| Friday,
August 3, 2007
Happy Birthday Alex
For those interested in education, I
found the Weekly Standard major essay,
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/
Public/Articles/000/000/013/850gvneh.asp
worthwhile. Fair warning: Roberta, who put it aside for me to read, says
it's rehashing old stuff. All of which is true I suppose, but she is much
closer to the subject than I am. Incredibly, she has managed to get
credentials as a Reading Instruction Specialist, and given that she thinks
most of the "standard" techniques of reading instruction are not merely
wrong but harmful, this shows a frightening determination.
It's worth your while. But if you are concerned about your
children, teach them to read. Do it yourself, or in concert with other
parents, but do not entrust them to either the public or most private
schools. The teaching profession is dominated by professors of education,
few -- if any -- of whom ever taught small children to read. Their
experience is almost all with college students and other adults, and of
course adults don't read like children. We do not "sound out" even big words
like Constantinople and Timbuktu. On the other hand, we certainly do not
read diethyldimethylphosphotoluene by word recognition, nor do we
"recognize" portmanteau words like slithy.
`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"
You can
read that, and many of you will read it by sight because you've seen it
before; but for those unfortunate enough never to have encountered
Alice
Through The Looking Glass, you'll have no choice but to "sound out" some
of the "words".
As to how to teach your kids to read, the best way I know
is to buy Roberta Pournelle's Reading
TLC program and use it. It works on just about any version of Windows,
including in Virtual PC on a Mac. It certainly will work on a dual boot Mac
booted into Windows, and I am told that it works in Windows under Parallels
on a Mac.
We don't have a Mac version any
longer. The Supercard version for the Power Mac I did used the Mac's text to
speech program, and it worked well enough, but Apple doesn't support that
any longer and I haven't time to rewrite it; and many didn't care for the
"computer voice" although that was a great improvement over the first
version which used a parent or reading tutor (we know of one 11 year old who
taught a whole class of first graders to read using it) as the text to
speech device. Human voices can express disapproval in the wrong places and
times. The "Agnes" computer voice on the Mac had great success in teaching,
and a lot of kids learned to read using the old Mac version, but we just
can't maintain it any longer.
The current (it's a good ten years old) version for
Windows has about 10,000 recorded instructions, sentences, phrases, and
sounds. Roberta painstakingly recorded each one of those and Robert Ransom
took my old Mac Supercard version and with considerable ingenuity turned it into
Delphi; instead of text to speech he was able to reference Roberta's
recorded sounds.
The program is hokey. The "music" is from the old Basic
"Play" function. The game is hokey. It all looks as if it were done in DOS
and ported to Windows, which is essentially true. It doesn't matter to the
kids: they learn to read in about 70 lessons at half an hour a day, and when
they are finished they can READ: which is to say they can take a newspaper
and read it to you. Or a Dickens novel. Will they "understand" everything
they read? Depends on their age. Most newspapers are aimed at a mental age
of 11 to 12; bright 5 year olds will not comprehend everything and dull
normal 5 year olds won't understand very much -- of a newspaper. But they
can sure read about Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail, and Peter without having to
ask what the words are, and there's a wealth of reading material for 4 and five
year old children, and lots more for older. Once you are no longer confined
to the awful controlled vocabulary readers, there's a wealth of material for
children. Steven Vincent and Rosemary Benet wrote a lot of great stories.
There's poetry including Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses which I
remember from when I was five. (And, yes, I had to ask what in the heck a
counterpane was.)
Her program works. It isn't considered by most school
districts (although some schools have adopted it with great success) because
while it doesn't preach anything, it does contain the word God and takes
that concept seriously in the lesson that teaches those phonemes. This
appalled the California evaluation committee. They didn't much care whether
the program worked or not; indeed they never tried to find out.
But if you want to insure your kids against the known
failing techniques that still flow from Departments of Education, this is
the way to do it. Get Roberta's Reading
TLC instruction program and use it for half an hour a day (max; some
kids get through faster) for 70 lessons. You can then forget about reading
instruction and teach them the addition tables (to 12 + 12, please) and the
multiplication tables (to 12 x 12 at least) by rote learning -- yes the
awful Drill and Kill -- and you can be sure they can at least do elementary
arithmetic and won't flunk algebra because they can't add. But that's for
another essay.
And when you have done this, help your friends down the
road. The US needs bright kids who can read, write, and cipher. We used to
think the public schools would do that. Alas.
=======
Subject: NCLB
Jerry: A quote from Chaska school
Superintendant David Jennings on NCLB:
"I, for one, believe this particular
federal law to be the single worst piece of federal legislation in my
adult lifetime, and my adult lifetime dates back to 1966. It is not
merely misguided, as some believe. It is, in fact, destructive, and I
believe intentionally so. …The truth is: All the expensive and
disruptive testing we now have through NCLB tells us exactly nothing
about whether kids have the actual skills the 21st century will demand
of them. Simply put, getting right answers means little when we're
asking the wrong questions.
It takes a village to raze a mad
scientist's laboratory.
We all know that the way to be sure that no child is left
behind is to see that no child gets ahead. Jacobin egalitarianism knows no
limits. Particularly when the leaders of the Jacobins are quite certain that
they are more equal than the others. As they always are certain...
=======
I should have remembered that HIGH JUSTICE is
available
from Baen in electronic book format. Go get a copy. It's worth reading.
=============
The last of Bruce Schneier's interview with the head of
TSA is up on his web site. Following it is an interesting note:
Face Recognition Test
Results
For a few months, German police tested a face
recognition system. Two hundred frequent travellers volunteered to have
their faces recorded and three different systems tried to recognize the
faces in the crowds of a train station.
Results
(in German): 60% recognition at best, 30% on average (depending on light
and other factors).
I'd call that a spectacular success. If we have the
computer resources to recognize faces at 30% average in such a test, I
would think that with some improvements in lighting and conditions that
average could get up to 75% eventually. This is no bad thing. Of course
there are all the implications of camera watching crowds.
But in an airline security line it imposes no additional
hardship to have passengers look directly into a camera then turn to
profile; it takes a second or so. This is certainly worth discussion.
========
For the horror story of the week:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/07/28/
eveningnews/main3107316.shtml?source=RSSattr=HOME_3107316
===========
I have recently been told about Technocrati,
http://www.technorati.com/blogs/
www.jerrypournelle.com/?reactions&page=3
which seems to measure site popularities although I don't know how. It
places me at 26,000 which is not very good. Daily KOS by contrast is 8.
Their authority is very high. Mine is not. Instapundit is 38. I don't
question those numbers.
However, I know for a certainty that I have more
circulation (unique site visits per month) than a number of sites ranked
much higher than mine, but I won't give those examples. My guess is that
this, like many other such ratings places, puts highest value on links, and
that some sites spend a lot of time working on getting mutual linkages.
Also, since I divide this place into MAIL and VIEW and most of you never go
to the home page any more but go directly to View, I am sure that has a
large effect on ratings and popularity.
I am just vain enough to wonder if it's worth working on
site organization to change some of this. Alas, I haven't any ideas on how
to do that, but I haven't thought about it either. I suppose I could force
everyone to funnel through one page to get to MAIL and VIEW? Whatever my
"ratings" I know I have one of the highest quality readership in the world.
My mail is probably the most learned mailbag on the web (I include what I
publish and what is sent in confidence). Even the mail I can't publish -- as
you imagine I get far more than I can put up -- reads to me a lot better
than 90% of the weblog comments I see on other blogs.
Suggestions welcomed, but please not idle speculation. I
know I have experts in the readership: let us hear from them. As you will
have surmised, I'm still deep in Hell, and I don't have a lot of time to
read mail anyway (I do manage to read it all, but sometimes it takes time).
========
This was mentioned on Rush this morning. It was instantly
overwhelmed, of course. It sounds interesteing.
http://www.thepeoplescube.com
========
And if you want to know more about the vicissitudes of
authorial marketing, try
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/
living/articles/2006/08/16/author_unknown/
========
Once again, my thanks to those who have recently
subscribed or renewed.
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