Sing a Song of Sixpence - the cause of the educational decline

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

5 common teaching methods may do more harm than good

SEEING THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES – PROJECT FOLLOW THROUGH
These five common reading methods may actually do more harm than good.

Have you ever heard of Project Follow Through (PFT)? Probably not. For almost 30 years (1967-1995), educrats experimented on U.S. kids in over 200 schools nationwide, with 22 different learning/teaching models. The idea was to create the Great Society with educational excellence. The opposite happened. The effects of PFT are still ongoing today, unfortunately.

After the results were analyzed, only one model of teaching proved to work – the direct instruction model using phonics. 

All the other models, whole language (sight-reading), child-led learning, inquiry-led learning, discovery, self-esteem first, etc., failed to produce positive results, and many even did more damage to children. 

(Ironically, self-esteem models did not produce self-esteem. Achievement in basic skills did. Models that emphasize basic skills produced better results on tests of self-concept than did other models.)

Paradoxically, the method that worked and worked well for all academic subjects, Direct Instruction (with phonics), was developed by an advertising-agent-turned-preschool-expert, a non-university, non-educational, non-PhD, father at home, Siegfried (Zig) Engelmann.

So what happened to the results of this long, expensive study, PFT? They were blocked from being disseminated out to the educational world- the teachers and principals that deal with our children every day. Why? Because 21 teaching models failed (including Whole Language and its many names), and only Direct Instruction proved to work. These results were blocked most likely to advance some university professors’, curriculum organizers’, and textbook publishers’ careers. And what about the politics of egos having to admit that the un-credentialed dad got it right? Never!

As a result, many of our children continue to be led down the path of illiteracy because Mr. Ernest House and Mr. Gene Glass, backed by the Ford Foundation, convinced the Department of Education that it was not beneficial (for whom?) to publish the results of Project Follow Through. Billions of taxpayer dollars created not the Great Society, but a mediocre, declining one instead. It’s ironic that men named Glass & House were “throwing stones” at the only successful method. 

Is your child’s education (and future) safe? Take this simple quiz.

Does your child:

1) Know the letter names, but not their individual letter sounds?
2) Know how to recognize words by sight, but not how to sound them out?
3) Confuse words easily?
4) Confuse letters and numbers?
5) Guess at unknown words?
6) Need pictures to help guess at sentence context?
7) Feel frustrated with reading?

If you said YES to any of these questions, your child may develop induced-dyslexia or fall further and further behind each year. 

Do something NOW to change his/her reading skills from sight-words to true phonics with The Godfrey Method. Give your child the tools to succeed in life!


http://thegodfreymethod.com/content/SeeingtheEmperorsNewClothes5commonreadingmethodsmaydomoreharmthangood 

What the experts never told you about preventing dyslexia

Saving Jack and Jill – Learning Disabilities

What the experts never told you about preventing dyslexia

                In medicine, the Chinese focus on prevention while westerners focus on treatment. Unfortunately, we focus on learning problems much the same way. Prevention of most learning disabilities is possible and so much more effective than treatment after the fact.

I hate to admit that one of the most embarrassing times in my life was when the elementary school notified me that my 4^th-grade son needed to stay after school twice a week for remedial reading class. How could I, the early-reading and gifted-child expert, have a son who couldn’t read on grade level? He was struggling with comprehension and spelling. What a wake-up call for me! I had been too busy with my career to notice my son’s lapse.

                After a couple of months of school tutoring, he hadn’t improved much in reading comprehension, so I pulled him out of the after-school classes and fixed it at home. My son didn’t really have a learning disability; what he had was perfectionism and impatience.

He was too impatient to take the time to sound out big words, then upset if he didn’t get them right the first time. The teacher’s “help”, as is often the case, was to tell him to guess at the word based on context. What a confusing, horrible method, yet pretty universal.

                So what was the fix? I realized that too much sight-reading at school had trumped the preschool phonics lessons I had given him years ago at home.  I simply started having my son read chapter books (no pictures) out loud to me. We started with an Animorphs series book, which has a higher vocabulary.

When he came upon an unknown word, I had him take the time to break it up into smaller syllables and sound out each separately, then string them together. If he still didn’t recognize the word, we discussed its meaning. In only a couple of sessions, my son started choosing chapter books from the library and reading all by himself at home. His spelling also began to improve.

                We are still working on his writing because he doesn’t have the patience to get his ideas down on paper, easily. But he will. One thing I noticed, that the schools missed, is that my son has a disconnect somewhere in his brain between having a thought and writing it down.

He could tell me about his last-night’s dream, but he couldn’t write it down as a story for me. Something got lost in translation. The schools thought he was just lazy or stubborn. His IQ is above average, so no one realized he has a problem.

                Thank goodness for “mothers’ intuition.” I got out my Flip® video camera and taped my son while he told me about his dreams. Then we played the video on our TV. My son watched and listened to himself tell the story, sentence by sentence. I would pause the video after each sentence and have him write it down. It worked really well! I suppose a tape recorder might help, too, if no video is available.

                Recording my son and re-playing it, helped make a connection in his brain for him to get his ideas down on paper. Basically, we slowed down the thought-process for him, and bypassed the frustration of forgetting things before getting them translated through his hand onto the paper. We could re-play anything he missed. It worked well, and he began to feel successful with writing.

                Another frustration for my son was that he is a slow, tedious writer. He is a perfectionist and is too careful with forming his letters. The video allowed him to write at his pace without losing the thoughts in his head. It also kept him more focused because we could re-play parts if he was distracted.

In the past, the slow act of writing could itself be a distraction for him, then a frustration with a lost thought. In school he would often crumple up his papers and quit. Teachers assumed he was having a “bipolar moment” and missed the word-disconnect between his ears, eyes, brain, and hands. We are teaching him cursive writing to overcome this.

                What parents do now may determine if their child’s learning disability is a stumbling block or a stepping stone. My son would have never thought of a solution on his own, which is why direct-instruction from adults is so important (and why some of the “unschooling” movement’s ideas don’t sit well with me – more in Vol. 6 of It's Not Rocket Surgery!).

For a child, twenty minutes with a parent can mean more in cognitive improvement than six hours with a teacher, as shown by Hartman Rector, Jr. (Vol. 11), and others. Parents need to be involved, whether their children attend public, private, or home school.

                We will discuss the paradox of resource class later in Vol. 9 of It's Not Rocket Surgery! In short, sight-reading and public school remediation classes often destroy self-esteem without much progress. Kids don’t let each other be too smart or too stupid without teasing.

And commercial remediation such as Kumon® or Sylvan® can cost parents an arm & a leg. Why should they have to pay to fix what schools do to their children? They already paid their school taxes!

As researcher Dr. Samuel Blumenfeld says, “Dyslexia can be artificially induced in school (by sight-reading),” and “Dyslexia: the disease you get in school.”

http://thegodfreymethod.com/blog/saving-jack-and-jill-what-they-never-told-you-about-dyslexia