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Sound It Out! Republicans Follow ‘the Science of Reading’ in Radical High School Experiment

Sound It Out! Republicans Follow 'the Science of Reading' in Radical High School Experiment

Republican legislators in 12 states have recently passed laws and regulations requiring Kindergarten-to-3rd Grade instruction in what is now called “the science of reading” — what we used to call phonics. This contrasts with the progressive doctrine of “balanced literacy” that focuses on the “love of reading and storytelling” and finding “context clues”. Memphis-Shelby County, Tennessee — with a large percentage of economically-challenged families — has taken more radical action. They added “the science of reading” to every class in the high school curriculum. Will this reversion to the wayback machine of education rescue the millions of students who can’t read proficiently, or even functionally? 

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27 replies on “Sound It Out! Republicans Follow ‘the Science of Reading’ in Radical High School Experiment”

FINALLY!! I have been hoping for this news since I began teaching young children in the 1970s! You are right about some out of touch administrators dictating how things should be changed and it wrecks the lives of so many. Congrats to these states for standing up and doing the right thing!

I, too, learned to read prior to kindergarten because my mom and sister would read to me whenever possible. Little Golden Books were the publisher of all those early books. By the time I hit first grade, and phonics was being taught as the only way to read, it seemed so easy and natural. My early memories of mom or sis saying repeatedly “sound it out”. Burned into my memory.
When I had 3 daughters of my own, I read and read and read, and then read some more to them. Each graduated at different times, in taking the wheel of the book and reading to me, but they all did earlier than their friends. To give them a huge fun boost, we also played games on these new thingys called Personal Computers. In 1993, a transformational game called “Sound it out Land” came out and I snapped it up. Not only can all my daughters remember the songs, the music and the characters in that game, I can recall off of the words and tunes too. Without even thinking about it. It just comes out. Just like, many of us can sing(badly) the words and tunes of songs we heard on the radio when we were young. Tempo, tonal inflections, everything.
Music and words. Hand in hand. In high school we were given extra credit if we could recite Pi over 30 places passed the decimal point. Many struggled at it. For some reason, I practiced mine in a jazzy, early rap like tempo. I cleared 30 and headed to 50 places…I may have sounded a little ridiculous doing it, but it worked. Music/syncopation and words (numbers). Over the years, I’ve often thought that this too might have been a way to burn words, the many sounds of letters and combinations of letters into memory.
With my daughters, they tracked through their elementary school years with teachers trying to undo everything my wife and I had worked so hard to accomplish. The 90’s were a period of “inventive writing”, spelling words in any way that you’d remember. This was a disaster. I would volunteer as a parent to help various teachers and in reading this invented style of writing, I would get so mad. “Just go back to the old way of teaching kids to read and write!” I would tell them. I soon was asked to stop volunteering.
Nice to see Phonics making a comeback.

The recently departed comedian Gallagher had a rather funny and clever riff about how stupid the English language was. Is still on YT , link below. We couldn’t even get the simplest words right. He’d say, spell Go. (Audience would respond, GEE OH!) Now, spell Do. (Audience would respond Dee OH!) He’d reply, There, you have it. We couldn’t even get those two simple words correct. Should have been pronounced Go and Dough. Or Goo and Do. Funny bit….then he smashed a watermelon with a mallet and everyone cheered….. Was it as brilliant as George Carlin’s comparison between baseball and football? Probably not. But it was clever.

https://youtu.be/Mfz3kFNVopk

I remember sitting on my dad’s lap and reading to him when I was five or six. Whenever I got stuck on a word, he said the same thing — “sound it out”. At some point I became fascinated with Greek and Roman mythology and read every book on it in my school library. I can’t imagine how isolating it must feel to be a poor reader.
There’s a good movie called Stanley & Iris with Robert de Niro and Jane Fonda. He is a functional illiterate and she teaches him to read. It opens up a whole new world for him.

Mrs. Ron was an elemtary school teacher for 3+ decades. Teaching young kids to read was her biggest joy. I vividly recall when she came home at the beginning of the school year with the “new and improved” reading method. She was pissed. I simply said, do it your way. If someone is in your class, pull out the new workbook, if not do it your way.
Her kids always did better later. Wonder why.
Though she almost did get written up for not following the preferred method.
Then she retired. That was a really good day.

But phonics still has limits in generating understanding:
You can sound out “postmodernism” but it still doesn’t have any real meaning, at least that relates to reality.
Maybe it would make sense if you read it backwards, like Hebrew or Arabic?? 🙂
Does anyone know how the Chinese children learn their script? Do the pictographs build up from sub-pictographs in any way? Or is it “learn 2000 to 10000 pics before you are considered literate”?

I have a Chinese business associate livingand working in Shenzhen, grew up in Futian, China but went to university in Helsinki, Finland. Brilliant guy and fluent in English. Confided in me that even he doesn’t know all the characters, “so so many” as he says.
I will ask, how he learned and how he’s teaching his 5 year old.

English is so weird a language anyway, with several meanings or spellings for several different words and letters ( many examples, like “their”, “there” or the letter “c” sounding like “see” or “kay” ), you’d better know the elementary stuff cold before grasping the strange stuff.

So happy to hear this. Reading well is number one in having a successful life financially and socially. Phonics makes sense. Whole reading, with all its levers that are cumbersome, frustrating and do nothing to foster real learning, with absolutely no science behind it, has ruined the intellectual capacity of way too many children and people. But, I believe that’s the intention. The progressives want an ignorant populace to rule over.

Now bring back sentence diagraming! (That should tell you how old I am…)

When I was little, my mom loved dragging me along on her thrift store trips. There was one store – DAV – that was huge and had all of the children’s books in a big bin. I would simply sit on the floor and paw through them and spend my time reading while she shopped. I still remember the smell of the wood floors…

But rules in school are racist, donchaknow? I doubt that the blue states will ever go back to properly teaching the kids. After all, it would interfere with their dumbing down goals and activist breeding programs.

Reading is far and away the most important thing to learn. With it, one can overcome many obstacles in life. Without it, minor obstacles become insurmountable.

This is a hot topic for me. My mother read to me each night before bed. By first grade I was reading at the third grade level. And in the third grade I was reading at the fifth grade level. Now, nearly 70, I read at least 5 books each month. It is my most favorite pastime. All thanks to the few minutes my mother spent each night, and phonics. Also, our regular babysitter was the local librarian. She would arrive with a stack of books, always slightly above my reading mastery, and we would read aloud.

I read to both my boys when they were too young to read for themselves. They learned at an early age that there were wonderful stories in those ‘book things’. They outgrew the pictured kids books very young and were soon hearing me read classic stories like Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Deerslayer and The Spy, Poe’s The Gold Bug, etc.

Then when they were old enough to read for themselves they were allowed to stay up an extra half hour after bedtime provided that they were in bed and reading something approved by their mother and me. This incentivized them to read, an extra half hour before they had to go to sleep was a big deal to them (kids, especially boys, hate bedtime anyway) and they thought they were ‘getting over on mom and dad’ by availing themselves of that time.

I couldn’t begin to count the nights I quietly removed a book from the hands of a sleeping boy, bookmarked and closed it, then turned out the light on the nightstand and left the room.

I was gone a lot when they were very young, off keeping the world safe for Democracy. This reading/bedtime thing was a policy I instituted in our home and their mom filled in for me when I was away. Until they started reading for themselves they always insisted that Dad read them their bedtime stories so that allowed me to spend some quality time with my boys every night I was home.

All of this had the effect both of encouraging them to read and of going to sleep to dream big dreams inspired by their reading. It was time well spent and worth every minute of the effort.

ahhh, thanks for the warning. Now I have to read it. My comfortable, safe little life needs some scares. Actually, for really scary reading just stay up with the alternative news and read all about what’s happening, been happening, will keep happening to bring on world destruction. Sad!

LOL, The Gold Bug was one of my favorite stories when I was a kid so I shared that and many others with my kids too.

I’m sure The Gold Bug is off the politically correct reading list for many years now. Too bad too, there’s a whole generation or more that’s missing out on some mighty fine books just because those books accurately portray the times they were written in.

Funny how that works. According to modern Leftist thought having been exposed to the character Jupiter in that story I should be a card carrying, bedsheet wearing Ku Klux Klansman at the very least by now.

My parents did the same with me as I did with my kids. The idea of an extra half hour to read before lights out didn’t originate with me, my parents started that system. My two kids, both sons, did the same with their kids too.

My mother’s father, my maternal grandfather, was an avid reader too. I remember visiting there one summer and reading “Alas Babylon”, finishing the paperback and then forgetting to get it along with my stuff when I went home. Grandpa read it in the meanwhile and thought it was great and could I suggest anything else to read?

The world of literature and the printed word is a major factor in the civilization of human beings. By which I mean it marks a demarcation point on the line between being a person aware of your own humanity and just a human shaped animal.

It’s kind of sad that it has to be ‘rediscovered’ by these Republican run states but at the same time it’s hopeful too.

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