the absurd

View 766 Friday, March 15, 2013

The Ides of March

Birthday of the late Stefan T. Possony

Yesterday I wrote a lot about reading and the modern education system. If you haven’t read that you should go back and read it, else what comes next won’t make much sense.

Also yesterday I mentioned that as we came back from our medical appointments, the car died. I had AAAS tow it to the local Shell Station where I trust the mechanics, and we came home. Today it is as good as new. I had the fuel pump replaced and the annual servicing done, and my old Explorer runs like new again. It’s an ancient car now – 1998 – but as my mechanic said, they don’t build them like that any more. It’s built like a tank, gets awful gas mileage but it’s reliable and should be good for years to come; and I don’t drive much so gas mileage isn’t a big factor. Keeping it serviced isn’t cheap, but a lot cheaper than getting a new car would be. As to the medical situation, most of it is over. Roberta and I and Sable all need more exercise, and we’ll just have to see to it that we get it. But all’s more or less well, and tonight I got the printer working that makes labels for my wife’s reading instruction program disk, so that problem is solved too.

[I got my Explorer after I wiped out my Bronco II in Death Valley driving home from a COMDEX.  Those who have been reading this page for decades know all about that, but for those who don’t, the Death Valley Adventure – I had to walk out – is told here. http://www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosreports/deathvalley.html and here http://www.jerrypournelle.com/pictures/death.html ]

Some of today was bizarre, and sometimes I feel as if I have slipped over into an absurd alternate universe. In one supposedly professional writers conference I was “given a time out” – her words – by the moderator for posting a comment to the answer to a question I had asked, and no, I don’t intend to explain any further except that I thought I was in a professional association, not a nursery school to be treated like a delinquent child. As I said, theater of the absurd. But I am slowly catching up with my life again.

Dr. Pournelle,

When our daughter was in kindergarten, she read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Yes, she understood it with the help of her Parental Dictionaries and a bit of phonetic guidance with things like wingardia leviosa. My sainted mother-in-law took the place of an English nanny.

At the end the school year, her masters-level allegedly educated kindergarten teacher reported to us that, perhaps, with hard work, she might be "ready to read" by the end of first grade.

Thankfully, the "teacher" was gone by next Fall. I shudder to think she’s still teaching somewhere.

Charles Krug

The notion of “reading readiness” is one of the worst blights of the modern colleges of education. It is easy enough to show that English middle and upper class children routinely learned to read in nursery school, and unless you believe that the ruling classes have better protoplasm than you and I, then you must conclude that the secret was that the Nannies who taught the kids to read were able to do it because they believed it could be done. But teachers in the US learn in their first year of education school that you can’t teach the kids to read until they are ‘ready’ so it is not the teacher’s fault if the kids remain illiterate after a year or two or three of reading instruction. It is a ghastly theory, and one reason that Head Start does not in fact give much of a Head Start: if Head Start taught the kids to read in pre-school you would sure as anything be able to see improvements over the kids who hadn’t been to Head Start. But it will not happen.

The only way you can be sure your kids can read is if you teach them yourself. The best way to do that is through a systematic approach.

phonics and reading Jerry,

Roberta or one of your advisors may have some idea about our little "problem".

We have read to our son since before he was old enough to sit up, and he pretty much "taught himself" in the sense that we did not do anything more than read to him daily before bedtime and insist that he sit down with us during book time. We did get some of those phonics based series but read him a variety of books. At 22 months old, he excitedly took me around his daycare room to everywhere people’s names were printed, and he read out loud every name on every photo board, the printed class roster, etc. I thought that was interesting since he had also started reading out loud road signs while driving around, so we started giving him a chance to read the books himself instead of us always reading to him. He could get through most hop on pop type books on his own at around age 25 months and read through 2 complete learn to read book systems in just a few months. For almost a year, he would constantly point at any word he hadn’t seen yet and ask "what’s that?" Fast forward another 3 years, and he remembers just about every individual word he reads/hears with almost no repetition. He reads just as well upside down 10 ft away from the book as he does with the book right in front of him, something I discovered while reading to our 3 yr old daughter when he started reading ahead of us while sitting on the bed across the room.

My "problem" as you’ve probably guessed, is that new or longer words stump him a lot of the time because we did not insist on him learning and using phonics to begin with. He was doing so well pretty much all by himself and we didn’t want to ruin his enthusiasm by making it hard work. We have been working with him on "sounding the words out" whenever he encounters a new word, but he is resistant because if he can get us to say it once, that’s all it takes for him to remember it.

So, any ideas on how to progress? Should we force him to learn and actually use phonics, or sit back and let him figure it out? He isn’t even 5 yet and we’re a bit stumped on how much to press him on this, because kids don’t usually read on their own as early as he did and we don’t want to mess with success.

Our daughter wanted to "play dumb" while reading with us so we had a heck of a time getting her to even try to read, but we enrolled her into a preschool a couple days a week (we pronounced it "daycare" at first) and working with a teacher and other kids has really gotten her interested. She just turned 3 and has shown no interest in simply memorizing words so she is learning phonics out of necessity. In a few years, I wonder which of them will be reading better and with more comprehension.

I asked my wife about this. I have seen it before. It’s the lack of systematic training – one technique in Roberta’s reading program is “uncover – discover” – that produces the proper result. Smart kids like to guess and are often rewarded for guessing correctly. That encourages bad reading habits. They must learn to attack the words, and NOT GUESS. Guessing will be right often enough that it’s rewarding but deceiving; systematic attack with uncover-discover works every time, and trains good habits. Bright kids eventually unlearn the bad habits, but it’s better that they never form bad habits in the first place. For more see

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/OldReading.html

The longer you allow bad habits, the harder it is to lose them.

Much is Thereby Explained

Jerry

I read your view on Whole Word reading instruction with great interest, as it suddenly exploded in my head in a blinding light the reason for our present financial situation: the Whole Number method. All these folks were taught to *guess at the number and that was good enough.

Mike Flynn

I wish that were a joke. Ah well.

Two interesting links from long time friend and reader Ed:

Beautiful Time-Lapse Videos Show Comet Flying Near Crescent Moon:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/pan-starrs-time-lapse/

Set it to full screen. It’s not long

Ed

New nuke could POWER WORLD UNTIL 2083 .

Jerry

“The Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactor (WAMSR) is based on designs first dreamt up in the 1950s for reactors that used liquid rather than solid fuels. Two graduate students at MIT have now upgraded those designs so that the reactors can be fueled by nuclear waste, and also designed a safety system that will automatically shut the reactor down without power or human intervention.”

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/14/nuclear_reactor_salt/

“Most conventional nuclear reactors – in the US at least – are light-water reactors, but this design has a number of disadvantages. The reactors only use about 3 per cent of the potential energy stored in the uranium pellets that power them, and the resultant waste still contains enough energy to be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. The average US plant produces 20 tons of such waste a year.” <snip>

“The design is much more fuel-efficient than light-water reactors – using 98 per cent of the potential energy in uranium pellets – and a WAMSR unit would produce just three kilos of waste a year that would be radioactive for only hundreds of years rather than hundreds of thousands.” <snip>

“As a safety feature, WAMSR’s liquid-fuel pipes are connected to a drain plug of salt that has been frozen solid. If humans aren’t around and the power to the plant fails, the plug melts and the nuclear fuel drains into a holding tanks, cools, and solidifies over the space of a few days.”

Sounds good. We’ll have to see how it plays out.

Ed

I would love for it to be true, but I haven’t seen enough about this to have a right to an opinion.

 

I’ll try to do a full mail bag shortly. It’s late and this absurd day is over. But I was digging about in old View columns, and found an interesting illusion that may be worth your time:

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view385.html#Illusion

 

There is a lot of really good stuff back in those old archives of this place.  If you have nothing else to do some time you might find it interesting to go spelunking through them