Kids shutting down (Part 2)

Let’s start with a Twitter thread I read yesterday, 30.10.24, morning. Many parents and teachers complain about kids who fail to read at grade level. Unfortunately, they don’t accept simple solutions. Let us read their comments as a preliminary to ‘Kids Shutting Down’.

 

This is a long post but will prove that teachers worldwide are having kids in grades 4 and above reading at grade one level. Many teachers who are still employed dare not comment as they have been warned by powers that be.

The following was the post commented on.

Beanie @Beanie0597

A 4th grader who can’t read because he wasn’t taught properly doesn’t need “accommodations” to make his illiteracy easier. He needs specific interventions that teach him to read. Otherwise, he’ll just become an illiterate middle & high school student with “accommodations”.

PISA exam revisited – Part 1

 

                                                              Anuar Ahmad from UKM

Here is my Facebook post about Anuar Ahmad dated 23.2.24.

I have been reading some articles by Anuar in Utusan Malaysia. He raises many valid points.

Here is an excerpt from one such article.

Anuar Ahmad 23.2.24

When I give views, isn't my real duty as an academician assigned to conduct research and provide views on implementing the country's education system?

They told me to shut up. I say ok, I'll keep my mouth shut. It's not because I'm afraid, but because I want to fully focus my attention, time, and energy on understanding education issues. I don't want to argue with anyone.

Even my views focus only on the education system issues, not an 'attack' on any individual. I'm silent because I don't want to lose focus to continue sharing education issues with the community.

We all have a collective responsibility to provide sincere ideas and views for improving children's education.

Bridget Nee and her silly notion that Pinyin is not for comprehension.

 

Bridget Nee is from Shanghai and now living in NZ. In Shanghai, she was a teacher.

On 22.7.24 Bridget Nee said the following:

'Forget the news from someone outside of China. Written Characters are the only formal ones in everyday language usage. Pinyin is for the Young kids, mainly as a bridge from oral to written. Don’t blame the teachers!'

I then commented:

I have heard this before. Someone says such silly things on social media and others jump on the bandwagon and repeat it as if it is the Gospel truth.

Is there anyone who thinks that Pinyin is only for young kids?

There were no comments from Bridget Nee or her friends from Shanghai. She said they are all busy making a living.

Behind & Beyond Sold a Story with Emily Hanford - Part 2

                                                                    

The podcast host asked Emily:

Do you read criticisms and have a strategy for that?

Here is Emily’s response:

I don’t have a strategy to articulate. I have developed a thick skin over the years. I have never muted anyone or blocked anyone on Twitter. People can criticise you and you don’t have to respond.

I believe she has not muted anyone or blocked anyone as she has not blocked me despite many comments I have made about her. Neither have I blocked or muted anyone unlike many who have muted and blocked me.

My credentials/achievements

 

Many of the educators on LinkedIn and Twitter ask me for my credentials. So, I thought it best to write and refer them to my post instead of explaining each time I am asked. 

I wonder if what is in the image above can be part of my credential in that I am able to think what has never been thought before about what we see every day. 

It must be part of my credentials as even when I explain it to others they are unable to see it.

To date many educators who read my book Shut Down Kids which describes why kids are unable to read in English but can read in Malay and Pinyin can't accept the reasons I have detailed as to why kids shut down from learning to read. You may read the book reviews.  

Professors are teachers too

 

Here is a blog post entitled ‘Professors are teachers too’ that I read yesterday. It is a very well thought out post and should be read by anyone interested in education. As usual, I have copied a few extracts and added my comments. This is one of the very few blogs where comments appear on the blog without being moderated and removed after being left under moderation for months. 

 

Ask and empower teachers to tell their stories.

The human mind is like the human egg.

 

Let us begin with a tweet directed to Dr. Sam Bommarito and his reply.

To my following tweet on 14.8.23:

I wrote emails to both of them (David Boulton and Andrew Johnson) in 2015. Both refused to accept what I discovered and wanted research reports to support what I discovered. Dr. Sam, do we need research reports for everything? Can't we think logically anymore?

 

Dr. Sam Bommarito @DoctorSam7 responded as follows:

In the world of research, there is the issue of replication. You have to be able to replicate results for them to be significant, replication requires formal studies.  One of the key issues here is. If you use your methods on other children and from other places will they still progress? So the answer is if you want other people from other places to consider your (approach) yes you do have to do research.

Are Dr. Sam Bommarito and the other educators that naive? Part 1

 

I don't believe that Dr. Sam is that naive not to be able to think for himself.

Here are tweets by Dr. Sam Bommarito and my responses.

And Andy Johnson has started a respectful conversation with someone from the "other side". They are doing a series of YouTube posts on this. That's the way science should operate- both sides respectfully listen to each other and then talk about the issue. Hope Andy's example is the start of a trend. This one is the third in the series.  So even though they disagree with each other they are both talking and listening to each other.

Luqman Michel

Did you actually listen to their dialogue? Andrew thinks there is no reading crisis because the graph shows a flat line from 1972 to 2022. David says that NAEP shows that about 60% read below proficiency level.

To me, it appears absurd that one can say there is no reading crisis.

Reading to your children

 

There have been debates on Twitter about reading to children. There are those who say that reading to children helps them to learn to read whilst another group says it does not.

Let us examine this. 

Sounds represented by letters – A revisit

 

Many of the educators on Twitter imagine things instead of trying to understand things as they are.

I have written many blogs stating that one of the main reasons why kids disengage/shut down from learning to read is confusion as a result of teachers teaching the wrong sounds of letters. This is supported in both of Dr. David Kilpatrick’s books. Refer to page 107 of Equipped for Reading Success - How to teach the letter sounds. Also refer to page 171 of Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties - Keys to blending: T does not say /Tuh/.

This was also discovered more than 15 years ago by Children of the Code in which Timothy Shanahan was also interviewed.

The following is an extract from one of the interviews in Children of the Code:

And the mistakes that the kids made guided us to see that we had something missing. For instance, at first, we had them sound out words traditionally. We never permitted "ch-aa-tah” for chat. Unvoiced sounds were unvoiced -- "ch-a-t." Well, they showed us through their responses that, that stop sound beginning was really hard for them. So now we had precise corrections that related to what they had learned earlier. We had a procedure for sounding it out that would reach virtually 100 percent of the kids. So we could teach even really low performers now to take the first step on the ladder. Then they can follow the entire sequence and they can learn at a rate far faster than would have been anticipated. (Siegfried Engelmann)

Divide and Rule by the powers that be.

 

The powers that be are experts in ensuring that this policy of ‘Divide and Rule’ is in place.

The Reading War has been going on for decades and is now stronger than ever between the phonetics and whole word Apostles.

Exponents from both sides keep warring and will not stand to reason. Their minds are like the Human egg. When one sperm goes into the ovum the ovum does not allow another sperm to get in just like the minds of these exponents. 

New York Times and the Science of Reading

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/science-of-reading-literacy-parents.html#commentsContainer

I read a report on Science of Reading in the New York Times dated 16.4.2023.

In the entire report there was no definition of the ‘Science of Reading.’

Why do we keep reinventing the wheel and come up with so-called discoveries which do not improve the level of reading?

Here are some extracts from the article in the New York Times and my comments.

New York Times:

The movement, under the banner of “the science of reading,” is targeting the education establishment: school districts, literacy gurus, publishers and colleges of education, which critics say have failed to embrace the cognitive science of how children learn to read.

Learning to read is a natural process – Thinking aloud

                                                                      

This is controversial, but as I said in the heading above I am thinking aloud.

I would define a natural process as a skill that is relatively easy to learn.

Educators on Twitter keep saying that learning to read is NOT a natural process. Pamela Snow copy pastes what others have said – ‘Reading is a human contrivance that has existed for only approximately 6,000 years (Snow, 2016)’.

The statement above ridicules the intelligence of humans. I called it an idiotic statement and a Twitter friend said, “I don't think it is productive to categorise opposing opinions as 'idiotic', especially when those positions are the generally accepted.”

Fountas and Pinnell

The following are extracts from the Fountas Blog post. You may read the article here.

The goal for the reader is accuracy using all sources of information simultaneously. And that includes processing each letter in words from left to right. If a reader says “pony” for “horse” because of information from the pictures, that tells the teacher that the reader is using meaning information from the pictures, as well as the structure of the language, but is neglecting to use the visual information of the print. His response is partially correct, but the teacher needs to guide him to stop and work for accuracy.

"Try that again, and be sure what you read looks right and makes sense", or "Check the letters to be sure you are right."

The goal is for the child to stop or monitor, look more closely at the word and think about what would make sense and fit with the sequence of letters.

The bottom line is that a young reader must use everything he knows to move through a written text, to read it accurately and understand it. Multiple sources of information are combined in a complex and orchestrated way. The development of the child's ability to use all sources of information will take time and skillful teaching. It is impossible to boil down this process to something as simplistic as “don't think, just sound it out.”

Research on Teaching consonants without extraneous sounds

Dr. Kathryn Garforth has told me that she will respond to my questions after the busy month of October is over.

I usually write links to my tweets. This is because I type with 2 fingers which is very time consuming and because the links I suggest are related to what I am tweeting.

Many on Twitter rebut without reading the links and therefore it makes discussion a little less effective.

You can’t teach old dogs new tricks (Part 1).

I read the blog post here by Prof. Pamela Snow on Twitter yesterday and here are a few extracts and my comments.

If by democracy the NCTE (National Council for Teacher Educations) means every child reads as poorly as the next one, they may be right, but that does not address the social justice imperative. The only way for reading instruction to exert force on social justice levers is for it to be fail-safe for the overwhelming majority of students.

Definition of grapheme and phoneme

I believe I now know why I have been getting lukewarm reception of educators in the US, the UK and Australia. I believe most of them do not understand what I mean when I say that the pronunciation of phonemes of consonants is not taught correctly.

  You cannot teach phonics of any kind if the pronunciation of phonemes is taught wrongly. 

Sound symbol skills + Oral blending ability = Basic phonics skills.

My discussion with phonics proponents on Twitter (Part 1)

I have maintained for the past 10 years that we will end the reading wars if we teach the pronunciation of consonants the way it was meant to be taught.

A group of ladies who are phonics proponents insists that teaching consonants with extraneous sounds cannot be the reason why kids shut down from learning to read.

"Did balance literacy fail to teach your child to read"( P.L.Thomas)

Here are more extracts from P.L.Thomas’s article and my comments.

“Here we have a serious problem because at no period in the U.S. has anyone pronounced reading achievement to be satisfactory…

Yet, most of us view education as a 100% attainable venture—all students can and should learn to read by X age. This is a valuable ideal, but it certainly isn’t a reasonable measure for any sort of accountability (see the disaster that was No Child Left Behind).”

Stephen Parker – Phonics in isolation proponent (Part 1)

On 27 March 2020, I was blocked by Stephen Parker from Twitter. It was he who added me and then he removed himself which does not bother me. However, it would be nice to know the reason.