Episode 123: Sight-words are a con?? Of course. (Wed., Nov. 6, 2023)
Sight-words, always a con, always a funny bit of business that the professors of illiteracy came up with.
The field of reading has never been more chaotic and irrational. Every teacher seems to have a video explaining some subtle leap into a better future. But all of these things seem to be mainly concerned with keeping sight-words in play.
Please, confront the idiocy of sight-words so that we can get on to doing something better.
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MEMO TO K-12, TEACH KIDS TO READ IN FIRST GRADE
https://www.tumblr.com/edworld/732927928834441216/memo-to-k-12-teach-kids-to-read-in-first-grade-or
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Word-Wise Education
757-455-5020
Bruce Deitrick Price
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION: OVERVIEW
Recurring themes. Big ideas. Unifying concepts.
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LET'S FIX EDUCATION by Bruce Deitrick Price
Episode 123 - Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023
Sight-words are a con?? Of course.
Ladies and gentlemen…
So, what is the best way to teach sight-words? Don’t ever start!
On the Internet, we see a cacophony of competing claims about reading. Nobody has a chance of understanding the convoluted arguments, not parents, not children, not teachers.
This is the grim picture for the last 90 years leading up to the painful situation where we have 50 million functional illiterates, all of them suffering and handicapped.
In 1931 our school system rejected phonics and forced children to memorize sight-words. At that point our literacy rate began to decline and continues to do so. That's all the more remarkable as 3 or 4 years earlier Dr. Samuel Orton, a neurologist, conducted a lengthy study comparing phonics to sight-words, and concluded that sight-words don't work and even worse, they will damage your child's cognitive abilities. Orton said it first and best.
Case closed, you would think. Sight-words are stupid and criminal. Everybody at the top knew this. But the far left, the Bolsheviks, the Comintern, were flowing into the country in the 1920s. They knew reading was critical. If they could destroy that, the country would start to fall apart. They hoped to conquer the US just as Lenin had conquered all of Russia. Illiteracy would do the job on the cheap.
The next big event came in 1955 when Rudolf Flesch wrote a famous best seller explaining why Johnny can't read, namely, he was made to memorize sight-words. What's the problem with that, you ask. 1) Too many words by far. A college student probably has a vocabulary over 100,000 words, but it's a rare student who can memorize 1,000 sight-words. 2) The words all look too much alike. Most children reach the fourth grade already defeated, as the new words overwhelm earlier words. Many children can’t memorize even 200 sight-words, which means they can't learn much history, geography, science, or literature. (For a quick article about this topic, Google “K-12: Sight-words are a sick joke.")
But our Education Establishment kept pushing its sinister plot. In 1956 the Education Establishment spun off the International Reading Association. The purpose was to demonize phonics, and extol the wonders of sight-words.
Here is the bottom line. The history of reading from 1931 to now has been a continuing conspiracy to hide the fact that sight-words don't work and can't possibly work. But this was the dominant method and OK with the media, the great universities, the foundations, and the country’s opinion leaders, who were apparently all on drugs.
Everybody in the ed business knew that sight-words don't work. The two biggest pretenders were Professors Frank Smith and Ken Goodman who created clever sophistries to protect the central sophistry. Smith breezily estimated that ordinary Americans could memorize anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 sight-words. That's like saying ordinary Americans can high jump 6 to 12 feet.
Frank Smith said, "Readers do not need the alphabet.”
These guys sabotaged American education for 40 years. Then they were eclipsed by the Queen of Reading, Lucy Calkins, starting in the middle 1990s.
These three pretenders pretty much agreed that the way you read is, if you can't remember a sight-word, you check context, you analyze picture clues, you guess, you skip ahead. All nonsense.
Many millions of children who are in this trap ended up on tranquilizers and therapy, remediation, counseling, and all the rest. So they waste thousands of hours of school time but can't read a newspaper. All of this is tremendously expensive because bad methods create years of additional problems, all of which are expensive.
All the time Lucy Calkins was selling sight-words, I was writing articles saying sight-words are poison. Columbia University finally divorced her. I have fun quoting Marva Collins who declared to the world that all of her students could read by Christmas of the first year. Ergo if your students can’t read in the first grade, you should get out of the education business.
What we needed all along and still need is more people willing to take a few minutes to understand these issues. They are confusing in the same way that magic tricks are confusing until somebody tells you the secret. The secret about sight-words is they were a con from the start. They are like the tooth fairy and the Easter bunny. Please don’t base your school system on mythical creatures.
Here’s more sad news. If young readers devote even a little effort to memorizing sight-words, this will typically reduce literacy. Because there will always be that moment when you see a word, and then you think, Oh, is that a sight-word I should have memorized or is that something I’m supposed to sound out??? So this is schizophrenic reading and you can never have a good reading speed. You'll be slow and anxious. Don't put up with this.
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THE WAR ON THE ALPHABET, PHONICS, READING,
WESTERN CIVILIZATION, AND YOU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeXubIcv6l0
I have more than a dozen videos about reading, on YouTube. Each takes a different tack because the subject has been complicated by lots of deceptions.
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How To Teach Reading
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2VcFj4FyAc&t=8s
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My YouTube channel, with many entertaining, short videos.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2YPIDPnXI_SVTHo15AB5rQ
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