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Is Phonics "Killing Us Softly"?
In the letter, Dave provides a rebuttal, along with personal insights. Dave clearly has very deep emotions about those who defend outdated and ineffective reading theories. Some of his feelings may seem extreme. But considering the lifelong damage done to children in the name of fuzzy theories, maybe strong emotion is called for.
Dear Mr. Meyer: I read your article, "Killing Us Softly With Phonics," with about as much interest as I could muster after reading dozens of other such extended complaints over the past eight years. I don't know what made me respond to yours after failing to respond to so many others, but respond I must. But before discussing your piece directly, I would like you to know a little bit about my wife and myself.
My wife is 49 and I am 48, which means we both grew up in the heyday
of "look-say." We each attended schools in which phonics was
essentially not taught. Oh excuse me. I suppose it was actually
taught "all day," as the teacher in your article claims. Except that
it was apparently taught in such a subtle manner that essentially
nobody picked any of it up. I don't know the particulars of my wife's
experience, but in my school they used the Ginn "My Little
During our school years I excelled while, unbeknownst to me, my
future wife languished. The difference in our experiences had mostly
to do with what happened to us at home. My mother, for reasons I will
never know (she died before I became heavily involved in the
education biz), spent countless hours with me before I attended
school. She taught me phonics, carefully, extensively, and
intensively, which is the only useful way in which it can be taught,
because almost nobody picks up enough of it in any other way. By the
time I arrived at first grade (my kindergarten was little more than a
day-care), the Ginn series books were a joke to me. I could read them
and everything else they had in the school. Reading seemed like
second nature to me, and I would be in my thirties before I realized
that it wasn't "second nature" to everybody else, or indeed that it
wasn't "nature" at all.
My wife's story is quite different. She came from a relatively
impoverished rural family and her parents had no understanding of the
realities of reading. Sadly her parents entrusted her education to
the local public school, which provided her, year after year, with
look-say readers and "real" literature, expecting her to eventually
start reading if only she would (ironically) already be reading, as
if no technique were involved. While I was breezing along through
anything I wanted (I was reading Mark Twain extensively somewhere
around the age of 9), my future wife was stumbling with difficulty
through her school texts, unable to determine what most of the words
on the page were. And her "teachers" were relentless in their
expectation that she should just simply already know what they are,
or that she should memorize all of the words she would ever need to
read. I don't know if her "teachers" understood, when they sent her
home with her 20-word memorization list every week, that there are
over 100,000 distinct root words in the English language, and that at
such a memorization rate it would take my wife several lifetimes to
memorize them all, but then I would guess that her "teachers" didn't
know or think about much of anything.
Needless to say, all of my wife's schooling experience was a
struggle. With no rational strategy for recognizing unfamiliar
printed words - tens of thousands of words that she could easily have
understood because she already knew them verbally - her task was
impossibly huge. In her later schooling years she did not understand
that her teachers had already slammed shut the doors of science,
history, English, art, music, philosophy, and anything else she might
have wanted to study, by the time she had left first grade. Nor did
she understand that she was engaged in a hopeless competition against
kids who had advantages at home - kids like me who had strategies for
recognizing unfamiliar printed words and converting them into their
familiar verbal equivalents. So of course she eventually came to
agree with the assessments of her "teachers" - namely that she just
didn't have what it takes to make it.
Today my wife is still reading-debilitated. The difference between
our reading capabilities is staggering. I still use my phonics to
decode unfamiliar words and proper names effortlessly; my wife
stumbles, realizes that she is not up to the task, sometimes guesses
(almost always incorrectly), and eventually just moves on or gives
up. She would not likely distinguish "infanticide" from
"insecticide." A prefix like "deoxyribonucleic" is, quite simply, an
impossibility for her - she has no strategy for reading such a thing,
and probably never will. She doesn't have time these days, you see,
to compensate for the neglect and abuse that were heaped upon her as
a child.
Her reading disability goes much deeper, though, than her inability
to pursue lofty intellectual topics. Because of her
look-say-whole-language-balanced-literacy strategies, she cannot be
trusted to read the instructions that come with a new product (it's
just too hard so she usually doesn't even bother). I cannot even
assume that she will "get" the contents of a simple handwritten note
that I might leave for her in the morning as I go off to work. The
other day, for example, I left a note asking her to pick up some film
for me. That evening we were going to be in a big rush, so I closed
the note by asking her to please put some of the new film in our
camera bag. But when she read the note, she somehow left off the
final word "bag." Why would she skip this word? I guess it's all part
of the loosey-goosey, student-centered "you decide what's important"
bag of tricks she was handed by the jokesters who stood in front of
her classrooms 40 years ago. Who knows why anyone does anything in
the vague and zany world of
look-say-whole-language-balanced-literacy? So she presumed that the
camera was empty, opened the back, and destroyed all the pictures
that we had of our daughter's graduation.
My wife is the perfect and ideal product of the
look-say-whole-language-balanced-literacy teaching empire, and you
should all stand up, give yourselves a hand, and take a bow. She does
exactly what you all told her to do: guess what word might fit in
here, skip "unimportant" words, and move on. She is a titan of whole
language methodology.
So why am I responding to your article? I guess it just made me so
violently upset that I had no other choice. The article is remarkably
consistent with similar stuff that I have read over the years:
In short, the entire article is a travesty of self-serving
propaganda.
If you really believe that doing your jobs (i.e. meeting the
expectations of your students' parents) is equivalent to being held
hostage, and if you will refuse to teach reading in any way other
than to conduct a little junior literary society, much like the ones
that parent volunteers conduct for free at local libraries, then
maybe you should do us all a favor and resign. On my way to work
every day in Chicago (where I am "held hostage," incidentally, to my
employer's wishes) I pass a number of people who refuse to be held
hostage. They sit on the sidewalks, doing their best to look
pathetic, jingling change in their plastic super-size Taco Bell
cups, hoping that some of us will drop some more coins in. Or maybe a
dollar bill. Perhaps you and "Karen" would fit in well with their
little society.
Sincerely, |
