Friday, May 1, 2020

Idiots, Tribes or citizens



"There are three kinds of people in any given society.

This was first identified and supported by the founders of democracy in Ancient Greece.

For the Greeks, the first kind of people is the idiots. To the Greeks, an idiot is a totally self-centred person and a totally selfish person. An idiot is always looking for personal gain and personal interest.

The 2nd kind is – The tribespeople. By this the Greeks meant a tribal mentality. They are the people who cannot think beyond their small tribe or group.

For tribe people, their only allegiance and ultimate allegiance is to their tribe. The tribe people are always afraid of things that are different that are a little alien to them. They are always suspicious and fearful. They always dealt with difficult people with intimidation and with force.

The 3rd kind – ideal people – citizens. A citizen is someone who has the skill and the knowledge to lead a public life. A citizen strives for the common good. He knows his responsibility as well as his rights to society.

That is a choice every individual has to make in a society."

The above is extracted from a video by Dr.Kevichusa. (Dr.Kevi Naga).

Why am I so bitter with most of the educators I have dealt with? Many of them are intimidating.

Others do not want to look beyond their noses and cannot think beyond their group. Why do some  Phonics proponents insist that Dolch words should not be memorised when it has proven to be useful for reading. 

Pam Kastner, whose profile says: PaTTAN’s State Lead Consultant for Literacy. A passionate advocate for the science of reading and MTSS, had said, in reference to one of my posts, that no one should teach visual memorisation.  

“English is an alphabetic orthography. It is not logographic. We cannot visually memorize every word in the English language nor should we "teach" any word in that manner. We must use grapheme-phoneme correspondences to orthographically map words storing them as mental...” (Pam Kastner)

Pam Kastner went ahead and tagged 12 others who probably will think that I had suggested kids  learn Dolch Words by visually memorising them.

I tweeted her and asked as to which school she knows that teaches visual memorisation and received no response. I do not believe that any school in the world would teach kids to memorise words visually.

Visual memory is not the mechanism we use to establish memories of printed words. However, we use visual memory in learning letter names and letter sounds. Correctly saying a name or sound that goes with a particular letter involves pairing a visual memory with a phonological memory. We use visual memory to name objects like car, aeroplane etc. We use visual memory to remember the faces of people.

Why are these educators so dogmatic?

Read  some of the ridiculous tweets by so-called educators:



Replying to
@luqmanmichel

@debbiehepp
 and 5 others

We know, @luqmanmichel
, the damage that can be done to many children when they try and memorise words by shape. It is much easier, and far more effective, to teach all children to read words through the process of decoding. Let's teach the alphabetic code like the code it is.

 When I asked Pam Kastner when I said anything about visual memory there was no response.


Pam Kastner
@liv2learn
·
Apr 13
1. English is an alphabetic orthography. It is not logographic. We cannot visually memorize every word in the English language nor should we "teach" any word in that manner. We must use grapheme-phoneme correspondences to orthographically map words storing them as mental...
Pam Kastner

I have tweeted Pam Kastner several times as to when I said anything about visual memory and she has not responded. They can stoop so low when they are unable to debate in a professional manner. These people belong to the tribe and cannot see beyond their noses.










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