Werd Yo

Confusing cause and effect in Common Core:

Professional Highly-Educated Education Researchers noted that high-level early readers were usually just identifying words at a glance -- reading in a "whole word" way. While kids using Phonics read more slowly. Phonics kids were slower readers and struggled with it more.

So hey -- let's stop teaching kids this slow method of reading called Phonics and just teach them "Whole Word" reading!!! Win, win, win!!! It's easier for the students, and even easier for the teachers, as they don't have to teach the step-by-step Phonics method of reading. They can just say the word "horse" is horse and keep saying it until these stupid kids start learning that "horse" means horse.

Here's the problem: This is Cargo Cult mneliaty. Yes, the high-lanrneig, early-raednig kids are in fact using the Wlohe Wrod raenidg mhoted, just as you, reading that gibberish I just wrote, employed Whole Word reading -- looking at the first and last letters of the word and using context and years and years of experience in how the written language works, and what words are expected to come in which place in a sentence to read, fairly easily, a bunch of misspelled words as the words I intended.

The Cargo Cult mistake of these "Educators" is to think that Whole Word reading is a shortcut to teaching reading. No-- Whole Word reading is the endpoint of learning to read. First you read letter by letter, then syllable by syllable (as you have begun to compile, in your Reading Memory, a large list of common syllables). Then you start just reading Whole Word.

Which is why we have an entire generation of kids for whom reading is painful and effective writing is nearly impossible. Confusing cause and effect is a favorite mistake of lefties, activists, religious nuts, and other flavors of True Believers. Unfortunately, it's always the rest of us who end up paying the price for their mistakes, usually through a geometric increase in the level of societal ignorance.


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Shamelessly stolen from Jerry Pournelle's blog