No sight-words. No sight-math. No sight-music. Period. Why? Keep reading:
In an effort to wake parents up to the need for their involvement in raising math excellence for their children, I want all parents to be aware of how Reform mathematics curricula are deeply, fatally flawed. Reform math is basically sight-reading for math, often involving calculators without knowledge of basic math skills.
I received an email from a music teacher in Canada, which is making the same educational mistakes befalling all English-speaking countries -
Pavel Ryzlovsky, Vancouver, B.C. says:
“Dear Ms. Godfrey,
“I must say that, over years, I have been reading all those prizes for the "Whole Language method of reading" in disbelief, and I patiently waited for the moment someone would start debunking the myth it was constructed upon.
“I can tell you that the method you justifiably exposed has also been called to assist promotion of the same sort reading in instrumental music teaching, and so it's been doing considerable damage there, too.
“Thank you, and I sincerely hope that your article makes the whole mountain of wrong teaching and poor reading shake.
“All the best to you.”
Pavel later wrote:
“Thank you kindly for sharing this story with me, it's a really good satire [by Cathy Froggat*].
“I would like to add that, with the whole population's silent participation, we have already accumulated several obstacles to good-quality language teaching. The other one I see that will need to be tackled is our adherence to student-oriented learning.
“I remember reading of a study [Project Follow Through] which was conveyed to determine what sort of language-teaching system has been the most effective one. This study was unprecedented in its scope (and was done at an unprecedented cost of some $10mln). It found that teacher-oriented education has been consistently bringing the best results, in few aspects several times better than the student-oriented type.
“The outcome of the study was disseminated among the teaching districts throughout USA; however, only one tenth of their total number embraced the teacher-oriented system; in other districts both parents and teachers refused it as "too demanding" (for children and teachers).
“The sooner we recognize what's wrong at the roots of our approaches the better. We have a long way to go to get out of the trouble we put ourselves into.”
[*Whole Language at the Fork in the Road, Cathy Froggatt, Former NRRF North Carolina Director, Right to Read Report, February 1998.]
I whole-heartedly concur with Pavel! Have you or your children ever taken piano lessons? Students are taught each note’s name, sound, place on the piano and in the musical staff, individually before putting them together into chords, measures, and complete songs. Once those are mastered, they can move on to more complex pieces and learn to add nuances to the music with soft and loud, slow and fast, slurring or staccato, etc.
Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to learn piano the Whole Language way? The piano student would have to learn whole songs by sight, guess through context, cooperation, comprehension, and meaning-making. Yet that is how we are teaching now. How many whole songs can a child memorize by sight? Not many. But any student who has a foundation of individual notes can build up to any and every tune out there. It is the same with phonics and reading.
To continue quoting Laurie Rogers of the Safer Child organization http://www.saferchild.org/:
“American public-school math instruction is a blight upon the land. It’s a crater, a crime, a sin against the children…
“Across the country, school districts happily spent truckloads of taxpayer dollars chasing after every mangy, stray-dog program, and Texas Instruments (TI) and textbook publishers happily made enough money to wallpaper the moon at least twice in pretty thousand-dollar bills.
“TI continues to deliver fancy calculators to wee tots, and textbook publishers and the College Board pant and salivate at being in on the ground floor of new national curricula and assessments.” Hence the gleeful swallowing of the poison.
Music is another great way for children to learn spatial timing, which brain neuron mapping enhances mathematics as well. One thing I like to do to help my beginning musicians learn their treble clef and bass clef notes is to use their fingers and hands to represent the staff lines. The staffs are written vertically, yet they represent notes on the piano that run horizontally. So a pianist has to learn that when the notes on the staff are going up or down, the notes on the piano are going right or left.
Here is a fun mnemonic way to remember the staffs for each clef:
· The fingers themselves represent the lines in each staff, the left hand for the Bass Clef and the right hand for the Treble Clef.
· For the Bass Clef lines, GBDFA, use the mnemonic, “Good Boys Do Fine Always.” (Left hand.)
· For the Treble Clef lines, EGBDF, use the mnemonic, “Every Good Boy Does Fine.” (Right hand.)
· The spaces between the fingers represent the spaces in each staff.
· For the Bass Clef spaces, use the mnemonic, “All Cows Eat Grass.” (Left hand.)
· For the Treble Clef spaces, use the mnemonic, “Fast Apes Climb Easily.” Or say they spell FACE. (Right hand.)
· Middle C is the short line between the two staffs; with its left neighbor B sitting in the space just above the Bass Clef, and with its right neighbor D sitting in the space just below the Treble Clef.
Such learning of the spatial relationships of musical notes, as well as the timing of the notes, helps children to excel not only in music but in reading and math as well.
http://thegodfreymethod.com
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