There’s anger in New York City over the state of children’s reading ability. Recently a retired New York English professor has been bitter about the school board, under “Calkins,” teaching “whole word.” He blogged that “evidence-based” science would presumably support, instead, teaching by using phonics, as in having children read by sounding out the letters. That’s how my elementary school taught, calling it “phonetics.”
On his blog a commenter wrote, “I hope all this does mean a move back to phonics.”
I tried to comment too, but my efforts were not posted: I blame human nature—more on that later.
The prof replied, “I hope so. I just hope that a new and supposedly improved Calkins curriculum doesn’t carry the day.” (September 4, blog Orange Crate Art—I won’t link, as I am talking behind his back)
I understand the prof being bitter. When I left high school, graduates entering college didn’t have to take a screening test for adequate English, but a few years ago the professor’s peers reported they no longer had students read anything aloud in class: It was too painful hearing university level students read haltingly one whole word at a time.
Terms: If the teacher puts up a sign “Two” by a pair of objects, then that is teaching by “whole word.” Like the Chinese memorizing painted pictograms: I remember a high school girl in San Francisco who could race through Ivanhoe while she was still struggling to memorize basic calligraphy.
If the teacher draws a big “S,” perhaps with a snake tongue, saying it hisses like a snake, then that is “phonics.”
Had I wanted to join the bandwagon, I’m sure my conformist comment would have been posted: I could have said my niece was halfway through grade three before my sister learned she was …still illiterate… Her school used whole word. So the girl repeated grade three in a school that used phonics—and learned to read. Forever a year behind, but at least she could read the Harry Potter books.
But I’m an academic, a free thinker, and my actual comment was not posted.
Here’s an expanded essay-version of my rejected comment:
In the late 1980’s I knew a fellow-baby boomer taking Education. A mature student, Anne was skeptical of the fierce, fiery debate on “whole word versus phonics.” She told me that back when her grandmother was a young teacher in Wales, the same debate was raging.
One day in the Fraser Valley, a young Lawrence Peter, born a month before my father in 1919, was teaching. He was later to write his irreverent The Peter Principle. This day would have been before 1965 when he left Canada for greener pastures. (Despite what my search engine claims about dates for whole word) His school included the best Grade One teacher for miles around. She was an old lady with a sterling reputation: All the parents wanted their child in her class to learn to read.
On the first day of class she would write, and every day recite, “How many apples do you see? We can count them, one two three.”
One June day, just after class, in her last month of teaching, she carried her teaching materials out to the schoolyard incinerator. (My school installed one too) As an enthusiastic teacher, Peter just had to ask: Which side of the hot debate was she on? She answered with a sharp laugh, “Phonetics? Whole word? I teach both!”
My question is: Why the hundred years long debate? And why was my (streamlined) comment not printed? Maybe to cut this Gordian knot requires a Freud or a Shakespeare, someone who knows human nature better than I.
I can only guess: Consider etymology: “tomy” means to cut (anatomy) and “di” means di-vide in two. (Dice is old French for twice) Possibly, perhaps, maybe …humans have a blind spot for a false dichotomy…
If so, then I can predict something hypothetical: Out east, where many persons of Jewish heritage live—Eastern universities observe Jewish days off—if, one Sabbath day, someone deliberately drove a van into a group of Jews leaving a synagogue, then the dichromatic responses would be “All Easterners hate Jews” or “Only that mad driver hates Jews, everyone else is normal.”
I can confidently say such a crazy sounding thing because that is exactly what happened after December 6, when a mad gunman at an Eastern polytechnical school spared male students and killed female ones. “Society believes in violence against women” or “only one man does.” Remember? The truth was somewhere in the middle, but I only read one solitary person ever saying so. I wonder if she felt lonely?
At my campus (now vanished) Women’s Centre, they would organize with fourteen candles to remember the deaths of December 6 every year.
The motto of the university, inscribed on a white arch near the student building, is “I will lift up my eyes.” Not in Latin, in Gaelic. How queer that I can look down to doodle on a two dimensional paper, but to think abstractly I will look up and beyond, trying to grasp human nature.
The last line of my rejected comment, referring to Peter and the old teacher, was: “I have been skeptical of false dichotomies ever since.”
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Sean Crawford
Miles and years from the University of Calgary
But as close as ends of folded paper
September
2023
Book note: The famous book of my favourite decade, bashing whole word, in 1955, was Why Johnny Can’t Read.
Seth Godin blog note: On August 1st Seth’s blog included:
When we revert to a testable analysis of what works, we’re relying on the one thing that all humans share: reality. But cultural connection, peer pressure and the power of affiliation and status often short-circuit that analysis.
