Re: Attorney generals trying to shut down usenet?

James Arthur wrote:
MooseFET wrote:
On Jun 17, 3:11 pm, James Arthur <bogusabd...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
MooseFET wrote:
On Jun 16, 8:02 pm, James Arthur <bogusabd...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
MooseFET wrote:

<snip>

I would say that it is one of your delusions. It is always the
republicans that want to remove courses other than reading and writing
and put in tests that are multiple choice.

Tests are not the problem--that's an excuse.

Multiple choice questions often are a problem. You have to be terminally stupid to score less than 20% in a five way multiple choice test.

I disagree with that. Note that I said "multiple choice". Teaching
to the multiple choice test has removed what little real education was
left.

That's a corruption, of and by, and from the teachers.

The idea of testing is to make sure kids have learned, as
gaged by a representative sampling of the kids' knowledge.

"Teaching to the test" is gaming the system, trying to outwit,
to bias the outcome, to subvert its purpose. It's cheating.

That is a bit too strong. If the test is so weak that it is amenable to simple rote training then it is a clear measurement fault.

There is an old maxim. What you measure gets controlled and the corollary is that everything else goes to the wall.

The manipulators are to blame, not the tests.

People of integrity--like teachers once were and should
be--don't do that.

And if their careers and bonuses depend on getting the best out of their class - what then? Hedge fund managers see nothing wrong with shorting a weak bank to deliberately drive its share price down for a quick profit or speculating on oil futures to drive them ever higher...

Big bonus and career progression or integrity you choose.

The problem is
multi-faceted,

I agree with this.

much stemming from bogus new-age theories
about education.

The "new math," for example.

The problem with the "new math" is that the teachers don't understand
math and thus can't really teach it. The "new math" was about
introducing subjects like modulo earlier in the schooling. This is a
good thing. Unfortunately neither the teachers nor most of the
parents understood what it was all about.

I thought this was mainly a problem in the UK where it is fashionable to say "I am useless at maths". Japan doesn't have this problem.

And "the new reading" where
young kids aren't taught how to sound out or spell words,
but to recognize whole words by outline and shape.

I agree with you on this but not completely. Many people do read
using th recognizing of whole words. There are some cute things
around on the internet where every word in it is horridly misspelled
but most people can read it without any trouble at all. Some hardly
even notice that anything is wrong with the words. I have trouble
reading at the best of times but was among those who hardly noticed.

This needs clarification. Traditionally young kids first learn the alphabet, learn letters' sounds, then parse words letter- by-letter, then learn pronunciation.

They learn this at an early age, when languages and certain skills
come easily, for whatever brain-developmental reason.

Later, with experience, we recognize whole words.

In English yes...

But in languages like Chinese and Japanese you have no choice ultimately but to learn to recognise whole words (and completely different phonetic readings of the same character according to context) it has to be that way. You also have to learn to draw them with the right stroke order.

My favourite Japanese nonsense rhyme uses various characters for "ni" and "wa". And translates roughly as "there are 2 chickens in the yard".

I know
a college kid today who struggles mightily as a result...

I grew up with "sounding the words out" etc. Perhaps part of the
reason I struggle is because of that. It is a very slow way to
process a word.

You can grow out of that by learning to flash read newspapers. It just takes practice - although I expect it is easier when you are young.

The young gent I know was taught whole-word recognition right off.
Consequently, he couldn't process new words he hadn't seen before.
Even words he knew verbally mystified him in print: strange and new, undecipherable, like hieroglyphics.

Assuming they taught it sensibly he would get the 2, 3 and 4 character phonemes first and grow from there. A few irregular UK English spellings of longer words might cause him trouble but it should still work OK.

It's taken him years of hard work to learn, later in life, how
to painstakingly decode words by sounding them out. In college.

He covers the letters with his fingers, exposing one at
a time, as if he never developed the fine motor skills
needed to scan them visually.

It doesn't come easily; he still prefers a talking e-dictionary.

You could almost say he's functionally dyslexic, except he
isn't dyslexic. He's a hard-working, smart, great guy. Normal.
Proven, if nothing else, by his current mastery of the method
he wasn't taught.

He could still be genuinely dyslexic. One of the most brilliant guys I have ever met (a top mathematician) was seriously dyslexic at written English with a reading vocabulary of under a thousand words, but he was still amazing at solving mathematical research problems.

The genius' teaching fad that so equipped him? That method
is no longer taught. Turns out...it doesn't work. Sigh.

Several faddish methods to teach English have been and gone. But the guy you have described may well have some kind of perceptual problem.

Regards,
Martin Brown
** Posted from http://www.teranews.com **
.

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