Kudos to Chris Matthews and MSNBC for giving coverage to this very important topic.
MSNBC Chris Matthews hosting a “town-hall” style discussion on literacy
This is what the Main Stream Media should be doing to have a positive impact on the issues facing our country. I am impressed with Chris Matthews for wanting to have a forum on a subject that won’t inspire much controversy, but is truly important to the well being of our country.
Please share widely!
this is one place where the role of parenting is so important, and has a “win or lose” impact on children’s abilities to succeed.
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p>The school systems can’t even begin to address the fact that some children are never going to learn to read and write at the same pace as most students. I do think it is a failure of our education system to not identify those who are having difficulty, instead giving them constant D’s and F’s so failure is a certainty.
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p>My son has had an incredible amount of difficulty keeping up with the other students in his grade. My son is far from stupid. It’s not that he can’t read or write the words. The problem he has is comprehension, and the ability to read in a flowing manner that we all take for granted.
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p>It’s never too late to read with your child. You don’t have to stop reading together when a child turns 6 or 7. It seems in school the teachers stop reading to children around the second grade. This is fine for those who have mastered reading, but for those who are still struggling, it’s a mistake. Parents don’t have to stop reading with their children either. You don’t have to read the whole book to them, but taking turns reading chapters helps them to comprehend the story.
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p>My son is 12 years old and has just entered the 7th grade. Despite the many years of difficulty, as well as the D’s and E’s he’s brought home to me, this summer (finally!)I have seen marked improvement in his ability and desire to read and understand books that are geared to his age range. The same boy who would stuggle for hours to write a 5 sentence paragraph in the 5th grade, just a few days ago handed me a 2 1/2 page short story he wrote in a few hours. It wasn’t even an assignment! He wrote it because he wanted to.
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p>I hope this town hall meeting can help convey the message that in some cases and probably most cases, literacy can be resolved by simply not giving up. Even though the schools have to move forward and maintain their curriculum geared toward what most kids are capable of at a certain age, at home, you can keep reading with your pre-teens, and sitting beside them while they write paragraphs inspiring them on great ideas for a next sentence. I think this works far better than punishing them for poor grades, demanding that they do better. The worst thing any parent or school system can do is just give up.
“illiteracy can be resolved”. I do believe that giving up is the biggest problem. It is up to the parents to not give up on their kids. It’s not a hovering glare or threatened punishment that helps a struggling child to learn. It takes “walk with me through this” support to get them to overcome their difficulties. At least in my experience.
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p>Of course, there are always those fully capable children who just don’t want to learn. A hovering glare is suitable for those situations. I have done the hovering glare thing on occasion.
Two kids in American school system failing badly. Not understanding homework, requiring nightly help and assignments making little sense to parents.
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p>Expat assignment to school system outside of domestic US “new teaching methods” paradigm.
Return to US.
Zero homework problems, passing grades, infrequent questions.
Parental drop out of insane school policies.
Tell kids Dad will back them up in any school confrontation
True story.
(maybe I’m having comprehension difficulties) I will say that some schools just absolutely suck. You are absolutely right about having to do a tremendous amount of home schooling, expecially in the younger grades, and it is difficult to understand the assignments, or exactly what the school is looking for from the kids.
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p>When my daughter was in the 1st and 2nd grade, way back in the early 90’s some genius decided they would teach writing using the “writing to read” program (I think that’s what it was called). The goal was to get kids to write using their imagination, instead of being worried about spelling. So they were told to spell seat > sete, shoe > shu, or any spelling they wanted as long as they wrote the sentence. Well, one day my daughter brought home a paper with a word marked wrong. She had mispelled goat incorrectly. I think they were looking for gote, She spelled it correctly as goat. She was marked wrong for it. I just couldn’t believe it.
While maybe it was a compelling idea to have kids learn the pleasure of imaginative writing before having to tackle the task of spelling correctly, I think some schools may have had implementation problems. In particular, marking words wrong that weren’t mispelled correctly according to the opinion of the teacher. Marking a word wrong for being spelled correctly made no sense.
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p>Without proper implementation, I’m sure this program caused more confusion for the students (and parents)than it achieved success in inspiring students to write.
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p>Achievement in the Writing To Read Program: A Comparative Evaluation Study
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p>IBM’s Writing To Read Program: The Right Stuff or Just High Tech Fluff?
At least that has been my experience. Kids must keep pace with their peers in literacy or either be held back or subject to rigorous intervention until they do. If you can’t read you’ll never be able to learn much else. I’m absolutely NOT saying label these kids as failures, but they cannot be given up on either.
…I have only substitute taught grades K-6, but have a preference for the upper half of that range. About a year ago I got my initial licenses to teach middle and high school History, but have yet to be employed in that capacity.
and teach a class for the year, how do you think you would handle students who were struggling with comprehension and writing?
I’ve had my own teachers growing up who were less than impressed by my writing (but others who thought it was great – I don’t know what accounts for the difference, personal tastes of the teachers I guess). At the risk of sounding elitist (which I probably am) I prefer honors classes, or least homogeneous grouping. I suppose I’d make a good faith effort to work with them while hoping their English teachers do the heavy lifting with regard to writing skills.
I think a “good faith effort” is all anyone can ask for.
Thank You.
Didn’t work out for the current academic year:(, but I’ll keep trying.
Life is being cut into “blurbs”. We live in a world where things that need more than 100 words to say are not valued because they are inefficient.
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p>FML. no lol @ that.
I’ve even heard teachers I’ve worked with say their students sometimes use IM abbreviations in essays. I’m old school; I don’t even let kids use standard contractions in formal writing. That’s how I was taught, but I get the sense others are not as picky.
is surprising. I’ve never heard of that being allowed. Contractions would be OK.
only that teachers have mentioned that the kids use them, although in on instance a teacher said the Vice-Principal shrugged it off as being “part of their culture”.
English, in fits and starts, is a hybrid tongue that has evolved tremendously since Beowulf first appeared in the scop’s tale. English is not known as the “whore of languages” for no reason. It is a language of historical encounters, profitable and violent, in which each new vocabulary word is a solution to a problem. Beyond the original Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Latin, and French, there are over 345 other languages contributing to English. No other language has functioned this way in the past and no other language functions this way now.
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p>My point, though, is this: trying to claim that there is a pure English is folly. Fully one-third of your English is French with the other two-thirds Anglo-Saxon and Norse. English is organic by nature, and will continue to evolve whether people like it or not. If the past is any indication of the future, spelling and usage will change dramatically as English becomes a leaner, cleaner, more efficient means of communication. Conservatism has no place in English, and those who cling to the English of their childhood are bound to be both disappointed and dismissed.
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p>Do we still have written academic standards? We sure do. We currently have an accepted standard, but our MLA is no French Academie–and that’s a good thing. The trick is to teach kids to code shift in writing they way they do in speech. Eventually, though, the inevitable will occur and a critical mass will develop, forcing changes that facilitate better, more effective communication.
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p>Lighten up and come along for the ride. These are wonderful times to be watching language grow before your very eyes. The changes that used to take 100 years now take virtually no time.
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p>As a bumper sticker I had once stated, I’m waiting on the next Great Vowel Shift. Unfortunately, time is running out for me to even sense a little tweak. I’m destined to die a disappointed woman in that respect.
we still need to find gender neutral pronouns for he/she, his/hers.
Singular they works for me, but it would be so much fun to come up with something new.
Vocabulary of course needs to evolve and expand, and occasionally a rule like ending a sentence with a preposition or splitting an infinitive is ruled less necessary even by Oxford University (who fancy themselves a “Supreme Court” for the Queen’s English). I think it’s great that we take from so many other languages, but I’m not sure I agree about the speed of change, either in fact or in desire. I once read that the evolution of Middle English was very fluid before standardization of spelling (Try reading Canterbury Tales in the original.) up until Shakespeare. The language has of course evolved some, but the point being made was that Shakespeare was such an influence that there has almost been a tacit agreement among English speakers that we will not allow English to evolve so much that Shakespeare would have to be translated.
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p>I’m an unapologetic purist when it comes to language, which probably stems from a combination of five years of Latin and learning how to diagram sentences. Agreement between subjects and verbs and pronouns and antecedents are important to me as are knowing the differences between fewer/less, good/well, and even when I’m thinking about it shall/will. Language should be precise and quite frankly it usually sounds like laziness when people argue we shouldn’t stick to perfectly good and useful rules.
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p>Much of what you read in Shakespeare has been modernized, you know, in terms of spelling. Hope you realize that…. Just sayin’….
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p>When I was in graduate school, we had to pass a competency exam in a foreign language. Because I was an English (Literature) major, mine was Middle English, the language of the Canterbury Tales you mention above. I can assure you that the English of 1300, or at the advent of the Great Vowel Shift in 1450, is markedly different from the Elizabethan English of Shakespeare’s 1500-1600s. Standardizing language through spelling works wonders in standardizing pronunciation–until the function of the language itself becomes problematic or until an influx of foreign language speakers become the majority. English has more than doubled in size in the last 100 years, making it the largest language on the planet. In fact, English has more than three times the vocabulary of either French or German. Efforts to fully count and catalog every English word is ongoing, but the addition of new words and newly acquired or changing meanings of existing words make this effort virtually impossible–and the editors of the OED clearly and readily acknowledge this fact.
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p>This is patently absurd. There is no such tacit agreement anywhere and no authority in place to ensure such a notion. Indeed, contemporary English speakers frequently need support in reading and understanding Shakespearean texts. No one is in control of English except the masses who speak it, write it, and read it. Given enough time, the language will, like it always has, evolve in order to provide more efficient and effective communication.
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p>What you are talking about is not precision; it’s custom and convention. The sole purpose of language is to communicate. When communication is not effective, forces will influence syntax, diction, and vocabulary to remedy these deficiencies. If a more effective syntax catches on with enough people, the language rules will eventually accommodate that change. If a foreign word captures what English cannot, that word will be appropriated. It has ever been thus.
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p>You are free to claim some sort of affinity for the English of your youth, but time will leave you in the dust just as surely as it left the generations before us.