Re: Attorney generals trying to shut down usenet?

On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:53:20 GMT, James Arthur
<bogusabdsqy@xxxxxxxxxxx> 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.


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.
The manipulators are to blame, not the tests.

I can agree to that


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

They drove out the ones with that property.



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 think it is a little deeper, the kids parents were afraid that their
kids would find out how bad they are at math and demonized it before
the kids could learn any better. Then all the kids who would learn
math anyway went into accounting, math, science and engineering and
the innumerate went into all other fields, including teaching.



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.

In many languages there are such as diphthongs, accented characters,
compound words, and different pronunciation by use. Good teaching
always starts with the clearest and easiest examples. And progresses
to higher levels of difficulty.


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.

Speak for yourself, but if you study it you may find you are wrong.
Personally, i recognize allophone chains Markov-stochastically, with
rewind and retry.


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.

I only seem to do that when i meet a word i do not recognize. And
that has not been happening much for quite some time.



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.

Yes, it was the asinine imposition of an oriental phd who could not be
taught any better about the difference between ideographic written
languages and phonetic written languages.


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.

Actually that is normally done with visual skills and there are better
methods to learn the techniques.


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.

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

Cheers,
James Arthur
.

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